No one in the last decade has gotten rich betting that stability would come to Somalia or that all the fractured country needs is the right leader to emerge. So I’d be cautious in the message I draw from Jeffrey Gettleman’s New York Times profile of President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed. Sheik Sharif might warrant a nice burst of cautious optimism — Gettleman asserts that his moderate Islamist government is widely considered to be Somalia’s best chance for stability in years — but I’d put the brakes of talk of him representing a telling sign of stability to come.
