The article first traces events in Somalia since 9/11: the rise of the Islamic Courts, the Ethiopian occupation, the recalibration of the interim government and the al-Shabaab insurgency. A second layer of analysis brings into focus three fluctuations in the external perception of the Somali crisis: (i) a post-Cold War narrative of state-building; (ii) the post-9/11 war on terror; and (iii) a reloaded vision of state-building-as-counterterrorism. Such models inform US policy, yet their roots lie in an Anglo-Saxon intellectual edifice, detached from the Somali context. Nomothetic fallacies over US political agency encourage paradigms to linger long after the facts have failed them a disjuncture brought to light most visibly during the second term of the Bush administration. In this period, the unrealities of the war on terror were refracted instrumentally by local actors in the Horn of Africa, creating a web of distorting friend-enemy distinctions. While the Obama administration is less devoted than its predecessor to imagining an opponent in Somalia, it too has misread the core political logic. The article explores how this dissonance between external perception and local reality creates difficulties for post-interventionary states, whose politicians must win favour in Washington in the knowledge that favour alone cannot ensure political survival and may subvert domestic attempts to secure it.