The hunt for an elusive Somali militant illustrates why Al Shabab, despite a decade of American covert action, are at their strongest in years.

The vehicles halted at a seaside village where American and Somali paramilitaries poured out, storming a house and killing several militants, Somali officials said.

The blast last November killed three Somalis and grievously wounded an American: Michael Goodboe, 54, a C.I.A.

His was a rare American fatality in the decade-old shadow war against Al Shabab, the world’s wealthiest and arguably most dangerous Al Qaeda affiliate.

The United States’ most ambitious response to the 9/11 attacks was in Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of troops were dispatched to banish extremists and rebuild the country — a mission that recently ended in crushing failure with the chaotic American withdrawal.

The mission was narrow at first, a hunt for Qaeda fugitives, only later expanding to include fighting Al Shabab and building up Somali security forces.

As in Afghanistan, the American mission has been stymied by an alliance with a weak, notoriously corrupt local government, an intractable homegrown insurgency and the United States’ own errors, such as drone strikes that have killed civilians.

But critics of the American approach in Somalia, including some military officers, say the threat to the homeland has been exaggerated, and that Washington’s own policies only boost the extremists they seek to defeat.

Biden administration officials deny the mission in Somalia has failed, but they say they are cleareyed about its shortcomings.

The administration could unveil a new Somalia policy in coming weeks, some officials said.

government has been reluctant to commit troops to Somalia since the “Black Hawk Down” episode of 1993, when Somali militia fighters killed 18 American service members in a blazing battle later depicted in books and Hollywood movies.

There are now fewer than 100 American troops in Somalia, mostly in intelligence and support roles.

Trump moved most of the 700-member force across the borders to Kenya and Djibouti, though it continues to conduct strikes in Somalia, and train troops.

“It rang frightening alarm bells,” said Abdihakim Ante, a former Somali government adviser.

mission in Somalia can be seen in the stories of two men, an American and a Somali, on opposite sides of the fight.

Goodboe, known as “Goody,” for his easy manner, steady temperament and keen sense of purpose — qualities that stood out in the SEALs’ swaggering subculture, and helped him forge close relationships with the Afghan, and later Somali, troops he helped to train, they said.

officers based in Nairobi, Kenya, led the American return to Somalia.

A year later, Al Shabab emerged.

returned to Somalia in 2009, establishing a secure base at the Mogadishu airport and teaming up with the National Intelligence Security Agency, Somalia’s fledgling spy agency.

snipers deployed to rooftops around the sprawling Bakara Market, then a Shabab stronghold, picking off Islamist fighters from up to a mile away, said a retired Somali intelligence official who worked with the Americans.

In 2011, Somali security forces killed Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a Qaeda leader behind the 1998 bombings of U.S.

The Somalis handed everything to the C.I.A., including a memento — the dead militant’s unusual model of rifle, said Hussein Sheikh-Ali, then a senior Somali intelligence official and later Somalia’s national security adviser.

station chief in Mogadishu pressed for the removal of General Abdirahman Turyare, the Somali intelligence chief, accusing him of corruption and mismanagement.

At the heart of that dispute, several Somali officials said, was control of Gaashaan, a paramilitary force officially part of the Somali spy agency, but in reality led by the C.I.A.

Goodboe was fatally injured, according to a retired Somali official and a senior American official who refused to be identified to discuss sensitive intelligence.

His boss, the station’s Mogadishu bureau chief, Fahad Yasin, later went into politics and became Somalia’s spy chief — a striking illustration of the Somali conflict’s complex layers.

By 2008, Al Shabab had become the most radical and powerful armed faction in Somalia, with thousands of recruits.

Mohamed first helped Al Shabab with propaganda, the friend said.

Later, as American airstrikes killed successive Shabab explosives experts, the young militant, whose degree was in electrical engineering, was promoted to take their place.

Al Shabab went on to perpetrate a series of horrific attacks including, in 2017, a truck bombing in central Mogadishu that killed at least 587 people — one of the deadliest terrorist acts in modern world history.

As Shabab leaders were killed off and the Danab, an elite, American-trained Somali commando unit, evolved into a powerful anti-Shabab tool, the militants adapted.

A Somali intelligence officer in an interview listed the Shabab tax rates at Mogadishu port — $90 to import a regular container; $150 for a large one.

Somalia’s national army officially has 24,000 troops, but in reality is one-fifth that size, a senior American official said.

officials said.

Ahmed Abdullahi, who was airlifted to Turkey, and killed a South African employee of Bancroft Global Development, an American contractor that recruits and trains Danab fighters.

The South African, Stephen Potgieter, was the seventh Bancroft employee to die in Somalia since 2009, said Michael Stock, the company’s chief executive.

Mohamed’s growing reputation for chaos and bloodshed have made him a highly respected leader inside Shabab ranks, Somali and Western officials said.

After an American missile struck a farmhouse near Jilib, southern Somalia, in February 2020, the military said it had killed a “terrorist.” Months later the military admitted that it had, in fact, killed an 18-year-old schoolgirl named Nurto Kusow Omar Abukar.

But she said that Somali officials reviewed and approved each compensation decision.

Although Washington is by far the largest foreign donor to Somalia, giving $500 million in 2020, few Somalis see evidence of that assistance because Somali partner organizations hide their American ties to avoid Shabab reprisals.

Bancroft’s property wing built the fortresslike Mogadishu embassy and leases it to the State Department; a senior official said it is among the most expensive to operate in Africa.

Yasin to force him to back down, two Western officials said.

It sent the wrong signal to Somali officials about America’s priorities, one of the officials said: “They see the mouth and the body doing two different things.

officials say missteps by the Trump administration have complicated the situation in Somalia.

it’s because our presence in Somalia made it so,” said Captain Rohrbach, the active duty SEAL.

officials say the experience of Afghanistan shows that success cannot be defined as remaking a government or society, and that the mission in Somalia had paid off by disrupting Al Shabab.

needs to contemplate a totally new approach in Somalia, including a political settlement with Al Shabab, or face the prospect of bring trapped in another “forever war” with an inglorious end.