Indeed, as Douglas Jardine, Chief Secretary during part of this period, has eloquently recorded, Somaliland's twenty-years war left nothing more tangible than a few ramshackle Ford cars and no decent roads or other means of communication. 'A still greater misfortune' was 'that the British public had forgotten the Somali war many years before it was brought to a successful conclusion.' And having spent so much on military operations so completely out of proportion to their interests in Somaliland, the British government was not now disposed to make further funds available for development. To add to this sorry tale, the conclusion of the operations against the Dervishes, far from ushering in a new era of co-operation between the people and the Administration, left instead an atmosphere of sullen distrust and covert hostility.

I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Som…, loc. 284