After the successful hit on the Al Quaeda, the response covered on SWJ Bog ranged from the ecstatic to the dismissive with:

US Kills Top Qaeda Leader in Southern Somalia

U.S. Kills Top Qaeda Militant in Southern Somalia
NAIROBI, Kenya — American commandos killed one of the most wanted Islamic militants in Africa in a daylight raid in southern Somalia on Monday, according to American and Somali officials, an indication of the Obama administration’s willingness to use combat troops strategically against Al Qaeda’s growing influence in the region.
and

Somalia strike and offshore balancing

A helicopter-borne U.S. special operations group, apparently operating from a U.S. warship in the Indian Ocean, attacked and killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan along with several of his associates along a road in southern Somalia. According to the cited New York Times article, the U.S. special operations soldiers recovered the bodies and presumably other interesting intelligence products from the site.
and

Alternate View: Somalia Strike and Offshore Balancing

OK, I’ll take the bait.

To offer the killing of Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan as evidence of the success of a strategy of “offshore balancing” would be myopic in the extreme. By press accounts, it was a very well conducted SEAL raid, but let’s not confuse good tactics with good strategy.

Let’s begin with U.S. strategy toward Somalia. Since the withdrawal from Mogadishu in the wake of the “Black Hawk Down” incident – and let’s remember why this was Osama bin Laden’s favorite movie, an exemplar of America the “weak horse,” unable to run the course – keeping that failed state from becoming an al Qaeda haven has been a very narrowly run thing, at best.
Personally I found the following to be closer to the mark:

Black Hawk’s Shadow
Why we don't care about Somalia anymore.

Picture Mogadishu in 1992. Marauding militias loyal only to Somali clan leaders stalk the city, looting aid shipments bound for the 1.8 million Somalis facing starvation. Then, from the green-blue Indian Ocean waters, there materializes a flotilla of U.S. transports bearing aid and armed men to deliver it. In the skies overhead, U.S. attack helicopters appear, providing cover for food shipments, while an American spy plane circles the city night and day gathering intelligence on militias trying to disrupt the rescue effort.

Flash forward 17 years to the same city, still surrounded by squalid refugee camps. More than twice as many Somalis are now teetering on the brink of starvation in what many view as the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Militias of heavily armed young men still stalk the city hijacking aid shipments. This time, though, no one's coming to the rescue.

Somalia is in dire straits—maybe worse than ever. An estimated 3.8 million need humanitarian aid (fully half the population), according to the U.N.'s Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit for Somalia, which calls the crisis the worst since 1991–92. In the past six months alone, the number of people forced from their homes by fighting—between the country's barely functional transitional government and Islamist insurgents—has grown by 40 percent, to 1.4 million. Most live in squalid camps that a new report from Oxfam calls "barely fit for humans."

So why don't we care anymore? The answer lies not only in how the giant U.S.-U.N. mission to Somalia came undone—in the ashes of the Black Hawk Down firefight in October 1993—but in a legacy of failures by both Somali and Western leaders to cure the country's ills.