Bin Laden’s Africa

Bush was right when he accused Somali Islamists of being a product of the international fanaticism workshop, committed to opening a new front in the Horn of Africa.

Al-Shabab, which yesterday made a bloodbath of delegates in Mogadishu, have become the real Taliban. Meanwhile, the front on which there is already fighting is already thousands of miles long, from the Red Sea to the Atlantic, along the fault of shaking misery and despair that separates the deserts of Africa from the savannas. Somalia, with its eternal horror that has lasted 30 years, marching day after day with distracted resignation, has become a chapter of a larger war. A war that could be a terrible surprise for the West, fearful of new troubling and unpopular “crusades.” Is Africa being Islamized by force, with the forceps of terror and fanaticism? True, there aren’t any operational links between the different parts of this army. But the end result is composed like a well-balanced mosaic. The West, miser, thought it could wrap Mogadishu, an indecipherable and bloody chaos, in a cotton wool of protective forgetfulness. The eggs of the snake opened, multiplying themselves.

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, a mixture of fanatics, emirs and chief-robbers, has in its hand the north of Mali, as well as vast areas of Niger and Mauritania; it does business with Medellin drug traffickers along the new drug routes, kidnaps Westerners, collects rich ransom spoils and has become a trafficker of illegal immigrants that dream of Europe. It calls its teams “katiba,” with a link to the Third World myth of the liberation war in Algeria. In northern Nigeria, immersed in oil, the “Boko harams” erode a state undermined by great hatred, both ethnic and economic. The desert looks more and more like the lands of Central Asia, the Pakistan-Afghanistan area: a sea crossed by deep tensions, where it’s possible to build a global threat.

Al Shabab, a clan coalition built on fanaticism, has dismantled and cannoned Somalia, and now they are pirates combing the seas of oil and the strategic straits. What separates them from power is just a shabby army of Africans without means, badly paid, but not afraid to die without regret and without a ceremony on television. In place of the peacekeepers that the West has never granted. Al Shababs struck in Uganda in July: Seventy dead. They are already terrorizing southern Africa with satanic tribalism and genocides.

Bush made a mistake by relying on a purely military response — the proxy war — contracted out to regimes that were the cause of evil. Now Obama’s new America, fascinated by the withdrawal, convinced that only Afghanistan is worth the scandal to die, could give Africa to bin Laden, forgetting that no war is right, but sometimes it is necessary.