Whilst Gaddafi has been hogging the headlines for weeks in Libya, much else has been happening amid the continuing blow-back of the “War on terror”. No-one much likes to cast back to George Bush’s infamous coining of the phrase. But as we head to the tenth anniversary of 9/11 the landscape – particularly threaded from Pakistan in the East, to Nigeria in the West – is not pretty.

Over the weekend, whilst Colonel Gaddafi’s family was packing their bags in Tripoli, there was the a most blood-curdling suicide bomb attack on the Iraqi capital’s biggest mosque, Um al-Qura. You see the great domed building dominating the skyline as you speed along many of Baghdad’s urban freeways. This was a high profile Al Qaida operation which claimed the lives of 29 people, including a high profile Member of the Iraqi Parliament. The Sunni al-Qaida movement claimed the bombing – a completely sacrilegious act in the holiest time in the muslim calendar. Some 250 people were killed in such bombings in Iraq in July. On average in August, there were eleven attacks a day. Ninety people were killed in 43 co-ordinated bombings on August 15th – more than 300 were injured.

Further east, attacks and suicide bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan are so numerous that news of them barely surfaces in the West.

But it is in Nigeria on Friday that one of the most alarming incidents occurred. Suicide bombing has been a stranger to West Africa. Not any more. The radical muslim movement Boko Haram killed 18 people in a suicide attack on the UN headquarters in the Nigerian capital of Abuja. This was the country’s second ever suicide attack – the first was in July against a police station.

That suicide bombing has come to this vast and populous nation, in an area of the world where no such activity had ever been seen until this year, is alarming indeed. Paul Rogers of Bradford University points out that 140 people have been killed by police in Nigeria this year alone as the authorities try to destroy Boko Haram (literally in English “Education is Prohibited”). The movement’s leader, Mohammed Yusuf, was captured by the Nigerian army and killed. Rogers suggests that tactics aimed at trying to contain the violence may even be provoking it.

I haven’t even mentioned Yemen and Somalia, where suicide bombing has also become endemic. Everyone reading this blog is old enough to have lived in a world where such attacks were completely unheard of. Perhaps the most fitting memorial to 9/11 might prove to be a thorough analysis of how and why this devastating mechanism of war is taking root with such speed. Did anyone imagine that so many people would ever be found to demolish themselves in such a cause?

@jonsnowC4

There were Italians, there were Yemenis, there were Zanzibaris and there were Russians. We mingled in the hot streets of Mogadishu, or bumped into each other in the Italian restaurant across the street from the old stone built Croce del Sud Hotel. Or we might see them on the beach looking out across the port. The Somali capital was a place of intrigue and conflict. The year was 1976 and I was on my first foreign assignment to try to find out whether Russia or America was now in the ascendent in Somalia.

A hot, parched, pivotal nation, at the bottom end of the Red Sea – to visit Somalia was to risk losing your heart to her. The people were poor, but open, welcoming, and breathtakingly beautiful. By the sea they fished. Inland, they scraped a wandering farming living, entirely dependent upon rare bouts of rain.

But Somalia was also a war-ground for the outside world. Who ruled in Mogadishu mattered. Bullied and manipulated before independence, by colonial Britain and no less colonial Italy, the atlas said it all. Some official had grabbed a ruler and drawn a straight line across the Ogaden desert, dividing Ethiopia from the Somali flat lands. For the endlessly wandering nomadic peoples of the Ogaden, which side of the official’s ruler you meandered mattered not.

Somalia was ripe for rape, ripe for howitzers and the other barbarous plumbing that the outside world would import to resolve their arguments about who controlled the gateway to the Indian Ocean.

We cub reporters were in on the birth of Somalia’s agony. The country was deemed too lowly to send a senior reporter and so we boys were sent to get lost for weeks upon end to return shaggy, dusty-haired and browned from the eternally searing sun, to report our findings.

We were in on the foundations of her present pain and suffering. We found the outside world rendering her fledgling governance a nonsense. We found the British, Russian and American embassies by turns wielding more power than the President, and rarely in the interests of the indigenous people. No wonder even the hard faced Communists of Siad Barre’s menacing regime crumbled. No wonder the country splintered back into its tribal past. And amid the dawning of ever more acute shortage, no wonder they came to fight each other. And as each successive outside influence – capitalist, communist, Islamist – came to call with cash and weapons, no wonder they accepted both.
No wonder then Somalia became the most dangerous war ground in the world; no wonder her seas the unsafest on the planet.

Read more from Jonathan Rugman, writing from Kenya on aid efforts

One of the great tough-guy leaders of Africa – Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings (who became Ghana’s President with a coup in 1981 and bequeathed a democracy to his successor in 2001) is today the African Union’s Envoy to Somalia.

No wonder Rawlings cried in Mogadishu on Channel 4 News last night. His day had been consumed with dead children, starved of their lives. Somalia is their crisis and our moral burden.

We, the outside world were there. We fiddled, we manoeuvred, we manipulated to safeguard the energy of our lives, the safe transport of the world’s oil. Now it is pay back time, and Rawlings is calling forlornly from a wrecked quarter in Mogadishu, with an armed soldier at his back.

“Bring your food, your medicine, your help. Hundreds of thousands are in peril of death in the next two, three, four weeks.”

The United Nations is at his back, warning the famine is spreading. The factions on the ground are so weak and enfeebled that they are laying down their arms with arms that can now barely lift them.

Famine is not remote. Famine is us, our history, our involvement and calls down our duty.

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As school boys we were excited to learn that Western spies could now read number plates in Moscow’s Red Square – that was well over three decades ago. How come then, as the freed kidnap victims Paul and Rachel Chandler return home, a bunch of crude Somali pirates are able to run rings around the most sophisticated navies the world has ever known?

As drones wander about the border areas of Pakistan picking off alleged al-Qaeda leaders at will, these men are able to wander the high seas at will, snaring super tankers the size of several football pitches. How come?

Currently there are still dozens of ships held hostage, and some 400 sea-farers held hostage by Somali pirates. The EU/NATO fleet that is tasked with battling the pirates costs half a billion pounds a year to run. Sure, a good number of pirate vessels are frustrated by the force, but the Indian Ocean between Somalia and India remains the most dangerous maritime area the world has known since the North Atlantic came under fire from Germany’s U-boats.

Drones, satellites, high flying spy planes, radar, high powered computing, you name it, the world has it in abundance. Yet the pirates are not yet losing. Saudi Arabia has just seen a vast multi-million pound ransom paid to free one of her super tankers.

Will not history judge that in the early 21st Century humankind, at the pinnacle of technological achievement, in a time of war, the international community failed against some of the most primitive criminal forces deploying methods of the Middle Ages?

So what’s the problem? Is it that the world, despite spending half a billion a year, doesn’t really take Somali piracy seriously? Or is it that all that brilliant 21st Century technology proves close to useless when it comes to such a test on the high seas?

In those far off school days we used to be taught about quarantine – fixing a maritime boundary beyond which the “enemy” would not be allowed to venture. We were told how useful aircraft carriers were in policing such a zone with their fast flying harrier jump jets.

There is no full-time air craft carrier off Somalia. At the last count there were three naval reconnaissance aircraft in the region. Never mind, at least, if the pirates sport a number plate, we can still presumably read it from a very long way away.