From Aden to Somalia is a short boat ride. This is a simple logistical explanation for the expansion of Al Shabab terrorists into neighbouring Kenya and beyond.
A brigade strength Indian Peace Keeping Force (bag pipes and all) was dispatched under Gen. Mono Bhagat in 1994 to quell the civil war after the fall of Somalian strongman, Siad Barre, in Mogadishu.
I have extensive TV footage of this campaign. It was a vicious inter clan conflict. Somalia was a peculiar country: violent but totally secular. That is why al Shabab is a puzzle.
Likewise, one could never have imagined jehadism in Qaddafi's Libya either. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton materialized in Tripoli she spoke the memorable line: “I came, I saw and he died.”
The split screen had her in one half and Qaddafi in the other, screaming, sodomized by a knife.
An efficient dictatorship was thus transformed into a series of feuding tribes. Jehadists, identified as the ones involved in the Danish cartoon mayhem, began to populate Benghazi where eventually US ambassador Christopher Stevens was murdered.
Jehadi legions crossed into southern Egypt on the one hand and past Niger into Mali, desecrating the great Sufi mosque of Timbaktu, exactly as the Taliban in Afghanistan had blown up the Bamyan Buddha.
Further south, the boost to Boko Haram in Nigeria and Islamic militancy along the Sahel, all derive their DNA from Afghanistan, after the triple tumult of 1979.
More recently the inability to oust Bashar al Assad from Damascus and the durability of Nouri al Maliki in Baghdad where Sunnis suffered their first status reversal once Saddam Hussain and the Baathists made way for the first Shia government have added to Sunni rage, stoked by Saudi Arabia.
When Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, all with American and European help, provided men, money and arms for the civil war in Syria, Sunnis began to sense power. Now external support is drying up.
The moment therefore has produced the man. Abu Bakr Baghdadi of the ISIS has emerged a latter day Otaybi, independent of all past sponsors, turning viciously to bite the very hand that feeds.
Americans are beginning to learn yet again an old lesson: in the ultimate analysis, there are limits to power.
Meanwhile, the worry in the subcontinent ought to be on a different count: is a Baghdadi-like danger possible in our neighbourhood?
