Jihad in the Arabian Sea

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the challenges for the countries on the shores of the Arabian Sea are many: civil war, piracy, radical Islamism, transnational terrorism, and a real risk of environmental and economic failure on both sides of the strait. Yet its strategic importance as a conduit for maritime trade between Asia and the Mediterranean world is as great as it was when Egyptian pharaohs built a canal between the Nile and the Red Sea. Today, as then, the lands around the Bab el Mandeb are as difficult to pacify as the Red Sea was treacherous to navigate.In Jihad in the Arabian Sea, Camille Pecastaing leads us through the history and geography of the region, illuminating the tests it faces today. He describes the collapse of the Somali state under Syad Barre in the 1980s and details the struggle between the warlord Aideed and the UN and US forces in the early 1990s. He outlines the history of modern Yemen, from the civil war of the 1960s to the reunification process. And he reviews the activity of Al Qaeda in the region, from the assassination attempt against Mubarak in Addis Ababa in 1995 up until the double US embassy bombing in the summer of 1998, as well as examining the preparation and execution of the "naval terrorism" attacks--against the USS The Sullivans, the USS Cole, and the French tanker the Limburg. In addition, Pecastaing discusses how the state of lawlessness in Somalia has led to the rise of piracy in the western Indian Ocean, offering a brief narration of the most spectacular hijackings.For foreign powers, Pecastaing concludes, the Horn of Africa is a conundrum. The strategic risk is mitigated by the logistic limitations of the local outfits, their lack of capacity to project power outside the region. The costs of trying to impose law and order most certainly outweigh the benefits, as least in financial terms. As long as local violence does not make too much of a splash in the global media, foreign governments will continue to look the other way.