LONDON: About now is the short rainy season on East Africa’s Swahili coast, occasioning blustery winds and a cyclonic squall known by local fishermen as the chamchela. Despite this, and the blighting of the landscape by numerous hotels servicing western tourists, the coastline remains an earthly idyll. Fragrant with spices and frangipani, it is the kind of a place where, on glittering beaches fringed with palm, you might be forgiven for believing you are in paradise. At least till you find yourself at the sharp end of an attack by Al Qaeda.

If indeed it was Al Qaeda. A previously unknown group called the Army of Palestine has claimed responsibility for Thursday’s attacks. All one can say for certain is that a wide variety of Palestinian jihadi groups have links to Osama bin Laden’s “deputy” Ayman al-Zawahiri. It was he who organized the carnage in Luxor in 1997, in which close to 70 western visitors were sprayed with machine-gun fire in the shadow of the Pyramids.

The Mombasa and Bali attacks look like a resumption of the policy al-Zawahiri developed for Luxor, which established tourists as legitimate targets and linked the US with Israel.

The Swahili coast is an alluring destination for cultural reasons as well as for its coral reefs, translucent water and all those other well-used signifiers of tropical languor. And those cultural reasons have a bearing on the issues raised in Zawahiri’s gnomic statement. In the labyrinthine streets of the port city of Mombasa, you can visit mosques and bazaars and ruined palaces, testament to thousands of years of interaction with the Middle East. It was from this coast (sahel giving us Swahili, means coast in Arabic) that the kingdom of Sheba sourced the riches brought to Solomon. The least of its connections with Osama bin Laden, that well-known Saudi of Yemeni stock, is that Sheba’s kingdom was based in modern Yemen, where an American missile recently squirrelled down on some of his friends as they rode along through the desert in their car.

Did that killing represent “success” in the war on terror? Do Thursday’s attacks represent “failure”? It’s hard to measure these things, to develop a calculus of terrorism and counter-terrorism, but right now it seems that the forces of civilization are firmly on the back foot.

Mombasa itself has seen the rise and fall of civilizations, and it is from the embers of these that Islam has coaxed its flames. For thousands of years monsoon winds have enabled how traffic between the continent and the Arabian gulf. It was the monsoon which made Mombasa and nearby Zanzibar the last great outposts of the slave trade. Here, in the 19th century, Arab, European and American sailors colluded to avoid British policing of an Indian Ocean trading network based on cruelty.

The British navy came too late to prevent the worst of the slave trade. And so it is with the global policemen of our own era, faced with its own hydra-headed challenge.

Last time, the Americans arrived in force. What is known in US security circles as a Fest, or foreign emergency search team, borne on a plane called a C-17 Globemaster III, was dispatched to deal with Al Qaeda’s first big spectacular: the simultaneous bombing of two US embassies early one morning in August 1998. The attacks took place in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, and Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania, not far down the coast from Mombasa.

It was mainly FBI staff who filled the Globemaster’s seats four years ago. Wearing all-over Tyvek suits to prevent contamination, carrying sealable bags, forensic specialists collected fragmentary pieces of evidence, looking for the characteristic pitting and cratering that affects metal close to the source of an explosion. Later, using cotton-bud, they swabbed for trace elements, trying to find the minute residues of chemicals which can give a clue to the origin of weaponry.

Investigating agents began the long round of interviews with witnesses and suspects, gathering material for the investigation, which led over a period of years to the apprehension of culprits, a trial in New York and something like justice.

Well, that was how it happened before: the trial of some of those responsible for the 1998 bombings concluding just as the September 11 attacks of 2001 shook America and all of us out of complacency. Defence submissions argued that the methods used by the US, in conjunction with local authorities, to gather information in Kenya and Tanzania violated human rights. The Muslim community in both countries was put under pressure and that may well turn out to be a factor behind Thursday’s attacks.

During the trial, it emerged that the sleeper cell which planned the 1998 truck attacks was based in Mombasa, fronted by a fishing business. As Thursday, the pattern of attack again involved one man getting out and setting off a small explosion (grenades in Nairobi) while others blew themselves up in a vehicle in a larger explosion.

Long before Sept 11, the US knew what it was dealing with in Al Qaeda: that observation has become a standard one in commentary on this issue. What might seem astonishing now, as we consider a second attack on the Swahili coast, is that intelligence agencies weren’t able to prevent it using information gathered in the area since 1998, presumably with more intensity since Sept 11.

If there is any index by which we can judge the failure or success of the ‘war on terror’, this must be it. Massive resources have been deployed; funding has been made available to local governments; US navy patrols have been scouring the Horn of Africa since this time last year. In part this is because of worries of attacks on oil tankers. Another reason is Somalia, the southern coastline of which adjoins Kenya’s in one of the most lawless places in the world: an easy jumping-off point for someone wanting to transport missiles or explosives.

The Somali connection has some bearing on Thursday’s attacks. The fiasco of the US intervention in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, in 1993 saw a Black Hawk helicopter downed and American servicemen torn to pieces by a mob. At the time, it seemed to have nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, then not “well-known” at all except to a few CIA field officers and the Saudi government. The trial of the 1998 embassy bombers, however, revealed that some of the Mombasa cell had travelled to Mogadishu to foment trouble five years before. One was involved in transporting shoulder-launched missiles, such as were fired at an Israeli airliner on Thursday.

The CIA now uses a technique called pattern analysis to compare terrorist actions. As details of the latest attacks emerge, it is tempting to apply pattern analysis to the way they are reported. One of the questions that will be asked is: was this Al Qaeda? Another is: were the perpetrators local or from abroad? Most knuckle-headed of all: was it Osama bin Laden?—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.