Britain’s highest ranking diplomatic officer delivered to President Uhuru Kenyatta Tuesday a huge report documenting British torture during the Kenyan battle for independence in the 1950s, and invited Kenya to request financial compensation.

The report followed a British High Court ruling last October that allowed Mau Mau (Independence) war veterans to sue the British government for their torture in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the British government’s subsequent negotiations with hundreds of alleged victims.

In fact the release of previously sealed and top secret documents from the U.K. Foreign Office suggested there could be still living as many as 10,000 Kenyans due compensation.

The tedious process of negotiating individual claims began last year, and attempting to get out in front of what could have been an endless line of petitioners, the British government commissioned the report that was handed to Kenyatta Tuesday.

Quite apart from the tens of millions of pounds likely to be paid to the victims of Kenya’s insurection, the released secret documents, court case and Tuesday’s government commission report opens the gates to similar allegations from other foreign colonies.

The British report acknowledge Red Cross archives that documented widespread use of torture techniques including waterboarding and worse, waterboarding with kerosene.

Kenya reacted yesterday by demanding an official apology from the British government:

Britain should “offer a public and unconditional apology to the people of Kenya for all injustices and gross violations of human rights committed by the colonial administration between 1895 and 1963,” the Kenyan response says.

Note that Britain and Kenya right now are not the best of friends. In fact, Kenya has few friends in the world as the world awaits to see if its president and vice-president will stand trials as accused for crimes against humanity scheduled to begin in just a few weeks.

The British report and offer of compensation, however, seems completely unlinked to the UK’s current cold shoulder attitude towards its former colony.

And there is every concern in America that the British action sets a precedent that could severely impact the U.S.

If U.S. violations, including torture and unwarranted war, become issues for compensation, there could be literally millions of claims.

No formal reaction has been forthcoming from the U.S., although Voice of America broadcast this week a story admitting that the “The Mau Mau settlement would set legal precedent.”

The report did not elaborate as to whether it was legal precedent restricted to Britain or one that would be more global in nature.

And of course a number of other warring or former colonial powers would be just as vulnerable to legal attack as the U.S., mostly notably France.

Current American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are really little different from the European colonial actions in the past century.

The West has a distinct problem imposing its will. Perhaps a financial slap will bring western morality to its senses.

As the stubborn, not-too bright bully on the block, America has shifted to accepting global warming as human caused, but it took a few Katrinas and Sandys to tip the balance. And experts still spend inordinate amounts of time explaining the obvious to the recent convert:

“Global warming” or “climate change” or whatever you want to call it is manifest most dangerously in extremes, not just increasing temperatures. So terrible winters on top of terrible summers means we’ve screwed up nature. It’s our fault and we’ve altered nature.

Winter and summer are naturally the opponents in a ping pong game. If one hits harder, it sets up the rebound to be harder as well.

And while it’s been predicted for some time that the short-term global effects of climate change could actually benefit America, because America reigns as the world’s principal power, there’s no way we’ll avoid the much more terrible negative effects:

“The U.S…. may benefit from increased crop yields, [but] its military may be stretched dealing with global “humanitarian emergencies,” Scientific American reported five years ago.

The rest of the world has more or less recognized this for a long time, so there are plenty of studies to refer back to. As America’s conversion into reality became policy when the Obama administration came into power, America began to participate in the global studies.

Africa has the largest percentage of unstable societies in the world, and what early climate change studies show is that these misfortunes were mostly predictable, founded mostly if not exclusively on climate change.

Because Africa is the only continent to stretch so far into both hemispheres, it is unfortunately placed to feel the greatest effects of climate change.

Jihad, civil war, violence after contested elections – even the reemergence of debates about social issues like female circumcision – all seem to ebb and flow with the weather. They are all symptoms of climate change.

John Vidal writing last month in London’s Guardian cited a variety of studies showing that the Arab spring had less to do with human rights than food insecurity:

While the self immolation of the Tunisian street vendor “was in protest at heavy-handed treatment and harassment in the province where he lived… a host of new studies suggest that a major factor in the subsequent uprisings … was food insecurity.”

When the rains returned to drought-stricken Somalia, was it only coincidence that the Kenyan army occupied then pacified the country? Or more likely was the Kenyan army decision triggered by an easier time supplying its troops with food?

And now that drought has turned to floods, pacified Somalia is growing restive, again, and this instability is even spilling into neighboring Kenya.

Even in Namibia, among the least densely populated countries on earth, growing instability from climate change motivated the president to declare a state of emergency on Friday.

Record floods in 2011 have now been replaced by record droughts.

The frequency of climate disaster in Africa is increasing so fast that even statistics are lagging. PreventionWeb is a UN agency that simply documents human disasters. From 1980 – 2008, the ten greatest disasters in Africa were all due to drought.

We expect, now, that the top ten disasters when compiled for 2008-2013 will be from flooding.

It seems pretty simple. Forget about proselytizing or promoting democracy and free trade, cut carbon emissions.

Yesterday France returned to Nigeria in an elaborate ceremonial handover several confiscations of ancient Nok Arts, prized terra cotta sculptures of Nigerian empires of the 6th century. Over the last several years Yale University has begun a near complete repatriation of the Hiram Bigham artifacts the explorer took from Machu-Picchu in the early 20th century.

And while Paris remains replete with Egyptian artifacts like the obelisk acquired especially during Napoleon’s reign, France is slowly repatriating these, too.

And then comes Mali.

Without ancient artifacts from foreign lands such august institutions as the British Museum would be near meaningless. Chicago’s Field Museum would be emasculated. Taipei’s National Palace Museum would be crushed. And the Louvre – my goodness, Le Louvre, would be nothing more than a home for the Mona Lisa.

But is it right that such national treasures be housed away from the Motherland?

The treasures of Timbuktu rank right up there with the pyramids and Inca kings. In fact, many believe they are the most precious artifacts the world has.

This is because among its mosques and building relics are housed many of the world’s oldest written manuscripts. The oldest registered manuscript – at least before the current war – was dated from 1204. It included texts not just on world religion but astronomy, women’s rights, alchemy and medicine, mathematics and linguistics.

Timbuktu was a natural place for such ancient manuscripts. For several millennia before the modern age it was the crossroads of two major trade routes: the Saharan camel route with the Niger River.

But it was not until the 16th century when the area was arguably at its prime that a famous and wealthy scholar, Mohammed abu Bakr al-Wangari, established a “library” of ancient scrolls and documents. He spent the last 30 years of his life collecting these treasures, and when he died in 1594 they were inherited by his seven sons.

Collection and restoration continued for the centuries thereafter, but without a strong centralized government it was haphazard and often random. Timbuktu’s most prominent families became identified with their libraries of ancient texts.

By the turn of the 20th Century it was estimated that more than a quarter million books, notes, drawings and other relics of the past were being lovingly preserved by literally thousands of Timbuktu’s 100,000 residents.

UNESCO became deeply involved years ago, and in 2005 a huge portion of its cultural restoration budget was dedicated to Timbuktu alone.

But because the manuscripts – the most precious treasures of all – were still legally in the hands of individual families, UNESCO cleverly over the years poured its funds into the remains of ancient mosques and mausoleums. Slowly over time these attracted manuscripts.

Still the vast majority of texts were aggressively retained and often hidden by individual families. In 2005 South Africa convinced many of them to stop burying ancient parchment in the sand whenever trouble arose, and began a library.

That extraordinary effort went up in flames as the Islamists left Timbuktu last week.

One of the most visible of the many libraries was Timbuktu’s Ahmed Baba Institute for Higher Studies and Islamic Research. When the Islamists first took over Timbuktu, the adroit director managed to convince one of the leaders of the importance of the texts to Islamic law.

Then, over the next months, he smuggled 28,000 of the most precious manuscripts out of the building. When the Islamists left, they burned what was left.

How much has been lost? Inventory is still going on, but the point is that most of these remarkable documents are still in private hands, libraries and collections of various Timbuktu families.

Is it time that such precious relics of humankind be removed to safer places? Or at the very least removed to Bamako and protected there?

The truth is counterintuitive to many Americans whose understanding of Africa comes mostly from the nightly news and America’s very distorted and political travel advisories. But Scott Straus has documented the fact, and what’s more critical, explained it.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison is fast developing as one of America’s invaluable resources for everything African. Strauss is young, an associate professor brilliant enough to obtain an endowed chair, concentrating in political science and global issues.

But Madison is rife with many others Africa directed, including one of my favorite, John Hawks, whose exciting blog is one of the most important first sources of breakthrough anthropology and paleontology in Africa.

So it is not surprising that research news about Africa comes from UW-Madison. It is surprising, though, that a young associate professor will dare take on contemporary media alliances as normally disparate as Ted Koppel and Richard Engel.

Koppel suggested on Meet the Press last Sunday that Africa is going nuclear, not necessarily figuratively, and far outpacing the danger of conflicts of the past. Engel suggested on Tuesday’s Nightly News that Africa exceeds Syria or North Korea in terms of potential conflict.

And these represent the liberal media! As far as Fox News is concerned, the only indication at all that evolution might be true is that Africa hasn’t yet.

Media news in short sound bites is how most of America forms its understanding. As Straus explained in an article Monday it takes more than sound bites to reveal the truth.

Straus’ quest to disseminate the truth has been a two-year one. Using the most incontestable data since 1960, he has demonstrated in publications and conferences that conflict in Africa is on the decline. It’s a particularly difficult task right now, and he refers to the northern African conflicts as an “uptick” but when laid into any graph of any length – even just 3 or 4 years – his premise stands.

And as I’ve written recently, many of us do not see this current conflict in northern Africa as lasting very long. (So I hasten to add that doesn’t mean terrorism will be wiped out, or that Egypt won’t boil and bubble for years to come.) But it does mean that from a truly global perspective, it’s wholly rational that the world’s biggest businesses are investing hands over fists in Africa, because even they know: Africa is the place to be in the future.

But even more interesting is Straus’ more delicate conclusions as to why.

Why is there more conflict in Asia, for example, than Africa? Why are wars – when they do happen – more gruesome and often barbaric in the Balkans than Central Africa? Why is North Korea or Iran so much greater a threat than an extremist Islamic Arab Africa?

Three reasons:

1. The End of the Cold War
As I’ve often written Africa was the great pawn in the Cold War. It led to its current stubborn levels of corruption, since the patrons in the East and West lavished immature African societies with tons of money and weapons without requiring accountability. When the Cold War ended, this unfiltered pipeline did as well.

2. Democracy
This is Straus’ weakest point, but if I understand it correctly, he believes that before the advent of multi-party politics, dictators’ control of African countries’ growth, revenue streams and disbursements, were highly targeted ethnically or even just into the coffers of those dictators. The release of the economies of African societies requiring real public stewardship – coincidentally or otherwise with the advent of multi-party democracy – leads to a strong motivation to keep the social peace.

3. China
Like me Straus doesn’t hold China up as a model for how a big power should mentor small ones, but like me he realizes that China’s unique form of foreign policy is good for African peace. “China doesn’t take sides,” Straus says flatly. China takes oil. And it will do anything it can to get it. There’s no deceit, here. Everyone knows the rules of the game, and to be a winner, you have to have peace.

4. Regional Conflict Resolution
I disagree with Straus on this, but fortunately I think the previous three reasons are sufficient enough. Straus argues that regional powers and organizations have been working successfully to reduce conflict: South Africa in Zimbabwe, Kenya in The Sudan and Somalia, Egypt with the Palestinians, the African Union in many places. I don’t. I think these ostensible activities are totally emasculated without big power – mostly western – support and guidance. The signs are hopeful and this may herald the resolution centers of the future, but right now they are still the puppets in the shadow box.

But his last explanation could be stretched into an argument that is equally positive: that the Big Powers are doing better in shepherding conflict resolution in Africa. And with that I totally agree, and especially recently under Obama.

Truth is often so broad and so immutable that it fades like a watermark under the moments of things more exciting and threatening. That’s what much of Africa’s steady progress into the future is like. There was so little interest at all in Africa a generation ago by westerners, all we learned was the bad stuff.

That’s the history we store, miserably inadequate to produce sufficient contrast as a watermark on the abduction of child soldiers and Rwandan genocide. But the persistent and careful work by people like Straus will prevail, and I for one hope he continues to enthusiastically duke it out with the Koppels of the world.

Sunday’s Meet the Press roundtable was in contrast the perfect example of how fooled and even bamboozled old guard American media personalities still are. Andrea Mitchell excepted, the remaining two old men got almost everything wrong:

Ted Koppel who presided over the creation of the War of Terror in the media predicted “we’re entering one of the most dangerous eras this country has ever experienced.”

Wrong.

“I think it’s even bigger and more troubling than that,” pounced Bob Woodward, the man who broke Watergate and was apparently broken by it in return.

I’m making no bones about saying that France’s action will be short-lived, especially by the standards of American foreign involvements, and that it will be generally successful. As I said in earlier blogs, I think this is the end-game for the current era of terrorism. That doesn’t mean the end to terrorism, of course, just the end of the al-Qaeda chapter.

The end-game wasn’t supposed to be quite so publicly bloody, and this is largely because of American missteps in Mali. AFRICOM was the new American African command that set in pace a number of militaristic actions I’m ambivalent about, but which did chase al-Qaeda from Yemen to Somalia to central Africa and finally to North Africa where it was supposed to desiccate in the sand.

This three-year chase fragmented what had been a more structured and organized group of very bad guys. Separately, the Obama drone assassinations took out dozens of terrorist leaders, including of course the Top Gun. Like Sherman plowing through Georgia, death and destruction has been left in the wake, but…

…al-Qaeda is gone, Somalia has been pacified and terrorism has been chased on a long arc from Afghanistan down into east Africa and back up to North Africa … where now the French are pummeling it to death.

It got messy in Mali because Americans don’t speak French right. We trained the Malian army and held it up to public scrutiny as a model for modern African armies (allied, of course, to the west).

But those pesky French-speaking Africans got naughty and staged a coup against what we had also championed as one of Africa’s most stable democracies, and together with a few other events like generations of weapons released from Libya, the current war was precipitated.

Tuaregs have been fighting for independence since the dawn of the camel, and al-Qaeda remnants fleeing America’s silent sweep, pushed north into the southern flowing Libyan arms made uncomfortable but convenient bed fellows. For a while.

It couldn’t last. It didn’t. But it was strong enough long enough to give the French cause to attack. The French don’t dither like Americans. They never have, and their unique forms of morality are the same which continue to celebrate Napoleon’s tomb in the Champs de Mars.

So now what?

North Africa is a mess, but it isn’t the global threat that Afghanistan was. The trouble in Egypt is internal and will last for some time, but it will not spread. French foreign legion will be in Mali for some time, now, but fighting will diminish not spread into Niger or Nigeria as old men American commentators claim.

And the terrorism threat will diminish. The world will be more peaceful.

So why am I so unsettled and near sarcastic?

Because this was all planned. I see everything having happened to a a near perfect specific plan, a covert military mission organized by the Obama administration, cleaned up by the French. The French weren’t supposed to come out of the rafters, but they had to translate for the Americans. That was the only unplanned move. That this all worked and made the world peaceful is good.

That it is covert and so strikingly successful is terrifying.

The journal Science is no teenage blog. The rigors of getting published in magazines of this caliber are legend, and the author, Dr. Nigel Stork, comes well credentialed. He’s the Deputy Director of the Griffith School of the Environment, not just one of Australia’s top schools but a global leader.

So what did Dr. Stork say? Something that alarms alarmists, that right now there’s no reason for alarm.

Stork’s comprehensive data study concluded that species are not going extinct as quickly as commonly thought. There is not, as Richard Leakey convinced me years ago, a Sixth Great Die-off happening, now.

Five times before Leakey’s pronouncement in the 1980s, Planet Earth has suffered a massive die-off of species. We know the reason for several of these, including the giant rock that pummeled Yucatan and accelerated the end of the dinosaur era. Another of the reasons millions of years before was when bubbles of deadly methane trapped deep within the earth were released by earthquakes.

While I can’t put my finger on any study suggesting otherwise, it really has been a widely accepted notion that if not an actual “Die-off” that we were losing species right left and center. Organizations such as Global Issues live not die by pronouncing organic holocaust.

Stork says stand back and take a deep breath. He’s not saying everything is as good as it should be, just that it isn’t as bad as popularly believed.

And to his credit he portends Armageddon if global warming isn’t curbed.

The article made me think about East Africa, of course. I thought of the several species of antelope that have gone extinct in my lifetime, the decline in lions, the ups and downs and right now downs of elephants, and the real loss of a number of smaller forest creatures.

Yet I then had to remind myself of how many new species have been discovered within that period. Now this isn’t like new births replacing deaths, of course. But it may indicate that a balance of sort exists that we were just ignoring.

It’s hard to accept that belief. When we get broadsided by Konza Cities and Mega Malls and highways through forests. But scientifically, it may just be true.

Conservation of known species is today a tremendous art and the technologies that have been employed to nurture our biodiversity are sometimes, well, extraordinary.

Take drones, for instance.

Now that the Somali war is winding down, what do you do (if you were Uncle Sam) with all those robotic airplanes flying all over the place? You start an internet campaign to raise money and buy one of them to fight rhino poaching!

And what a steal it was! The drone cost less than $40,000, but keep in mind how fast drone depreciate and this one had none of the bells and whistles of the better models, like missile launchers and laser sprays.

They weren’t particular about the color, either.

Kenya’s most successful rhino conservancy, Ol Pejeta, explained that the drone was purchased “used” from the U.S. company UASUSA Tempest, and that another U.S. company, Unmanned Innovation, will launch it and provide the ground-based monitoring equipment. No comments from these guys since they’re classified.

I’ve always felt that one of the best ways to justify wars is to give away a few bombs. Discreetly, of course.

Now though the campaign to raise enough money is done, Ol Pejeta will let you donate more and you might win the contest to NAME THE DRONE!

Yesterday.

But before that, you have to go back to World War II. But yesterday the U.S. officially recognized the existing Somalia government after 21 years of on-and-off direct conflict.

Although far from tranquil or totally stable there is today a globally recognized Somali government for the first time since 1991, piracy is ending, farmers are planting, schools are open and the economy is growing. None of this since 1991. All this precisely because Obama “surged” our militarism there for the last two years.

He surged a war and won.

Applause?

Them’s the facts, Ma’am. The catastrophe began with Bill Clinton’s cowardly response to Blackhawk Down and then a few years later, the Rwandan Genocide. Clinton escaped a couple close calls with oblivion as President, and I for one think he’s culpable for the last several decades of terrorism in the world. (With a good measure of French obstructionism as well.)

A sweet irony that his wife yesterday was the person in the spotlight recognizing Somali peace.

But Clinton and French responsibility for igniting global jihad had a significant catalyst with the end of the Cold War.

So many African countries were nothing but pawns in the Cold War. They were treated like ivory pieces on a chessboard, spit-polished when they advanced one sides game and ignored to the point of being sacrificed when they didn’t. The frontline battle was in Somalia and neighboring Ethiopia for 20 years before Blackhawk Down.

The U.S. and westerners pulled the puppet strings on Somalia, and Russia with occasional Chinese lace pulled the strings in Ethiopia.

Tens of thousands – maybe hundreds of thousands of people died in regular old tank wars on deserts with no more value than the sand that defines an egg timer. So for 40 years “Somali society” if it still exists was pulled and shoved and bombed and tortured as some unexplained pendulum flinging between good and bad.

The epoch Americans remember most is the one just ended: the epoch of terror when Obama’s surge in Afghanistan forced al-Qaeda principals to flee to Africa. After a short stint in Yemen they went to Somali where their much greater skills and far superior dedication to ideology gave them the tools to conquer the rat pack of warlords that had controlled what had been Somalia with the residue of weaponry left by the end of the Cold War.

The prize in that stealthy battle was the port city of Kismayo, the throne of the pirates, and the loot this provided al-Qaeda rebirthed them with new weapons, new roads, new infrastructure and alas was born, al-Shabaab.

Obama gives no quarter to his enemies. But he doesn’t like public wars. So with more equipment and better technology and not a few real American boots on the ground, America began battling al-Shabaab.

It was just the continuation of the Texas Ranger pulling up his red bandana to disguise his face and sticking his badge in his pocket so he can hunt down the Dallas bank robber who fled into Arkansas. But when it became clear that this clandestine operation wasn’t enough, well, he hired Kenya.

The Kenyan Army invaded Somalia in October, 2011.

Well, that did the trick!

So now the al-Qaeda principals – what’s left of them – have fled into the interior and north of Africa. But don’t worry. The French talk better than we do in that part of the continent, so they’re taking control, now.

I’m of two minds about all this. The world – the whole wide world, including shipping and fishing lanes and air space – it’s all much, much more safe and peaceful today because of Obama’s surge against terror.

But my second mind is whiplashed by the memories of the Cold War, and how we used African societies as pawns in a game that was cruel and devastating to them.

It all remains to be seen. And perhaps my sarcasm is little more than spite of days gone bye.

Perhaps today is better.

The battle today is fierce. There is absolutely no question that this is Afghanistan 2003 in Mali. And I’m convinced that France will win.

Revolutionary guerrillas are never bombed out of existence, whether they’re Mao’s Red Brigade or al-Qaeda in the Maghreb. Guerrillas who survive extermination surface elsewhere, in other revolutions and later wars as many of the old al-Qaeda are Taliban today in Afghanistan.

But al-Qaeda as an organized terrorist force will be no longer and I don’t think anything near as powerful will reemerge in this political epoch. The Taliban, for instance, in either Afghanistan or Pakistan has little power outside its own turf, and that’s what differentiates them from al-Qaeda.

In addition to nine-eleven, al-Qaeda organized a number of global attacks, including the horrible subway massacre of London, the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa, a Philippine Airlines bombing plot, the Bali massacre, the World Trade Center bombing, tourist hotel bombings on the Kenyan coast, the attempted Manchester airport raid, the shoe bomber, the UPS package bomber, and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, and this lengthy list doesn’t even include the successful attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The reach of al-Qaeda has never been seen before al-Qaeda. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been as effective revolutionary movements, just that none except al-Qaeda were truly global. That’s the difference, and I think that global reach of a single terrorist organization will end when the Mali war ends.

What happened in Mali was long expected. The country sits on the bottom of the Sahara Desert, and a huge portion of its north is little more than sand. But for centuries this sand has been ruled by the Tuaregs, a tribe of powerful horseman and cattle traders who controlled the lucrative desert routes that connected North Africa and Europe with the countries on the Atlantic Ocean.

The Tuaregs had never truly succumbed to modern government oversight. And their revolutionary nature, matured in the 21st century with leaders who were schooled in the west and armed by enormous weaponry left from the overthrow of Ghadafi, took over northern Mali more than 9 months ago.

The area is the size of France, and Tuaregs demanded an independent country. It would be nonsense, by the way. As camel thieves and rogue marauders to desert oases, the Tuaregs will never develop on their own. They need development just like peoples everywhere, and nobody in the world – including China or Russia – was going to recognize a country composed of desert tents.

This was the feeling of the very moderate Mali government, a government that was heralded by democratic giants the world over. Even in this blog, written in March by Conor Godrey, there was a sense that the Tuareg “rebellion” would be negotiated down to helping them better than they had been by the Mali government.

But what happened was that al-Qaeda was looking for a new home. I’ve written before about the putsch against al-Qaeda organized by the U.S. and the west.

We pushed them from Afghanistan to Yemen to Somali to the jungles of central Africa, and ultimately into Mali.

We pushed them with local militaries, like the Kenyans, and unbelievably advanced technologies like drones.

Guerilla terrorists flee before making a last stand. Their ideology demands little honor of the sort traditional battles value. When defeated, they run to make a stand another day, and they run to places where they have an opportunity of control. For example, the desert.

So the Tuaregs were usurped by al-Qaeda. There was a period in March and April when several groups negotiated among each other and agreed on an uncomfortable assembly of Islamic law and order. But it didn’t last, really. The land of the Tuaregs, which literally for centuries was ruled by their desert mavericks, was now in the hands of al-Qaeda.

And the Mali government response was weak. So weak that even as the world was calling for serious military intervention, the Mali government balked. Finally its own soldiers mutinied, the weak government collapsed and there was no formal opponent to the new Islamic soldiers ruling its north.

The Security Council, unanimous across its many different state ideologies, authorized military action. The most progressive nearly communist governments and institutions also recognized the need for military action.

This is because Mali is the heart of West Africa. If al-Qaeda establishes a toehold here, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and even Morocco may be threatened.

But France felt waiting until the UN got its act together would be too long. Friday, they started bombing.

Britain has provided air craft for transport. The U.S. has provided transport, intelligence, and undoubtedly, drones.

The Afghan war was bungled by an inept American administration. France is not inept. Since Afghanistan and with lessons learned from it, the western world has been stealthy until now. It is no longer.

The only explanation is that this will be the last and decisive battle against al-Qaeda.

These are my 6th to 10th Top Ten Stories. To see a list of all The Top Ten, click here.

#7 : China Partners with U.S. for Peace in Sudan
The world’s two most diametrically opposed societies have struggled uncomfortably ever since shaking hands during the Nixon administration in the 1970s. Whether it be over world wars and conflicts, climate change, human rights – you name it, we’ve been at odds.

But this year the two adversaries teamed up to make peace in The Sudan. This is terribly exciting.

Two years ago South Sudan became its own nation after years of civil war with The North. That in itself was amazing, and in no large part because of enormous initiatives by the Obama administration.

But the border between the two has never been completely demarcated. And it goes right through the most productive oil fields in the area, and so border disputes spilled over into outright warfare.

China and the U.S. got together and stopped it. Period.

It is an amazing geopolitical development, because the U.S. is heavily invested in The South, and China, in The North. But rather than parry their positions, they negotiated them for peace.

Unfortunately, trouble persists in both countries not due to this grander conflict. Darfur remains troubling for The North and The South’s northwest states are close to open rebellion.

But the grand deal signed earlier this year between the two hostile siblings of the once singular Sudan state remains laudable.

#8 : Breakthrough Discovery for Malaria Eradication
The devil is in the details to be sure, and despite a generation of unprecedented research and global aid, malaria finds ways to evade suppression. But this year a new genetic discovery might finally herald a definitive way to eradicate this disease that is so devastating in Africa.

Malaria is such a tough candidate for making a vaccine against because it’s really seven different types of life forms. True, it’s only one of the stages that infects us, but that one has proved terribly difficult to fight against.

If we could simply interrupt the change of life forms from one to the other, we’d do the trick. And now, a new genetic discovery gives us a guide towards finding out how to do that. It’s complicated, but perhaps the most promising new science regarding malaria in my life time!

#9 : African Arms Dealer Finally Prosecuted in U.S.
It’s no secret that you can’t fight a war without a gun. But the west – and especially the U.S. – and Russia have suppressed this evident fact because their war machine economies are so important to their overall economies.

And what’s even more embarrassing is that several of the most prominent arms dealers have lived as foreign visitors on extended friendly visas for some time in the U.S. The presumption has to be that the U.S. felt some advantage for letting them stay here.

So it was striking that finally the Obama administration actually began to prosecute arms dealers in a way past administrations, including back through Clinton and Reagan, declined to do.

Viktor Bout, a Russian, was convicted after a full court press by the Obama administration, suggesting more such prosecutions are on the way. This is an African story, because that was the turf on which Bout played, heavily involved in the most recent wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

#10 : Les Fisher Goes on Safari at 91 years old
The Don of African Zoo Directors who helped pioneer some of the first American adventure travel in Africa took a group of small friends on a not-so-easy safari into Botswana in the hot season.

I’ve guided Dr. Les Fisher on at least a dozen safaris over the years, and we’ve been in some of the most remote parts of Africa, together.

As I recall this was his 5th “Last Safari Ever!” At 91 that’s hard to argue, but it was hard to argue at 90, too!

Stay tuned.

My #1 top story for 2012 in Africa is the “pacification” of Somalia by the Kenyan armed forces, and #2 is the less obvious reason why. To see a list of all The Top Ten, click here.

The #2 story, the “less obvious reason why” the Kenyans conquered Somalia is the enormous covert military operations by the west, particularly the U.S. and France.

That assistance actually does include boots on the ground, but the Green Berets and French Foreign Legion are stealthy. They’re only rarely seen.

And while their presence has been most notable in the Somali war, they’ve been seen elsewhere, especially in central Africa in The Congo. About a 100 U.S. forces arrived publicly in Uganda for that effort. The French have a lot more in northern Africa.

These two top significant events on the continent last year have enormous implications globally but of course even greater ramifications locally. But I’d suggest that in a worldwide context they are among the top events of the year.

Somalia has been an anarchic geopolitical unit for 20 years. The implosion began when Bill Cinton abandoned a United Nations effort to hold the country together in 1993, what is commonly known in America as “Blackhawk Down.”

The country quickly broke apart into ethnic and clan-based tiny warlord states originally fueled by the weaponry left by Blackhawk Down. That later was sustained by piracy and other black-marketteering. Although two northern parts, Puntland and Somaliland, managed to organize themselves into something more stable and less onerous than the old Taliban Afghanistan, the majority of the country remained ruled by local warlords.

The Russians left Afghanistan in 1989 and shortly thereafter the country was ruled by the Taliban which welcomed the gang of Thugs led by bin Laden. This was a turning point in global power, a specific outcome of the end of the Cold War.

Perhaps the world was so tired of conflict that the west in particular grew inward desperate for periods of no war. Be that as it may, no president in the history of the U.S. has so dropped the ball on world peace like Clinton did, then.

His early nineties retreat from Africa caused all sorts of mayhem, from the Rwandan war to the Nairobi and Dar embassy bombings. He has since apologized, and some of his advisers at the time say he had been distracted from the growing turbulence in Africa by the Monica Lewinsky affair and subsequent impeachment.

I believe that radicals like bin Laden were emboldened by the subsequent mayhem. The Rwandan holocaust preceded by the implosion of Somalia was a calling card to bin Laden. A few years later, he blew up the American embassies in East Africa.

A few years later, he blew up the Twin Towers.

Terrorism reigned.

And so it has ever since. And America’s extraordinary response, the military involvement in Afghanistan and Iran hasn’t worked. Obama knows this. Like suburbs hiring trained snipers to kill deer eating their city park roses, Bush tried to eradicate terrorism with firepower.

All it did was blast it to the sides: Africa. Deer aren’t as dumb as you think. They sense the sniper’s limits and move out. For a while the city park’s roses bloom magnificently, but roses on the periphery don’t do so well.

For example, Somalia. Bush shotgunned Afghanistan, then Iraq, and many of bin Laden’s thugs were routed elsewhere. Not too many years later they ended up in Somalia after a short stint in Yemen. The al-Qaeda became al-Shabaab and conquered the warlord states of southern Somalia. What had been Afghanistan under the Taliban was now Somalia under al-Shabaab.

One and the same.

So Kenya especially began to suffer the same way all the countries bordering Afghanistan suffered. It starts with refugees. That is a problem of enormous magnitude, aggravated in Kenya’s case because the camps were located in its far and remote northeastern frontier.

And quite apart from the strain of such a responsibility economically and socially, the camps become conduits for terrorists to enter Kenya. Shortly Kenyan bus stops and churches were being blown up by suicide bombers.

So a little more than a year ago Kenya announced it would mount a military operation into Somalia. George Bush failed getting Pakistan to do the same in Afghanistan. Obama succeeded with Kenya. At first we all laughed out loud. But we were wrong.

At first the Number One News that Kenya has pacified Somalia seems so good. Part of it is. A multiple generational war is ending. Good, right? Yes, of course when any conflict ends.

Mop up continues, but when the Kenyan army captured the town of Afmadow we knew it would only be days before Kismayo fell to the courageous Kenyans. As it turned out it was months but it did finally fall and today Kenya occupies most of what only a year ago was troubled Somalia.

Today, Somalia has an effective government and the capital of Mogadishu – while not exactly a tourist haven yet – is peaceful. Kenya, on the other hand, is increasingly troubled.

I believe Kenya is too advanced and mature a society to succomb the same way Afghanistan/Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia did. Yes, folks, Kenya is more socially atune and politically savvy than Pakistan. I’m hopeful that the current bombings and other violence will slowly end as the new constitution is cemented with elections in March.

But this is deja-vu squared, no matter how you cut it. We routed world terrorists out of Afghanistan and they feld to Yemen. We routed world terrorists out of Yemen and they went to, and settled in for a quite a while, Somalia. Now that they’re routed out of Somalia?

The unpleasant conclusion is that for the time being, they’re in Kenya, and so Kenya is not a good place right now to visit.

Obama and Hollande seem to think the terrorist can just be chased into oblivion, and oblivion to them is currently beyond Kenya somewhere else in Africa. Are you following what’s happening in Central Africa, today? Or Mali? Or Nigeria?

I’ve been very skeptical about this policy. I’m not sure the west has enough resources to chase every terrorist into oblivion. I wonder if it’s time to let up.

But I’m uncertain. As uncertain as Clinton and Mitterand in 1994 must have been before a million people were slaughtered in Rwanda.