Motivated by rapidly escalating amounts being paid for the release of captured ships - in 2010, the average ransom was $5.4 million, up from $150,000 just five years earlier - the marauders have extended their reach well beyond the coasts of Somalia to waters as far east as the Gujarati coast of India and as far south as the Mozambique Channel. Despite the deployment of naval vessels from about two dozen nations, the first six months of 2011 saw the number of attacks by Somali pirates more than triple compared with the same period last year. In such an environment, about the only sector in the country that has flourished has been the maritime piracy for which Somalia has become a byword. The latest effort, the internationally backed transitional federal government, is besieged by Islamist insurgents and otherwise limping to the expiration of its mandate next month, its senior officials having accomplished little more during their tenure than stealing an astonishing 96 percent of the $76 million they received in direct assistance from foreign donors. In the two decades since the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre ignominiously fled Mogadishu in 1991, leaving behind a ruined capital in the throes of uncontrolled street violence, Somalia has topped lists of the world's failed states, stubbornly resisting no fewer than 14 attempts to reconstitute a central government. By Jay Bahadur (Pantheon 300 pages $26.95)
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