And transferable it has become. Some 200,000 Malians have fled Libya, as the country has become inhospitable to black Africans, the majority innocent remittance men but some earning $1,000 a week as mercenaries, including thousands of heavily armed Tuaregs. Their separatist efforts in northern Mali have therefore received a powerful boost. So too has al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), for many of these men are now destitute and unemployed in their "homelands". The government of Mauritania will be sending in its fighter bombers over Mali, where AQIM is mainly based, on an accelerated basis. They should be careful.

Twenty thousand Russian SA-24 Grinch and SA-7 Grail shoulder-to-air missiles have reportedly disappeared from one of Gaddafi's arms dumps. These weapons have sufficient range to shoot down a commercial airliner (as Islamists in Kenya tried nine years ago with a jet full of holidaymakers returning to Israel) and are more than capable of knocking out helicopters. That affects Mauritanian air operations against AQIM in Mali but also Israeli mastery of the skies over Gaza, where some of these weapons have already surfaced. Planes leaving Eilat are also thought to be very vulnerable. The missiles could also be smuggled into northern Nigeria to bolster the Islamists of Boko Haram who are fighting the government in Abuja. The name says it all. In Hausa, Boko Haram means "Western education is forbidden." 

It may be premature for Western governments to celebrate the fall of Gaddafi, especially since the leader of the National Transitional Council in Tripoli has announced the introduction of sharia. 

As for Somalia, the recent Commonwealth meeting in Perth agreed that merchant ships can now carry armed men to ward off pirates who infest an area the size of Europe off the Horn of Africa. That  courts the risk that Somali pirates will start shooting their merchant seaman hostages, for there are downsides — for Filipino or Pakistani crewmen — to the "sink the ships and kill them all" talk one sometimes hears at London dinner parties. 

The US has also recently opened a new air base at Arba Minch in southern Ethiopia, from which it can launch Reaper drone strikes inside Somalia, of the kind that already fly from Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti or the idyllic Seychelles. The mess that is Somalia seems likely to contaminate its neighbours.