A few weeks ago, most British journalists,
politicians and foreign policy watchers would have had difficulty accurately
positioning Mali on the map or naming its capital city (Bamako).
They would
certainly have been unable to bandy around the names of Tuareg and islamist
insurgent groups, or speculate on the importance of the trans-Saharan trade in
drugs and cigarettes. So what has changed, and what does it mean for
international policy in this poorly understood region?
Mali – a landlocked, impoverished desert country
famous in the west for its music – is the latest country to be subsumed within
the rhetoric of the War on Terror. However, the origins of Mali’s crisis lie in
long-standing grievances of its marginalised Tuareg minority in the North, the
islamist remnant of Algeria’s civil war (largely kept in check in Algeria by
its restrictive military regime) and a handful of foreign jihadists who see the
Sahara as a more fruitful region of struggle than their own homelands (ranging
from Pakistan to Libya and elsewhere in Africa).
Ungoverned spaces, akin to the
‘tribal’ regions of Afghanistan/Pakistan or Southern Somalia, particularly
those where it is possible to propagate anti-western sentiments, have (with
some justification) been a worry to western powers for many years.
Intervention in Mali, in the shape of ‘French-led’
Operation Serval does seem to be motivated, in part, by a genuine desire to
stop the kind of unwanted Sharia-based system of control that had taken hold in
Mali’s rebel-controlled Northern towns from spreading to the more populous
South.
This seemed briefly possible when the Islamists made a surprise advance
2 weeks ago, although whether they would have been able to hold this territory
for long is doubtful. Second, and of greater ‘strategic’ importance, is the
desire to prevent serious contagion in West Africa.
If Mali fell to the
islamists then what impact would that have on nearby Nigeria? – currently
battling its own home-grown (but lower level) islamist insurgency in the north
of the country. Whilst Mali may be a dirt poor patch of desert with little
international economic importance, Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil exporter.
Neighbouring Algeria sits second on the list.
The rhetoric and thinking produced by the US-led ‘War
on Terror’ has been instrumental in producing a concerted, if somewhat delayed,
western response (plans had been afoot for nearly a year to launch an African
force led by Nigeria, some training for the Malian army is being provided by
the EU).
Whilst there is little appetite for ‘boots on the ground’ in the US or
UK, which both have sizeable deployments in Afghanistan (and had them for many
years in Iraq), the French are largely unburdened by this recent history.
Operation Serval was launched after a direct request from the Malian
government, but it is difficult to believe that there wasn’t a sense that in
this patch of Francophone West Africa, it was France’s turn to do the dirty
work.
The intervention also represents a further positive
projection of French military force in Africa, leaving behind the old corrupt
practices of Francafrique which dogged President Hollande’s predecessors, and
largely concerned its more affluent ex-colonies (Mali is not one of these).
France, along with Britain and the US, also made up the ‘P3’ group of powers
which carried out aerial attacks on the forces of ex-Libyan leader Muammar
Gaddafi, and proved instrumental in his fall from power in 2011 – an operation
that some analysts have blamed for causing a flood of weapons to reach the
Malian rebels, thus making their insurgency possible.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has been
outspoken in his analysis of the current problems in the Sahara as part of a
‘global’ fight against islamist terrorism. He made the following statement
after the recent hostage-taking episode at the In Amenas gas plant in south
eastern Algeria where 6 Britons died (probably a response, of sorts, to
France’s action): “What we face is an extremist Islamist violent
al-Qaida-linked terrorist group – just as we have to deal with that in Pakistan
and Afghanistan…
It will require a response that is about years, even decades,
rather than months”.
Foreign policy makers would do well to avoid
conflating a long-standing crisis of governance in the Sahara, along with the
fallout from conflicts in Mali, Algeria (and more recently Libya), with a
global terrorist threat now centred on the region. As Jason Burke, author of
Al-Qaeda: the true story of radical Islam, states “[Cameron’s words] sounded
dated” and bring us back to the immediate post-9/11 days when the enemy seemed
clear and action unavoidable.
Whilst it is too early to say whether France’s entry
in to Northern Mali will trigger an Afghan-style insurgency, dragging
international players into a morass of complex local politics, all those
involved would do well to properly understand what the nature of the threat is.
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