•In the space between Hades and Hell lies the reality of war
Landlocked and straddling the edge of subsistence in the best of times, Mali has slipped into the lap of chaos. Trapped between the evil of the past and that of the present, the sleepy, bucolic state has transmogrified into a battlefield between the West and that which the West dreads: violent radicals seeking to establish a society based on a mutant understanding of Islam on any inch of dirt to which they are able to stake claim no matter how wretched the soil. Bit players in this showdown are the Malians themselves. The sad motif recurs. Once again, Africans become the dangling branches of a strange tree planted on their land. They are the recipients, not the makers, of their destiny.
For decades, Mali complied with the neocolonial instructions of the western powers. The nation was heralded as a model of African development and democracy. Little of this was African and not too much of it was development or democracy. Having invested significantly in Mali, the West had to proclaim Mali worked well in order to vindicate the neoliberal molding of that nation’s political economy. The West dubbed the country a resounding success; the West was guilty of false advertisement. The nation’s progress was shallow and transient. Even this progress in miniature was not a homegrown, organic occurrence; it was imported in the briefcases and tutorials of Western subvention. In effect, Mali stood on borrowed legs. Borrowed limbs are never enough to prevent a tumble for the limbs always return to their master.
The nation’s slow descent would have gone unattended by foreign hands but for the Libyan crisis. Libya represents an abject lesson in foreign policy humility. Libya should have remained an internal affair. Western claims that Gaddafi was intent on massacre in Benghazi is not substantiated by objective evidence. Gaddafi never threatened such a thing. The claim was a manufactured pretext for Western intervention to oust the hated dictator though he posed no threat beyond his borders.
So confident in their superior power, Western nations believed they could firmly control the crisis and its aftermath. They were wrong. In operation were complex undercurrents and riptides the West did not even recognize, let allow comprehend. Gaddafi was a ruthless man whose rule constituted a grave disfavor to his people. A man who cannot govern his impulses cannot wisely govern a nation. Yet, he served as warden in a harsh, parlous neighborhood. His demise loosed destructive forces which he had contained despite his long tryst with mental derangement. These forces would leave Libya to find homestead in weak, decaying Mali.
On one hand, Taureg irregulars from Mali had allied with Gaddafi. The dictator’s relationship with the Tauregs served both countries. It shored Gaddafi’s security machinery while being a release valve for Taureg separatist pressure in Mali. When Gaddafi fell, the Tauregs went home with war hot on their minds. Their return transformed meandering separatist activity into a purposeful, well-armed independence movement.
So eager to undo Gaddafi, the West allied with radical Islamists to reach this goal. The union dissolved as quickly as it had come. With Gaddafi, the West was assured extreme Jihadists were not welcomed in Libya. Now that he is gone, violent radicals who once had no say now seek to control Libya and have poured into Mali for the same purpose.
Although foes in Libya, Tauregs and Jihadists joined hands in Mali. Mainstream news reports claim the Jihadists have taken over the insurrection, embittering and sidelining the Tauregs in the process. These reports must be taken with a grain of suspicion. Dissension between the two groups has occurred but probably not to the extent the media claims. Reports of Taureg-Jihadist scrimmaging are infrequent and do not imply a total split. Moreover, it seems unlikely that ad-hoc contingents of foreign intruders could advance so adroitly over unknown terrain without significant local help.
War often is bought on the cheap but its end always is a costly purchase. In this exchange, the world purchased war with Libya and acquired an unwanted one in Mali. For the West, this is a considerable mistake causing its nations to expend resources they would have rather kept inactive but on the ready. For Africa, the crisis is a bulging error. Supporting the West in a war that did not need fighting, sub-Saharan Africa has brought to its doorstep a war it must fight but one for which it is ill-suited.
Opportunistically focusing on Mali, the Jihadists realized the country was a chicken ready for plucking. The government was in disarray and the army in tatters. Key Taureg commanders and soldiers had defected from the army to join league with their brethren returning from Libya. In an instant, the balance of military power had shifted in Mali. Regional and domestic dynamics had suddenly turned the low-simmering Taureg revolt into the dominant power. When Jihadists entered the fray, the balanced tipped more unfavorably against the demoralized government. In short order, the rebels seized the northern half of the nation and advanced toward a strategic airfield, important water and agricultural installations and ultimately, toward the capital. The demise of the government in Bamako seemed ordained. Enter the French to save its former ward.
The previous years of western investment in Mali have come to naught. America has engaged in the unreliable business of training West African militaries for years under the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative, the precursor to today’s AFRICOM. Until the coup, the Malian army was considered one of its achievements. The coup calls into question the utility of American military training to the goal of democratization. After all, the putsch was engineered by a captain who had been one of the primary beneficiaries of intensive American training. Sad coincidence? Perhaps. More likely it is form of caveat emptor regarding struggling African nations and Western military training. Upon purchasing a rabid wolf, one must not be surprised or declaim too loudly when it rips at your leg.
The struggle for Mali is now portrayed as one of democracy versus religious intolerance, the West against the Jihadists. This portrait ignores the genuine internal fissures that afflict Mali. Tauregs ignited this rebellion for reasons they believe important. Land and water grabs by Western and Libyan firms linked to the West threaten Taureg economic interests. Without settling these issues, the crisis in Mali will not be resolved. As long as Tauregs are disgruntled, Jihadists will find an alcove among them just as they do with frontier tribes in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen. Sadly, events have taken on such a martial trajectory that political discussions will be precluded for the time being.
The French have rapidly deployed well over a thousand troops and have commended daily bombardment of the Islamists’ forward positions. This decision was not a sudden one. The French had a counteroffensive contingency plan on the ready. Paris hoped the Malian army would have been better at self-defense, thus making French direct intervention unnecessary. When the army crumpled like a cheap box, the French were forced to act.
Once France made its dramatic entry, African nations were duty bound to follow. Yet, this situation gives sad testimony to the present state of many African nations. Instead of looking toward an independent future where the nation can plot its own way, Mali is left with the choice of falling into the hands of its colonial master or of falling prey to the excesses of vile zealots. No doubt, the former comes with strings attached. The latter comes with the danger that one’s head might be detached at the slightest perception of heresy.
Consequently, the nation is left to choose between bad and worse.
All of this places African nations in a diplomatic bind. The French objective is to stop extremists from gaining a toehold from where they can hatch plots against France. While this may give respite to Malians, French concern s more to stop the extremists than to help Mali out of the bog. However, ECOWAS’s objective is to restore the American dream of constitutional democracy and free markets to Malian soil. The French have firepower but a limited objective. ECOWAS has less firepower yet the larger objective.
There will be friction between the two allies. This will be resolved to France’s liking. The military division of labor will be that France controls the airspace. French troops will protect Bamako and other strategic points. Some French troops will engage as skirmishers to halt radical advances and to probe for alleys of counterattack. The French are unlikely to commit themselves to a significant ground assault. In essence, the French are in a holding position. They are biding time for ECOWAS to deploy. Once deployed, ECOWAS troops will be expected to take the frontline to spearhead the decisive counteroffensive with the aid of Western aerial support. This accords with the division of labor used in Libya. Just as in Libya, the conflict in Mali will take months to determine if this truly becomes the division of military labor between the West and Africa. Such gradualism will heavily test the capacity of African nations but suits Western interests. The longer the war, the larger the profits for the Western military complex. Moreover, the weaker other African states become due to this exertion, the more leverage the West will have over them.
Already, the trouble in Mali has not stayed in Mali. Mayhem has spilled into Algeria in dramatic and lethal fashion. The deadly hostage episode there will not be the last in that nation. Ironically, Libya announced it had closed the border with Mali due to the unrest. Tripoli apparently feared the desert winds would blow back into Libya the unrest Libya had chased into Mali. As such, the border closure is a sad joke. Additionally, the weakling Libyan government does not control the streets of its own capital. How does it think it can regulate a distant border separated by hundreds of miles of desolate sand, heat and lawlessness?
Perhaps the most salient news this week was a CNN report confirming United States Defense Secretary Panetta’s previous statement that American unmanned drone bombers may soon fly Nigerian airspace. This confirms America sees a direct, growing link between Al Qaeda and Nigeria’s Boko Haram. Given the violence Boko Haram has unleashed on innocent people, the American position incites an emotional appeal. Hardliners and Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye apostles will applaud this move. Yet, the logic behind it is deceptive and dangerously so. The policy’s bottom line is to kill Boko Haram leaders in retribution for their murder of the innocent. This is easy to conceive but nigh impossible to implement simultaneously with precision and decisive effect.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the laboratories were drone experiments have been conducted the longest. The drone campaigns have succeeded in killing thousands of people, many of them the intended terrorist targets. But many have been unarmed innocents whose only crime was to reside in close proximity to the bombs’ targets. Despite the years of strikes, neither Pakistan nor Afghanistan is better off. Both are rife with violence. For every terrorist slain, another is recruited. The same goes for Yemen and Somalia. While effective tactical killing machines, drones have demonstrated only negligible strategic value in defeating the organizations of terrorism.
In Nigeria, terrorist leaders hide in more urbanized, densely populated areas than in Pakistan and Afghanistan. If drones are used in this environment, more innocents will be killed here than in the other nations. Yet, like Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is unlikely the drones will decapitate the target organization.
Resort to drones only makes strategic sense based on the conclusion that Boko Haram will collapse if a few key members are silenced. However, if Boko Haram is an amorphous affiliation of gangs and sub-sets, drones will do no better in Nigeria than in Pakistan. Instead, constant bombings will raise anti-Western sentiment to a higher pitch. For every innocent person killed, two will come to sympathize with or join Boko Haram. The empirical evidence indicates that drones contribute to a war of attrition where the thing mostly attrited is peace. Drone use tends to radicalize populations affected by the bombing. Tactical kills are registered but the objective of ending terrorism grows more distant because bombing is reviled by the people on the ground. This is the human factor that drone advocates ignore. Ending an insurgency is predicated on shifting the goodwill of the people away from the insurgents. Yet, assassination by drone is a campaign more vindictive than victorious. If drones are deployed, America would have tossed the hearts and minds of the people into the gutter.
Should Defense Secretary Panetta have his way, planes dispensing death will soon be overhead in northern Nigeria. These planes belong to a military superior to any in Africa. That foreign military will decide which Nigerian is a terrorist and will make the decision based on secret factors of which no Nigerian will be aware. This will take place in the skies over Africa’s strongest nation. To say that colonialism is dead is to mouth one of the world’s seven greatest fables and no one presently remembers the other six.
In the early 20th century, the gunboat was the preferred instrument of strong-arm diplomacy. In the early 21st century, the gunboat has been supplanted by an unmanned aerial assassin, the drone. While the devices have changed, the mean calculations rationalizing their usage remain constant. Scientific man has advanced but political man remains a beast that prowls on all fours. He perverts science to create machines that fulfill selfish objectives more incarnadine than intelligent, more feral than fine.
Africa has entered a dangerous period. Mali is the first nation forced to walk the slim precipice between the neocolonial interests of the West and the rapine ways of extreme Jihadists. Instead of determining its own fate, an African nation once again has become the playground for the machinations of others. Sadly, Mali will not be last of our nations made to take the dire walk. The weaker the nation and its institutions, the more likely it will be to fall into the swell. This is a moment for the nations of the continent to marshal their scarce resources to take the lead in rescuing Mali and not merely trying to hold the extremists to a stalemate. It is beyond time for the nations to marshal their diplomatic courage, wisdom and foresight to forge a coordinated, strategic response to the twin dangers (neocolonial encroachment versus jihadist chaos) made manifest by the Malian crisis. The time is late. Soon the clock strikes twelve.
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