The rescue of Konna by the French army’s 11th Airlift brigade
over the weekend had all the drama and gallantry that we have come
to expect of our own forces as they battle savage tribesmen in the
wilds of Afghanistan’s remote regions and Pakistan’s northwest. The
timing was breath-taking; a delay of just a few hours and the
Islamist onslaught on southern Mali might have become irreversible:
fresh, well-equipped and highly motivated jihadist troops would
have taken Bamako and presented the Malians — and us and the French
— with a stark choice: make a deal or fight us in a densely
populated city where most of the victims will be the populations
you are trying to rescue.
It did not happen that way — so far — because the Ansar Dine men
led by the feared veteran Tuareg jihadist and bandit Iyad Ag Ghali
paused in Konna, a small town on the Niger about a hundred miles
south of Timbuktu, instead of racing on to the Mopti-Sevare
junction. It may have been that the French heli-borne troops cut
them off at the pass — we will find out eventually; at any rate the
11th knew they had to hold Sevare, because there is an
airstrip there and you need an airstrip if you are going to go
after the long-distance raid specialists who make up the bulk of
Ansar Dine’s force.
The French were able to move as fast as they did because, first
of all, they obviously are good at this, but also because they were
getting ready for exactly this sort of operation. They expected to
be the ones who would be on the offensive, doing what they did in
Konna in Gao or Timbuktu, important cities of the north that fell
to the combined Tuareg and jihadist forces that conquered northern
Mali — a territory the size of France — last April after a
three-month rout of the Malian army.
Ansar Dine jumped the gun on them, probably out of a combination
of several reasons. There was a tactical urgency: they could see
the French build-up, on both the military and diplomatic fronts.
Since September, Paris has put together a coalition of the willing,
a difficult feat in a region characterized by ancient tribal
hatreds — the word is not too strong — and mutually suspicious
post-colonial regimes. At the same time, French army advisors based
in Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, and elsewhere in the Sahel region
have been making battle plans and getting their equipment
ready.
The idea, for which the Hollande government sought and received
UN Security Council approval in late December, was to raise a three
thousand-strong multinational army with French advisors in order to
liberate northern Mali. It would be done with the full cooperation
of the Mali government, and the Malian army, or what remains of it,
would be a full participant in the campaign. It is this plan which
Iyad Ag Ghali evidently tried to pre-empt.
A second urgency was caused by the shifting political situation
in the region. The Mali civil war began as a secessionist movement
among non-jihadist Tuareg, and although these were routed by Ag
Ghali and his AQIM (al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) allies, an
international force whose core is composed of veterans of the
Algerian civil war of the 1990s, they remain a factor in the war
over Mali. They also receive some consideration from the
Mauritanians: these are determined to wipe out al Qaeda, but they
are not averse to backing MNLA, i.e. secular Tuareg, claims to some
sort of autonomy.
The Mauritanian leadership believes, at any rate, that the
problem of northern Mali must include a program for helping the
long-neglected Tuareg populations. Apart from a certain affinity
for another nomadic, desert people, the Moors — the dominant group
among the Mauritanians — have learned there cannot be peace on
their eastern frontier if the “Tuareg Question” is not
resolved.
The French toyed with the idea of creating a Tuareg state at the
time of decolonization, but it went nowhere. They had other
problems, particularly the painful withdrawal from Algeria, and
they did not want to quarrel with the leaders of the new
sub-Saharan nations, including Mali. These were black-power men for
the most part — “Africa for the Africans” was the slogan of the
hour. They and the “whites” of the Maghreb — Arabs, Moors, Berbers
— did not like one another. They still do not.
This is evident in the reaction of the MNLA to the French
intervention. Although they are on the sidelines, they continue to
issue communiqués and make appearances at the various venues of
mediation that have been tried in Algiers and Ouagadougou (Burkina
Faso). Their position is that the French should be applauded for
attacking the Islamists, but they must do it not on behalf of the
failed Malian state, but for the benefit of the indigenous
populations of what they call the Azawad.
Surely this view has some merit, but it neglects several
realities. The Tuareg are not the only native residents of the
Azawad — there are also Moors and, more ominously, the Songhai.
Songhai and Tuareg regard each other with a contempt from which
racism is rarely absent.
The complexities of the Sahel render a political solution
problematic, which in turn means a military solution can only be
partial and temporary. This is surely why Dominique de Villepin
criticized the French intervention over the weekend. It seems a
little gross for a former foreign minister to attack his own
country’s government in time of war, but he maintains he is only
being consistent with the stance he took in 2003 when he voted
against the U.S. intervention in Iraq at the UN (after telling
Colin Powell he would support us). His thesis is that you cannot go
to war if there is no political interlocutor with whom, afterwards,
you know you can make peace.
Regardless of our own feelings about Villepin (and his feelings
toward us), his point may be worth pondering. Not that there is a
credible alternative to what the French army is so gallantly doing,
short of allowing a major breakthrough by the Islamist
internationale into the very heart of Africa, with all the
consequences that will have. But there is an urgent need for our
own policy-makers to think hard about the choices, often
unpleasant, that need to be made in the kind of long-term contest
that we are engaged in.
Mr. Kaplan just returned from a trip to
Mauritania.
