Information regarding the hostage seizure at In Amenas, located
to the far south east of Algeria near the Libyan border, remained
sketchy as this column was filed last night, scarcely more clear
than when I filed an early account, now erroneous on some details,
in the Weekly Standard two days ago.
Algerian security forces reportedly surrounded the installation,
responsible for some 10 percent of Algeria’s oil revenues, attacked
the kidnappers after shooting cannon at them from helicopters, and
sent commandos in to finish the job. As many as 150 hostages were
reported to have been taken, but most of them were either released
early or managed to escape from their captors, some of whom are
still holed up in a sector of the site. How many, if any, hostages
they are still holding cannot be verified, but reportedly about 20
hostages remained when the Algerian commandos first came in,
including six Americans, and at least two — no Yanks — were
killed, either in the crossfire or by the terrorists, members of a
AQIM katiba (company) called Al-Mouthalimin led
by the legendary emir and cigarette smuggler Moktar Belmoktar,
known as “One-Eye.” One of our “mooj” warriors when the Soviets
were dying on Afghanistan’s plains and a veteran leader of the
feared Algerian jihad organization GIA, Moktar himself did not take
part in the raid.
The obvious question, which news outlets in Algiers did not shy
away from raising, is how a major oil installation — responsible
for some 18 percent of Algeria’s oil exports — could be overrun,
when these places are the most “bunkerized” — to quote an Algerian
newspaperman — locations in the country. Throughout the proto-Iraq
war that shook Algeria in the 1990s, with deaths reaching over
100,000 according to conservative estimates, the Islamists (it was
during these years that the term was first used widely) never were
able to attack Algeria’s hydrocarbon lifeline, let alone cut it
off. Yet more than a decade after the Algerian state won its war
against terror — at least according to a former U.S. ambassador to
Mali
writing in the New York Times earlier this week — a
terror group hits a non-French oil complex over a thousand
kilometers away from the front specifically as a warning to French
“crusaders” to get their neocolonial selves out of poor little
Mali, where meanwhile people are waving French flags and cheering
President François Hollande as they have not cheered a French
president since the great de-colonizer, Charles de Gaulle.
Nor did it go unnoticed that the warning was also to the
Algerian state, which earlier authorized French military flights
over its air space. Are there factions within the Algerian
government or military that want to send a message to Paris — or
to Algiers? It is a terrible question, but it cannot be avoided if
Algerians themselves are raising it. If nothing else, it is a
warning to the French — and eventually to us — that forging
practical counter-terror alliances in this part of the world is not
like getting a pick-up game going on the playground.
What is remarkable, however, is that we still have to learn
this. Part of our problem is surely our tendency to take a
simplistic view of those exotic eastern lands. According to our ex
ambassador to Mali, “Algeria‘s military leaders know the
extremists’ tactics and their leaders. It defeated them in a civil
war…” If it defeated them in a civil war, why are they still
operating in Mali and striking at Algeria’s economic lifeline?
The ambassador mentions a tidy sum of $500 million that we spent
over the past four years “to keep Islamists at bay in West Africa.”
For all we know that may have been money well spent — it kept them
at bay at least that long. But if that is so, we certainly did not
use the time to study the human and physical terrain. Our
understanding of Mali’s politics was scarcely better than our grasp
of a Libya that literally exploded into fragments, well beyond the
historical divisions between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. But
American concern for the North African and Sahel regions goes back
much farther than the four years the ambassador would rather lay
the blame on. At least since the second Clinton term there has been
a succession of counter-terrorism initiatives, joint task forces,
training and reconnaissance missions, special operations missions,
and sustained campaigns in cooperation with friendly natives.
What happened during the watch of the Hon. Vicki Huddleston, who
served in Bamako during the G.W. Bush administration? Was she
paying attention to our military aid mission? Did she order any
accountability reviews? Was she alarmed at the disproportionate
number of generals who seemed to be in Bamako all the time instead
of in the north, where Tuareg revolts are endemic? Did she
recommend cutting off aid to Bamako if its cliquish politicians did
not address the problems of the north, leaving it open to
terrorists and traffickers?
The cluelessness of Ambassador Huddleston is not a
deformation professionelle peculiar to our diplomats.
General Carter Ham, commander of AFRICOM, is on record as having
been taken completely by surprise by the collapse of the Mali
Defense Force last year. He heard a few months ago, apparently for
the first time, of bought commissions and diverted military aid, of
ill-trained troops without munitions, and of American-educated
officers who took civil-military relations as a green light to push
the civilians aside and install themselves in quarters more
comfortable than their barracks.
Whether the French know the human terrain better or happen to
have been feeling a greater sense of urgency, they did not waste
time worrying about knowing what they did not know or the legal
subtleties of coming to the rescue of a country where
constitutional rule is as they say in sports day-to-day. If Mali
south of the river Niger goes, West Africa is up for grabs, and the
two thousand marines and legionnaires of France’s Operation Serval
will scarcely be sufficient to save it. As of this writing, French
forces are battling an Islamist assault in the locality of Diabaly
in Mali’s west, even as their air attacks reportedly succeeded in
driving the Ansar Dine and AQMI forces out of Gao and Timbuktu. The
enemy’s strategy would appear to be to try to stretch French forces
as far as possible, the better to hit and run at will, and not only
in Mali.
Ambassador Huddleston’s plea is titled “Why We Must Save Mali,”
and while she has the why more or less right (stop Mali from
becoming a “launching pad” for terrorism, though it would seem it
already is), she does not get around to the “we.” However, she
implies we must deal with the Islamist onslaught on black Africa
and not worry about why we ever let it get to this point. She has
the priorities right, but it is also a convenient way of forgetting
that she was asleep at the wheel. The Secretary of Defense allowed
as much too, saying the other day that he really had no idea what
the balance of power is in Mali. He offered this was because the
Islamists based in the north do not use cell phones, so electronic
intercepts are hard to come by. However, anti-Islamist human beings
in the north of Mali are not hard to come by. What does seem hard
to come by are American officials military and civilian with a will
to get their feet — and their ears — on African earth.
But the ambassador is right that we cannot avoid getting drawn
into France’s Mali war. The French and the African troops who are
joining them from across West Africa will need re-supply and
sustainment that only we can provide. Perhaps our policy leaders
can send the bill to the Algerians, or the Qataris, or even the
Saudis, all of whom are flush these days. The problem with the
Middle Eastern sheikdoms is that although we give them — or sell
them — advanced warplanes, they give, according to very good
sources, funds to the very people we are trying to beat down. As to
the Algerians, their relations with the Sahara terror organizations
are ambiguous. Quite understandably, they do not want the Mali
conflict to be internationalized, with the threat that carries of
seeing their 1990s war come home again, instead of being tucked
away safely in their deep south.
The ambassador says that “Algeria has a moral responsibility to
act,” whatever that is supposed to mean, and has ethnic
affiliations with the rebels in northern Mali, a point that is even
more bizarre until one gets to her statement that the solution to
the Mali crisis is North African not West African. In Bamako this
would strike most people as laughable, but it does contain a germ
of historical insight. Mali was demarcated at the end of the French
empire to include large territories with diverse peoples — whites
in the north, though they tend to be pretty dark, and blacks in the
south, who usually are indeed pretty black — who historically
distrust and make war on one another. The nomads of the desert
north raided the south for slaves and still consider the Bambara
speakers of Bamako to be good for little more than slavery. The
black northerners, typically Songhai and Peul peoples, fought a
guerrilla war against the Tuareg in the 1990s which both sides
claimed reached mass-murder proportions.
Mali, in other words, is a creation of the colonial era. In this
it is not much different from many modern African states, Sudan
before partition for example, or Nigeria or Cameroon or even South
Africa or for that matter Algeria. In this sense it is correct to
observe that the “North” Africans will have to decide whether they
want to share in the responsibility for bringing law and order to
their geographical zone.
The West Africans, however, are the ones with the guns at their
heads. If they do not save Mali, they will have no one to blame but
themselves (and us, as usual) when the Islamist forces march on
their capitals, as they have announced they intend to do. In a
completely weird remark, our Foggy Bottom eminento claims that
Nigeria is the wrong country to get involved because it has
English-speaking Christian troops who may exacerbate ethnic and
religious tensions in Mali.
If anyone is exacerbating ethnic and religious tensions, it
certainly is not Nigeria’s or any other country’s Christian
warriors. However, since she mentions it, why should not Nigeria’s
Christian soldiers — who initially will number under a thousand
and will be under the command of General Shedu Abdul Kader, a good
Christian name if ever there was one — come to the rescue in a war
against Islamic fanatics? And, moreover, what have we come to when
a public servant with a name like Huddleston takes a dim view of
Christian warriors fighting for civilization against savages? But
let us not lose sight of the real issue here. Mali will surely have
to reorganize its political system, and the question of the north
will have to be addressed, including a practical power-sharing
formula among the several northern tribal groups. If French arms
can establish the conditions for working this out peacefully, well
then, good for the French, and if they need our help to do this, as
the Ambassador Huddleston thinks they do, then let us be Christian
about it — and serve our own interests too.
