According to reports, the French-led coalition of the willing in
Mali’s north killed two of top leaders of AQIM (al Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb, i.e. North Africa) last week, along with an
unspecified but reportedly significant number of their
fighters.
Though French spokesmen held back identifying the enemy leaders
killed pending analysis of forensic evidence, Chadian military and
civilian officials proclaimed a major victory in the campaign to
restore Malian sovereignty over the territory north of the Niger
river that was lost during last year’s Tuareg war. With French and
coalition forces occupying all the major towns of the north, the
AQIM and their affiliates have sought refuge, according to reports,
in the redoubts of the Ifhogas mountains at the junction of
southwestern Algeria, Mali, and northwestern Niger.
Chad and France face opposite public affairs requirements. A
certain reticence on the French side contrasts with an
outspokenness on the Chadian one. The Sahel region’s former
colonial power, with some four thousand men on the ground and a
substantial investment in Mirage fighters relentlessly showing the
enemy he can run but he cannot hide, must keep in mind that perhaps
a dozen of their nationals are prisoners of North African
jihado-criminal gangs. French officials fear gloating might provoke
their captors into homicidal frenzy, a condition for which they
have a marked propensity. Moreover, they must plan for
post-campaign diplomacy aimed at stabilizing the Sahel, which in
turn means taking the lead without quite saying so, out of respect
for regional post-colonial sensitivities.
Sensitivity to African sensitivities — or mere respect for the
uniforms that guard him — appears to rank low in the catalog of
Nicolas Sarkozy’s personal qualities. The conqueror of Tripoli — a
conquest about as real as was de Gaulle’s liberation of Paris in
August 1944, given that its unmentioned sine qua non was
the politely discreet massive deployment of American military power
just offstage — is widely believed in the Sahel to have provoked
the Mali war by enabling Gaddafi’s Tuareg legion to escape the
mayhem in Libya with a mighty arsenal and head home, where they,
essentially, proceeded to shoot up the joint.
This is undoubtedly a simplistic analysis of what happened. But
while it is surely true, as Alain Juppe, France’s erstwhile foreign
minister, pointed out last year, that the Tuareg Question long
antedates the current conflict in Mali, it is also difficult to
deny the recklessness with which Sarkozy embarked on a Libyan
adventure that the leaders of France’s ex-colonies in the region
told him would have repercussions for themselves.
To wit, the Chadians have some three thousand men in northern
Mali, a heavy military burden for a very poor nation of only 11
million with a history of political violence and instability.
President Idriss Deby, who has fought off armed rebellions in
recent years, has an interest in emphasizing his “regional
citizenship.” He has reminded his neighbors in the ECOWAS, the
Economic Community of West African States, which is the closest
thing West Africa has to a military-political union, that they too
pledged money and men for Mali.
Regardless of what one makes of the claims of the contending
tribal groups in northern Mali, Idriss Deby and his head of state
homologues have strong cause to believe failure to restore order in
Mali prior to bringing the contending parties around a table to
discuss the perennial “now what to do” of international politics,
will be an invitation for more disorder. Across the entire region
that forms the shores of the Sahara, and quite specifically in
Chad, armed men would like nothing better than evidence governments
will cave or crumble before the threat of arms.
The failure of the U.S.-supported government of Mali to defend
its the northern territories led to a coup almost exactly a year
ago, exposing the shortcomings of a vulnerable democracy. And
failure begets more failure: only this past week, the author of
last year’s coup, a young captain named Amadou Sanogo, who
supposedly learned something in some of our military education
establishments including that famed center of applied scholarly
brilliance known as the National Defense University, was given a
high sounding job with altogether high-sounding pay and perks, to
help “reform” the Malian armed forces whose honor he had done so
much to embellish, notably by allowing his men to go on looting
sprees in Bamako after last year’s coup. A few weeks following this
display of military discipline they nearly lynched the transitional
president; last December, notwithstanding their pledge to let the
transition follow its constitutionally prescribed course, they told
the transitional prime minister (another American trainee, though
in physics not military affairs) to resign or else. He chose the
more prudent course.
A claim I have not verified has it that there are more general
officers in the Malian defense force than in the U.S. Army. Not one
of them has been anywhere near the northern front, any more than
Capt. Sanogo, but Idriss Déby’s own son, a general in the Chadian
army, was wounded ten days ago during the operation in the
mountains that produced the alleged elimination of Abu Zeid and
Mochtar Belmochtar.
If Abu Zeid and Moktar Belmoktar are indeed confirmed to have
been among the enemy casualties the past fortnight’s battles, AQMI
— al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — is automatically in a
leadership crisis. These were — if the past tense avers itself to
be accurate — successful radicals and violent, evil men, with
large quantities of blood on their hands. Belmoktar, who is
reported to have split off from AQMI last year (revolutionary
organizations in all epochs and places are prone to faction
fights), masterminded the seizure of the In Amenas gas complex in
Algeria last month, with its bloody climax as Algerian forces
regained control.
The Chadians are proving their mettle even as the Malians seem
to be passing the chance to share in their own national epic. It is
too early to properly evaluate the battle for Mali, and the French
command has kept media away from the battle zones. Probably the
Chadians could not have been so successful on the ground had the
French not swiftly pushed the enemy away from the northern cities
and into the mountains whose terrain the Chadians are familiar with
from having fought similar campaigns in their own country. However,
there is no doubting the debt Mali, and the other West African
countries, will owe Chad, assuming the campaign is brought to a
successful conclusion.
Unfortunately, this is far from given. Mali remains, as the
Sanogo promotion symbolizes, a political mess in which civilian
bigs and military brass scarcely bother to pretend they place duty
and the public interest ahead of their personal opportunities for
position and gain. The ECOWAS appears to be no closer to
formulating a plan for the day after the fighting stops than they
were when it began in early January. They are muttering in councils
and press conferences that perhaps the idea of a blue-helmet
contingent, as proposed by the U.N.’s secretary general, might be
just the ticket, which of course it would be if avoiding the burden
of responsibility is what they are really after. And now Nicolas
Sarkozy is rubbing it in.
Seizing the moment with his usual finesse — just after another
French soldier was killed on the Mali front — the ex-president
suggested it is foolish to throw four thousand men into a country
larger than France with no functioning government. An arguable
point, no doubt, and one that surely could be viewed as a belated
recognition of his own last shot at foreign policy glory, but the
issue here, as Presidents François Hollande, Idriss Deby, Niger’s
Mahamadou Issouffou, e tutti have repeatedly explained, is
only tangentially Mali: the issue is the invasion of black Africa
by a coalition of Wahhabi jihadists and criminal gangs, and whether
they can be pushed back into the desert and contained there, if not
eliminated altogether.
Inadvertently or deliberately, Sarkozy has performed a service
with his typically frivolous and arrogant remarks, namely, the
sheer recklessness of the way leaders of the advanced democracies
have treated questions of war and peace since political Islam burst
upon us at the turn of the century. Issues of governance matter;
but they always do, and they can always wait. What cannot wait is
resistance. We were right to strike back — in a mountainous
country — at our enemies as soon as they attacked us. We did as
the desert fighters from Chad are doing. Now Nicolas Sarkozy wants
first to worry over whether the territory they must fight over is
properly governed? But is this not exactly the wrong turn we made
in our campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan? We shall know soon
enough. Until then, let us thank Chad’s brave soldiers, who with
our gallant French allies are fighting not only for Mali and its
neighbors, but for us too.
