Before we unpack that statement, a
little background on the current situation in Mali. Until last year, Mali had
been considered one of the more successful states in West Africa, though a
state that still dealt with a long-simmering issue of civil unrest in the
northern part of the country where separatists hoped to carve out their own
homeland. In one of the great examples of the law of unintended consequences,
this bid received a massive shot in the arm from the US/French/British-led
campaign to support the rebels in Libya in their bid to oust Moammar Gadhafi.
His overthrow meant the return of thousands of Tuareg mercenaries, formerly
employed by Gadhafi, to their homelands in northern Mali, where they teamed up
with al-Qadea-leaning militias and turned a minor bit of civil unrest into a
full-blown civil war.
The Malian army, not happy with
the way the war was being run, staged a coup, overthrowing Mali's president (The
Guardian's Glenn Greenwald notes this is a double-irony for the West since
the coup was led by a US-trained army captain). With no functioning military,
the Tuareg/al-Qaeda alliance took control over half of the country before
having their own setback when the Islamist militias turned on their Tuareg
allies. 2012 ended with the situation in Mali an utter mess and Mali's
neighbors pleading for assistance to prevent Mali from turning into a failed
state haven for al-Qaeda-linked groups.
The US has been promoting a
strategy built on the “Somali model”, at least the most recent version of
foreign intervention in Somalia, which has been the most successful in the past
20 years. In practice, this means providing funding and logistical support to
troops from neighboring African nations who will do the actual fighting. In Somalia
this, has been a mix of primarily Ugandan, Kenyan, Ethiopian troops who have
managed to largely defeat Somalia's homegrown Islamist militia, al-Shabaab, and
restore some semblance of a functioning government to Somalia.
That was the plan, at least for
Mali as well, until last week when the French began spearheading their own much
more direct intervention, which started with airstrikes against Islamist
positions, most notably surrounding the city of Gao. There are now also reports
of French special forces troops on the ground in Mali. Why France decided to
launch their Mali mission is a topic that is actively being discussed, though
it could likely be because the force of 2,000-3,000 peacekeepers from a
collection of West African nations would not have been ready to deploy for
several months, perhaps not until September, and perhaps not even then.
And that brings us back to our
unnamed US military source. He/she goes
on to add: “Air strikes are fine. But pretty soon you run out of easy targets.
Then what do you do? What do you do when they [the militias] head up into the mountains?” Sadly, since he/she is anonymous, it is
impossible to know if they asked these same important questions when the US
went stumbling into Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps they are offering up these
comments as a sort of advice, hard-won knowledge from the foibles of those two
US interventions. But it is hard not to read these comments as being both
hypocritical and condescending given the past decade of US foreign involvement,
our continued questionable presence in Afghanistan and the calls by the DC
warhawks, particularly those of the neoconservative stripe, for a US campaign
against Iran, yet another military mission that is unlikely to achieve its
tactical goal – elimination of Iran's nuclear program – while possessing a high
likelihood of spurring a whole chain of unexpected and unintended consequences.
The “Somali model” idea pushed by
the United States sounds good on paper, the problem is that while Somalia had
several neighbors with large populations – Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia – to supply
troops, the would-be ECOWAS force for Mali is being drawn from a collection of
fairly small states like Ghana and Sierra Leone, not countries known for having
large and robust armies. Nigeria is the one large neighbor that is pledging
troops, but Nigeria is also dealing with their own separatist movement (MEND –
the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) and their own Islamist
uprising (Boko Harum), so it is hard to understand why the Nigerians would then
suddenly have such better luck when operating in Mali when they have struggled
so much against these two groups at home. The proposed Malian peacekeeping
force is also made up of only 2,000-3,000 soldiers; by contrast, the Ugandans
alone contributed up to 16,000 troops to the ANISOM mission in Somalia.
Our unnamed source is asking some
good and important questions, but they are questions that highlight the problem
with the international community since 9/11: there is now a far greater
motivation to intervene in troubled nations (especially when supposed
“al-Qaeda” forces are involved) and to intervene right away! But these proposed interventions are launched
without clear military objectives in mind, and more importantly, without a plan
for the “day after” the initial military campaign is launched, or in other
words, without an exit strategy. The
United States has spent 12 years trying to find a way out of Afghanistan, you
have to wonder if France will now find that it was very easy to get into Mali,
but that it will be very hard to get out.
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