Ripples from Mali: events plus outside Mali

[Surferbeetle]

David,

Found this article to be of interest:

Jihadists’ Surge in North Africa Reveals Grim Side of Arab Spring, By ROBERT F. WORTH, Published: January 19, 2013, NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/wo...nted=1&_r=0&hp

Algeria’s authoritarian government is now seen as a crucial intermediary by France and other Western countries in dealing with Islamist militants in North Africa. But the Algerians have shown reluctance to become too involved in a broad military campaign that could be very risky for them. International action against the Islamist takeover in northern Mali could push the militants back into southern Algeria, where they started. That would undo years of bloody struggle by Algeria’s military forces, which largely succeeded in pushing the jihadists outside their borders.

The Algerians also have little patience with what they see as Western naïveté about the Arab spring, analysts say.

“Their attitude was, ‘Please don’t intervene in Libya or you will create another Iraq on our border,’ ” said Geoff D. Porter, an Algeria expert and founder of North Africa Risk Consulting, which advises investors in the region. “And then, ‘Please don’t intervene in Mali or you will create a mess on our other border.’ But they were dismissed as nervous Nellies, and now Algeria says to the West: ‘G*dd@&n it, we told you so.’ ”

[davidbfpo]

Jason Burke is a British journalist and author who has become a well-known commentator on terrorism, for The Guardian and The Observer in the UK; currently he is faraway from the UK and 'Sahelistan' in India.

His column looks at two aspects, the British setting and the global counter-Jihadi approach and ends with (with my emphasis):

There is another problem with framing the threat as "global". From General David Petraeus reformulating counter-insurgency tactics for the US army to MI5 putting spooks in police stations, the grand realisation of the middle of the last decade for those combating extremism was "think local, not global". This meant dumping identification of militants through profiling in favour of painstaking tracking of networks; questioning the vision of al-Qaida as global terrorist masterminds and unpicking the granular details of every extremist group from Morocco to Malaysia; it meant tailoring tactics to ground conditions and the customs of local communities; it meant degrading the credibility of the enemy by minimising the danger they posed.

The new challenge this decade may be an unforeseen one: the hard-learned lessons of last decade being neglected, if not deliberately unlearned.

Link:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...isis-dark-days

[KingJaja]

Seems like another front is being opened.

(Reuters) - An armored column of Chadian troops in Niger moved towards the Malian border on Tuesday, part of an African military force that is gradually deploying to support French operations against Islamist rebels in northern Mali.

A Reuters reporter witnessed the Chadian forces, who are experienced in desert operations, advancing north from the capital Niamey on the road to Ouallam, some 100 km (60 miles) from the border, where a company of Niger's troops are already stationed.

France, which launched air strikes in Mali 11 days ago to halt a surprise Islamist offensive toward the capital Bamako, has urged a swift deployment of the U.N.-mandated African force to back up its 2,150-strong ground forces already there.

Niger President Mahamadou Issoufou, who visited the troops at Ouallam military base, condemned the al Qaeda-linked Islamist alliance controlling Mali's vast desert north. An Imam, or Muslim cleric, said prayers for the troops.

"We are going to war. A war imposed on us by traffickers of all kinds, an unjust war, from which the peaceful citizens of northern Mali are suffering terribly," Issoufou told the forces.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...90L0GK20130122

[davidbfpo]

A wide ranging article from The Economist, which has some odd references, such as the bulldozers and tunnelling in insurgent Mali and a very useful map of religious observance across northern Africa:http://www.economist.com/news/briefi...sm?frsc=dg%7Ca

It ends, IMO not very helpfully with:

Should radicalised and militant forms of Islam spread farther, current grounds for confidence will be undermined. Intelligence agencies already have a heavy presence in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, to sniff out terror links with the east African diaspora in the West. The real threat, though, is to African countries themselves. In many, including resource-rich ones like Nigeria, religious cleavages are widening. Both action by jihadists and action against jihadists could exacerbate the dangers.

[davidbfpo]

Dr. Omar Ashour, from Exeter University, weighs in on 'The Algerian Tragedy', a country that has drifted out of Western attention until the recent incident. He starts with:

Let’s start by stating the obvious: AQIM is not a product of the Arab Spring. AQIM exists because of the military coup that ended the “Algerian Spring” two decades ago. And it has not been strengthened by the Libyan revolution, but rather by the failure of state-building in North Mali, the absence of post-conflict reconciliation and reintegration in Algeria, and a lack of accountability for a shadowy Algerian security establishment whose brutal methods have proved woefully inadequate to the challenge.

Link:http://www.project-syndicate.org/com...8P2uGYiICZP.99

A short backgrounder and a salutary reminder that most of Algeria was pacified at a huge cost, the war continues albeit mainly in the far south, with virtually no people to "swim amongst".

[davidbfpo]

Phil Mudd, a former analyst at the FBI & CIA, offers his perspective on what has happened and ends with:

We did not know how these types of al Qaedist fringes would play out 10 years ago, when I remember sitting at the nightly threat briefings at CIA, wondering, after yet another attack in yet another locale, whether we might be losing. Today, though, history has taught us the lessons of how these groups fail: trailing brightly from the fading al Qaeda comet, they win their 15 minutes of fame. Or maybe 15 months. Tomorrow, though, their real challenge begins. They have been, and will be, the architects of their own demise.

Link:http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...ying-gasp.html

[davidbfpo]

A rather long, but worthwhile review by Andrew Hussey, a UK-based academic whose specialism is France and North Africa. It's title is:

'Algiers: a city where France is the promised land – and still the enemy' and the sub-title: believes the only way to makes sense of the problems Algeria faces today is to look back into its colonial history. He takes a journey through 21st-century Algiers – into a dark past

Link:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...ial-past-islam

He is writing a book:

The French Intifada, which is a parallel attempt to make sense of French colonial history in north Africa. This book is a tour around some of the most important and dangerous frontlines of what many historians now call the fourth world war. This war is not a conflict between Islam and the west or the rich north and the globalised south, but a conflict between two very different experiences of the world – the colonisers and the colonised.

SWC has many threads that include Algeria; the main one is 'France's war in Algeria: telling the story':http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ad.php?t=15864 , but until Mali little on what happened in Algeria after independence fifty years ago.

I stand corrected there is a small thread 'Algeria Again? Contemporary affairs':http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=2079


As Omar Ashour reminds us Algeria had a 'Spring' twenty years ago that led to a bitter civil war.

[Bill Moore]

Phil Mudd, a former analyst at the FBI & CIA, offers his perspective on what has happened and ends with:

Link:http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...ying-gasp.html

This is a very poor piece of analysis in my opinion. I don't think anyone claimed the Algerian attack represented a spike, but rather it was part of a much larger spike of activity that has been enduring throughout the region from Nigeria, to Mali, to Libya, and Algeria.

As for AQ being on the short and final, Al Shabab gained in strength, AQ in Yemen gained in strength, Baku Harim (sp?) in Nigeria gained strength over a period of years and months. No one can evaluate a trend on a particular event, regardless of its media coverage, but on the other hand you can't dismis the trend either. Happy thoughts are a substitute for real analysis.