Quote Originally Posted by KingJaja View Post
David,

At the root of a lot of the problems in the Sahel region is state legitimacy and the deeper issue isn't whether the states could be made to function better but whether they should exist in the first place.

The US will learn this somewhere along the line and abandon this region to former colonial masters, who will then abandon it when they get tired.

It's back to the 100 years war and the Peace of Westphalia.
An interesting article that ties into KingJaja's comment:

http://www.disamjournal.org/articles...tatecraft-1120

Assumptions that good governance can only exist through state structures often result in flawed, ineffective policy responses that satisfy bureaucrats without altering ground conditions. Consider West Africa, where American officials are more concerned with financing capacity building programs to support dysfunctional states (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and so on) than identifying and influencing religious and tribal power brokers, even if they don’t hold formal elective office. And in Mexico, law enforcement in the six northern states collapsed without disrupting U.S.-Mexico trade volume, which grew from $332 billion in 2006 to a record $493.5 billion in 2012
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From South Ossetia in the Caucasus to Somaliland in East Africa, much of the world operates under political structures that are difficult for American pundits and policymakers to understand, let alone influence. As this map of geopolitical “anomalies” illustrates well, anarchy is the new normal in the 21st century world.[1] Consequently, an initial step towards more perceptive policy approaches might be to manage, accept, or even encourage unconventional governance as a productive avenue through which American power could be regularly exercised. This approach would view unelected leaders in general, and ungoverned space in particular, as conditions to be effectively handled rather than problems to be permanently solved.
http://www.fpri.org/articles/2013/10...ury-statecraft

If American policymakers reconsider Mali’s security situation through a paradigm other than Westphalian structures and Bismarckian statecraft, they might reach different policy conclusions. By acknowledging the obvious—Tuareg leaders, not the Mali government, control northern Mali—Washington might also seek to persuade the Tuaregs to become allies instead of enemies. Instead of teaching Malian soldiers tactics they already know and logistics they can never afford, officials could make clear that the United States fought the Tuaregs because their leaders chose to embrace radical Salafist Islam as an end to achieve independence, and not because the U.S. opposes a de facto, or even a de jure, independent Tuareg area.

While wantonly partitioning off the ethnic region might upset the president of Mali, doing so eliminates the uncomfortable and unnecessary façade that the national government is the country’s most significant political force. That it is not is obvious to anyone in West Africa. As FPRI’s Ahmed Charai recently wrote, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI carries regional influence based on his inherited Islamic title “commander of the faithful.” The king’s recent initiatives to promote religious moderation among radicalized Tuareg imams may preserve Washington’s regional interests more effectively than any state-building endeavor ever could.