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SHOULD CANADA INTERVENE? AS U.S. INTELLIGENCE FAILS AGAIN IN MALI, FRANCE EMBARKS ON OPEN-ENDED MILITARY INITIATIVE

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(Please Note: articles may have been shortened in the interest of space. Please click link for the complete article – Ed.)

 

 

 

Sending Soldiers to Mali May Be the Only Solution: Jennifer Welsh, The Globe and Mail, Jan. 14 2013—Last week’s announcement by French President François Hollande that his country is engaged in a military intervention in Mali represents a significant shift in strategy for this former colonial power in Africa.

 

French Strikes in Mali Supplant Caution of U.S.: Adam Nossiter, Eric Schmitt & Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, Jan.13, 2013—French fighter jets struck deep inside Islamist strongholds in northern Mali on Sunday, shoving aside months of international hesitation about storming the region after every other effort by the United States and its allies to thwart the extremists had failed.

 

Why Should Canada Help Mali?: Robert Fowler, The Globe and Mail, Jan. 8, 2013—Because our African friends so desperately need our assistance in stopping the threat of a jihadist takeover of northern Africa. And that threat is very real: Al-Qaeda and its allies are preparing to turn an 8,000-kilometre strip stretching across the widest part of Africa into a chaotic and ungovernable zone in which their jihad would flourish. 

On Topic Links

 

 

 

The Moor Strategy: Roger Kaplan, Weekly Standard, Jan 21, 2013

France’s Hollande Presses Canada for More Help in Mali: Campbell Clark, The Globe and Mail, Jan. 16 2013

Mali: Low-Hanging Fruit for France: Morgan Lorraine Roach and Luke Coffey, Huffington Post,  Jan. 16, 2013

U.S. Sees Hazy Threat from Mali Militants: Mark Mazzetti & Eric Schmitt, New York Times, Jan. 16, 2013

Can Mali be Saved from the Islamists?: Con Coughlin & David Blair, The Telegraph, Jan. 15, 2013

Al Qaeda’s Dangerous Play in Mali: Bruce Riedel, The Daily Beast, Jan 15, 2013

 

 

 

SENDING SOLDIERS TO MALI MAY BE THE ONLY SOLUTION

Jennifer Welsh

The Globe and Mail, Jan. 14 2013

 

Last week’s announcement by French President François Hollande that his country is engaged in a military intervention in Mali represents a significant shift in strategy for this former colonial power in Africa. Up until Friday, France was very much the reluctant intervener, investing all of its energy in co-ordinating a multilateral intervention, led by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), to forestall the further advance of Islamist forces in the Sahel region, and in reassuring worried African states, such as Algeria, that France’s days as an ‘African policeman’ were long gone….

 

But watching militant groups – some linked to al-Qaeda – take control of the strategic town of Konno took both regional and international actors by surprise over the past few days. In April, during the uncertainty that followed the country’s military coup, these armed factions ­conquered territory in northern Mali. The move into Konno, however, appeared to threaten the capital city of Bamako, only 600 kilometres to the south. There were genuine fears that the weak Malian army would simply crumble in the face of further provocations from rebel forces.

 

Last Tuesday, during a visit to Canada, the head of the African Union suggested that NATO countries should participate in an intervention to stabilize Mali. On Thursday, as Islamist fighters advanced even closer to government positions, the interim President of Mali implored the French to come to the assistance of his country. Then the UN Security Council, in an emergency session later the same day, expressed its “grave concern” about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Mali (where more than 400,000 people have been forced the flee the north), and the “urgent” need to address the increased terrorist threat posed by rebel advances….

 

These “invitations” to intervene appeared to give Mr. Hollande the legal cover he needed to act. While international lawyers will no doubt argue over whether this is true, accusations of unilateralism will likely ring hollow given that regional players were asking for French involvement, and the UN was claiming that the situation in Mali constituted “a direct threat to international peace and security.”…

 

French foreign minister Laurent Fabius has therefore articulated three main objectives for the French intervention: 1) To assist the Malian army in stopping the progress of Islamist rebels southward; 2) to protect the “integrity of the Malian state;” and 3) to help rescue French hostages. The time commitment is open ended; French forces will remain, he said, for as “long as is required.”…

 

For several months, ECOWAS had been pushing for an African intervention to address the situation in Mali, which posed regional security threats, given the continued proliferation of weapons and the presence of armed groups with links to terrorist movements. At the UN, Western diplomacy had followed suit, emphasizing the need for a multilateral intervention led by African states, but supported with hardware and training from the outside. As a result, the December, 2012, Security Council resolution makes African “ownership” explicit in its authorization of the use of force. But a variety of factors have made the realization of an African mission difficult to achieve.

 

The first is a capacity problem. As Security Council acknowledged, it would take time to train and equip such a force, particularly for desert conditions, and to engage in the detailed planning necessary to make the mission successful. Thus, the council forecast that the estimated 3,300 troops promised by ECOWAS states would not arrive in theatre for several months – more precisely, September 2013.

 

Second, regional solutions inevitably bring into play regional rivalries. In this case, Algeria – the most powerful military force in the immediate region – has been wary of having troops from ECOWAS ­(an organization to which it does not belong) at its border.

 

Finally, the Malian army itself has been lukewarm about being on the receiving end of support from its African neighbours, given the involvement of ECOWAS troops in human-rights abuses in previous missions in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Human Rights Watch reports claim that while West African forces helped restore security in these crises – which took place over a decade ago – they were also complicit in serious violations of international humanitarian law, including looting, harassment, and arbitrary detention of civilians, as well as – in the case of Sierra Leone – summary executions of suspected rebels….

 

And so the buck passes back to reluctant Western actors. Up until the events of this week, the U.S. was urging restraint, rather than the military action called for by the French. America insisted that new elections and the creation of a legitimate government in Bamako should come before any deployment of troops – especially Western troops.

 

Events appear to have forced Mr. Hollande’s hand, but in launching this intervention, he is asking his armed forces, just returned from Afghanistan, to take a big gamble. After only one day of fighting, French assistance had helped the Malian Army retake Konno from the Islamist forces. But the country’s terrain, the fractured nature of Malian politics, and the unintended consequences that always flow from the use of force, all make this intervention a risky proposition. Moreover, a French presence in Mali could internationalize the conflict among global jihadists, which could be exactly the outcome they seek.

 

Jennifer M. Welsh is Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Somerville College. 

Top of Page

 

 

 

FRENCH STRIKES IN MALI SUPPLANT CAUTION OF U.S.

Adam Nossiter, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti

New York Times, Jan.13, 2013

 

French fighter jets struck deep inside Islamist strongholds in northern Mali on Sunday [Jan13], shoving aside months of international hesitation about storming the region after every other effort by the United States and its allies to thwart the extremists had failed. For years, the United States tried to stem the spread of Islamic militancy in the region by conducting its most ambitious counterterrorism program ever across these vast, turbulent stretches of the Sahara.

 

But as insurgents swept through the desert last year, commanders of this nation’s elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training, defected when they were needed most — taking troops, guns, trucks and their newfound skills to the enemy in the heat of battle, according to senior Malian military officials. “It was a disaster,” said one of several senior Malian officers to confirm the defections.

 

Then an American-trained officer overthrew Mali’s elected government, setting the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists. American spy planes and surveillance drones have tried to make sense of the mess, but American officials and their allies are still scrambling even to get a detailed picture of who they are up against.

 

Now, in the face of longstanding American warnings that a Western assault on the Islamist stronghold could rally jihadists around the world and prompt terrorist attacks as far away as Europe, the French have entered the war themselves.

 

First, they blunted an Islamist advance, saying the rest of Mali would have fallen into the hands of militants within days. Then on Sunday, French warplanes went on the offensive, going after training camps, depots and other militant positions far inside Islamist-held territory in an effort to uproot the militants, who have formed one of the largest havens for jihadists in the world.

 

Some Defense Department officials, notably officers at the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, have pushed for a lethal campaign to kill senior operatives of two of the extremists groups holding northern Mali, Ansar Dine and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Killing the leadership, they argued, could lead to an internal collapse.

 

But with its attention and resources so focused on other conflicts in places like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, the Obama administration has rejected such strikes in favor of a more cautious, step-back strategy: helping African nations repel and contain the threat on their own.

 

Over the last four years, the United States has spent between $520 million and $600 million in a sweeping effort to combat Islamist militancy in the region without fighting the kind of wars it has waged in the Middle East. The program stretched from Morocco to Nigeria, and American officials heralded the Malian military as an exemplary partner. American Special Forces trained its troops in marksmanship, border patrol, ambush drills and other counterterrorism skills.

 

But all that deliberate planning collapsed swiftly when heavily armed, battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat in Libya. They teamed up with jihadists like Ansar Dine, routed poorly equipped Malian forces and demoralized them so thoroughly that it set off a mutiny against the government in the capital, Bamako.

 

A confidential internal review completed last July by the Pentagon’s Africa Command concluded that the coup had unfolded too quickly for American commanders or intelligence analysts to detect any clear warning signs. “The coup in Mali progressed very rapidly and with very little warning,” said Col. Tom Davis, a command spokesman. “The spark that ignited it occurred within their junior military ranks, who ultimately overthrew the government, not at the senior leadership level where warning signs might have been more easily noticed.”

 

But one Special Operations Forces officer disagreed, saying, “This has been brewing for five years. The analysts got complacent in their assumptions and did not see the big changes and the impacts of them, like the big weaponry coming out of Libya and the different, more Islamic” fighters who came back.

 

The same American-trained units that had been seen as the best hope of repelling such an advance proved, in the end, to be a linchpin in the country’s military defeat. The leaders of these elite units were Tuaregs — the very ethnic nomads who were overrunning northern Mali.

 

According to one senior officer, the Tuareg commanders of three of the four Malian units fighting in the north at the time defected to the insurrection “at the crucial moment,” taking fighters, weapons and scarce equipment with them. He said they were joined by about 1,600 other defectors from within the Malian Army, crippling the government’s hope of resisting the onslaught.

 

“The aid of the Americans turned out not to be useful,” said another ranking Malian officer, now engaged in combat. “They made the wrong choice,” he said of relying on commanders from a group that had been conducting a 50-year rebellion against the Malian state. The virtual collapse of the Malian military, including units trained by United States Special Forces, followed by a coup led by an American-trained officer, Capt. Amadou Sanogo, astounded and embarrassed top American military commanders….

 

American officials defended their training, saying it was never intended to be nearly as comprehensive as what the United States has done in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We trained five units over five years but is that going to make a fully fledged, rock-solid military?” asked an American military official familiar with the region.

 

After the coup, extremists quickly elbowed out the Tuaregs in northern Mali and enforced a harsh brand of Islam on the populace, cutting off hands, whipping residents and forcing tens of thousands to flee. Western nations then adopted a containment strategy, urging African nations to cordon off the north until they could muster a force to oust the Islamists by the fall, at the earliest. To that end, the Pentagon is providing Mauritania new trucks and Niger two Cessna surveillance aircraft, along with training for both countries.

 

But even that backup plan failed, as Islamists pushed south toward the capital last week. With thousands of French citizens in Mali, its former colony, France decided it could not wait any longer, striking the militants at the front line and deep within their haven. Some experts said that the foreign troops might easily retake the large towns in northern Mali, but that Islamist fighters have forced children to fight for them, a deterrent for any invading force, and would likely use bloody insurgency tactics.

 

“They have been preparing these towns to be a death trap,” said Rudy Atallah, the former director of African counterterrorism policy for the Pentagon. “If an intervention force goes in there, the militants will turn it into an insurgency war.”

Top of Page

 

 

 

 

WHY SHOULD CANADA HELP MALI?

Robert Fowler

The Globe and Mail, Jan. 08 2013

 

Because our African friends so desperately need our assistance in stopping the threat of a jihadist takeover of northern Africa. And that threat is very real: Al-Qaeda and its allies are preparing to turn an 8,000-kilometre strip stretching across the widest part of Africa into a chaotic and ungovernable zone in which their jihad would flourish. They told me repeatedly, during my 130 days as their captive, that such was their aim: to extend the turmoil of Somalia from Mogadishu on the Indian Ocean to Nouakchott on the Atlantic.

Should al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb even partly succeed – in concert with their murderous jihadi brothers in Boko Haram and al Shabaab – it would create an economic and humanitarian disaster of barely imaginable dimensions. And we also know that, given such an eventuality, we would then be required by popular insistence (the suffering of Darfur would pale in comparison) to intervene.

Surely it makes sense, then, to prevent all that from happening. We know full well that neither a somewhat better-trained Malian army nor a voluntarily funded light brigade drawn from a dozen African nations stands any hope of eradicating the jihadi threat on their own. Over the past half-century, Canada and other developed countries have invested more than $60-billion in assistance to the countries of the Sahel. Does it not make sense to protect such a huge investment in the lives and welfare of something like half a billion Africans?

We also need to accept that, in some part, we bear responsibility for Mali’s plight and for the enhanced Islamist threat to the entire sub-Saharan region. However inadvertently, by making possible the wholesale looting of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s arsenals, we have caused havoc to spread across what is arguably the most unstable region of the world.

 

As a captive of AQIM, I learned of its implacable hatred of all things Western, of the extent to which it despised the ideals we hold most dear: freedom, liberty, democracy, equality, human rights – all things it fervently believed were the exclusive province of God, not of men. It’s essential we be clear about the fact that there’s absolutely nothing to negotiate with these guys. There’s nothing we have to offer that would cause them to veer from their path – beyond, of course, our total submission to their extreme seventh-century Islamic perspective.

Thus, I despair when I hear United Nations bureaucrats, diplomats and politicians proposing that we delay military operations while we open some sort of negotiation with “the rebels in the north.” Al-Qaeda will use such naive efforts as a way to buy time to improve its defensive positions, increase its strength through recruitment and importing additional fighters, and further terrorize the hapless Malians.

Finally, as AQIM spokesmen make clear, we, too, are squarely within their jihadi sights. They won’t be talked out of their jihad. They won’t compromise. They can only be defeated now, or later at a much greater cost in blood and treasure.

What could Canada do? Most immediately, we could acknowledge the plight of our African friends and let them know we’re committed to helping them find a solution to the Islamist menace….More substantively, we could immediately join the Europeans and Americans in offering to resume our military training programs….Canada, in company with like-minded friends, clearly has military skills that would be of significant use to get this job done, and done right….

This must be about damaging and degrading the capabilities and numbers of al-Qaeda in northern Mali that it won’t soon threaten the peace and stability of our friends across this vulnerable region. And it must also be about helping Mali’s armed forces to reoccupy and then defend their country once the jihadis have been diminished.

It won’t be about turning Mali into Saskatchewan or Nebraska. And it won’t be about exporting our social safety net or funding a government or anything else that isn’t directly related to damaging al-Qaeda. This crisis isn’t about development. People don’t join al-Qaeda because they can’t find good jobs, or because their families are starving. I fervently hope that Canada, along with other donors, would resume our generous development programs once the al-Qaeda menace has been reduced to locally manageable proportions, but these two objectives must be kept carefully separated lest we recreate the Afghan quagmire.

 

Robert Fowler, a former ambassador to the United Nations and a personal representative for Africa for prime ministers Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper, was seized in December of 2008 by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb while serving as the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy to Niger and held captive in the Sahara until his release in April of 2009.

Top of Page

 

 

 

The Moor Strategy: Roger Kaplan, Weekly Standard, Jan 21, 2013—Of all the security threats Americans did  not expect in 2013, a military breakthrough by Islamists into the heart of West Africa is the most urgent. At this writing, Malians are fleeing the Niger River hub of Mopti, and elements of a French airborne brigade are deployed nearby to reinforce Malian infantrymen, as Islamist fighters advance. Last month, the U.N. Security Council authorized the use of force to rescue northern Mali, which fell under the control of several al Qaeda affiliates in March 2012.

 

 

French, Malian Troops Expand Ground Operations: Sudarsan Raghavan & Edward Cody, Washington Post, Jan. 17, 2013—French and Malian troops expanded their ground operations Thursday as they battled militants in the desert village of Diabaly in central Mali, senior Malian military officials said, and hundreds of French reinforcements arrived in the West African nation.

 

France’s Hollande Presses PM for More Canadian Help in Mali: Campbell Clark, The Globe and Mail, Jan. 16 2013—France’s President, François Hollande, has personally asked Stephen Harper to extend Canada’s contribution of a heavy-lift cargo plane for Mali, and to offer more transport help, testing Mr. Harper’s efforts to set strict limits on Canada’s military assistance.

 

Mali: Low-Hanging Fruit for France: Morgan Lorraine Roach & Luke Coffey, Huffington Post,  Jan. 16, 2013

At a time when French President Francois Hollande has gained a reputation for dithering over domestic policy the recent French-led intervention in Mali and Friday's botched rescue operation in Somalia has presented a new type of Hollande — one that behaves like a Commander in Chief. However, has Hollande bitten off more than he can chew?

 

France Digs in for Long, Uncertain Stay in Mali: Newsmax, Jan. 16, 2013 —In five days, France's sudden intervention in Mali to stop al-Qaida-linked Islamists seizing the capital has bounced it into a promise to keep troops there until its West African former colony is finally back on its feet. Africa's latest war is likely to entail a long stay for France with an exit strategy that will depend largely on allies who have yet to prove they are ready for the fight.

 

U.S. Sees Hazy Threat from Mali Militants: Mark Mazzetti & Eric Schmitt, New York Times, Jan. 16, 2013—As Islamic militants methodically carved out a base in the desert of northern Mali over the past year, officials in Washington, Paris and African capitals struggling with military plans to drive the Islamists out of the country agreed on one principle: African troops, not European or American soldiers, would fight the battle of Mali.
 

Can Mali be saved from the Islamists?: Con Coughlin & David Blair, The Telegraph, Jan. 15, 2013—As hundreds of French troops are deployed to Mali to do battle with al-Qaeda-backed terrorists and another chapter in the long-running war against militant Islam develops, it is hard not to feel a sense of déjà vu.
 

Al Qaeda’s Dangerous Play in Mali: Bruce Riedel, The Daily Beast, Jan 15, 2013—So far, Washington has let the French take the lead in fighting jihadists in North Africa. But the terror franchise is ambitious and should be stopped.

 

 

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