Increasing numbers of Malian women are being raped by Tuareg rebels and armed groups that have swept across the north of Mali since the beginning of year. Credit: William Lloyd-George/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Dec 18 2012 (IPS)

Even as U.S. and French officials suggest that a United Nations resolution on military intervention in Mali could come by the end of the week, concerns are rising that such action could do far more harm than good.

“Mali is a threat only if you want it to be – there is a real risk of this becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy, really radicalising the situation,” Michael Shurkin, a political scientist with the RAND Corporation, a Defence Department-aligned think tank in Washington, told a panel discussion here on Tuesday.

“Over the past decade, a very visible U.S. military presence in this region has done much to radicalise the population. While the situation is very concerning at the moment, the sky is not yet falling.”

Since a coup in Bamako this past spring, northern Mali has fallen under the rule of overlapping networks of criminals, ethnic militias and Islamists, including Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which the U.S. Defence Department recently characterised as currently the best funded Al-Qaeda franchise in the world.

In early December, the United States’ top military official in Africa, General Carter F. Ham, stated that not only had northern Mali become a safe haven for terrorists, but that AQIM has begun training and financing terror networks in neighbouring countries, including Nigeria.

Currently, the U.S. and France are spearheading a U.N. Security Council Resolution that could pave the way for military intervention by African forces, backed up by French and, potentially, U.S. assistance. The West African regional grouping ECOWAS has 3,300 troops ready to move into northern Mali, while the European Union is interested in supporting a training mission for Malian troops.

U.S. law prohibits Washington from legally backing the Malian military until after elections take place (potentially by April), though on Monday U.S. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland stated that negotiations are currently afoot at the United Nations to sort through the issue and table a resolution by the end of the week.

For months the U.S. government has pushed against French demands for faster intervention, largely paralleling U.N. caution, which has stated that an interventionist force would not be ready for as much as a year. On Monday, Nuland hinted that the first resolution could be to authorise a training mission, with military action pushed off for now.

Still, broad, coalition-based negotiations have yet to be tried in the current situation. A nascent mediation effort overseen by Burkina Faso began in early December, but several other promised conciliatory measures have yet to materialise.

Potential “race war”

Those warning against quick military action warn of the complexity of the social and physical terrain in northern Mali, and the difficulty of understanding the fluid situation on the ground.

“Lots of people are involved in these groups for a lot of reasons, and very few of them include international jihad against the West,” Shurkin said. “When people hear about Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb they automatically think of Osama bin Laden, but that’s a very dangerous discourse.”

Thus far, much of the planning for any military action has been predicated on the assumption that the multiple armed groups in northern Mali would either splinter or flee ahead of an international intervention. But according to Andrew Lebovich, a Sahel analyst currently in Dakar, Senegal, such occurrences would be extremely difficult to forecast.

“For all the valid concerns about what’s going on in northern Mali, there is a lot we don’t know about these groups that could have serious impact on resolving the situation and the possible reaction of these groups to any intervention or political solution,” he told an audience at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a government-supported think tank here, speaking from Dakar.

The complications go well beyond complexities of religious or political belief to include entrenched issues of race and ethnicity. Shurkin and his colleague, Stephanie Pezard, warn that an intervention could ignite a “race war”.

In the past, Pezard notes, the worst racial violence in the region has been between Arabs and ethnic Tuareg, both of which define themselves as white, and militias that define themselves as black.

In addition to simply angering locals, the presence of ECOWAS troops could thus be “seen as an aggression by the Tuareg population”, she says. “Any attempt to solve the crisis in northern Mali will require us to know with whom exactly we should engage.”

In turn, any such uptick in ethnically tinged violence could quickly spread beyond Malian territory. Already, Tuareg populations in Algeria and Niger, for instance, have publicly warned that, in the case of military action endangering their Malian brethren, they would have to get involved.

Most importantly, nearly all analysts agree that, at best, any military action would only offer a short-term solution, unable to even begin to address the deep-seated grievances that have led to repeating cycles of violence in Mali.

Humanitarian catastrophe

In recent days, several humanitarian organisations have made initial estimates that a military intervention in Mali could displace at least 700,000 people. On Tuesday, the U.N. requested 1.6 billion dollars in humanitarian costs in the Sahel for 2013, much of which would be contingent on what happens in Mali.

Meanwhile, the push towards intervention may have hit another obstacle with last week’s sudden arrest and forced resignation by the interim prime minister, Cheick Modibo Diarra.

“This simply points out that the army still plays much too strong a political role in the south,” Susanna Wing, an associate professor of political science at Haverford College, said Tuesday. “There will be hesitancy to move forward with any intervention, and instead to continue to push for legitimacy in the south and for the army to really step out of picture.”

Likewise, Andrew Lebovich and others are now suggesting that former prime minister Diarra was removed because he was seen as “pushing too much with France to accelerate a military solution” while “the junta was looking for a political situation … There is now the possibility that there will be another push for a political solution.”

Malian troops stand guard outside Kati Barracks in Bamako, the headquarters of coup leader Amadou Sanogo. Credit: Magharebia/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 2 2012 (IPS)

Despite growing western concerns about the continuing reign in northern Mali by an Al Qaeda-linked group, analysts here say it will take months before conditions could be ripe to oust it from the region, by military force if necessary.

The United States and the European Union (EU), which have held a series of meetings about the situation, are hoping that the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) will soon come up with a viable plan to reclaim the area, which has been in the hands of the group Ansar al-Din since last spring.

They are also trying to enlist the support of a somewhat ambivalent Algeria, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited earlier this week. Given its 1,400-kilometre border with northern Mali, as well as its formidable counter-terrorist and military capabilities, Algeria’s cooperation with any western-backed ECOWAS force is seen as indispensable to any campaign to remove Ansar al-Din.

ECOWAS has so far proposed a force of only 3,300 troops, recruited from member nations, as the military component of a larger strategy to wrest control of territory that is roughly the size of France. Meeting in mid-October, the United Nations (U.N.) Security Council dismissed ECOWAS’s proposal as unrealistic and called for the group to come up a viable intervention plan by the end of this month.

“We have to wait and see if ECOWAS is serious,” J. Peter Pham of the Atlantic Council here in Washington told IPS. “3,300 troops is not serious; in fact, it’s a sick joke, especially for the 3,300 soldiers who will be coming from the tropical belt of West Africa and who will be swallowed up by the desert where they’ve never been before.”

U.N. specialists say that at the very least twice that number of troops will be needed to take on Ansar, whose members are reportedly imposing their Taliban-like version of Shariah law with considerable brutality throughout the region, including in the storied city of Timbuktu.

Both the United States and the EU have suggested they are willing to provide any African operation with training, equipment, and logistical and intelligence support, and the Washington Post reported in June that the U.S. is flying surveillance flights over northern Mali from a small base in Burkina Faso. But so far the U.S. and EU have not offered to put “boots on the ground”, at least in a combat role.

Earlier this week, the EU said it was also considering sending about 200 troops to train Mali’s poorly equipped and largely demoralised 6,000-man army, whose overthrow of the democratically elected government helped precipitate the current crisis. At an Oct. 19 summit, EU ministers said Ansar’s control of northern Mali posed an “immediate threat” to Europe.

For its part, the United States, in particular its State Department, has expressed growing impatience, in part due to reports that the Islamist forces believed responsible for the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three of his staff in Benghazi in September may have included individuals associated with Ansar or with the wider group Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM).

During last month’s debate on foreign policy, U.S. President Barack Obama’s Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, mentioned the situation in northern Mali four times in an apparent effort to cast doubt on the Obama campaign’s claims that Al Qaeda has been decisively defeated.

Indeed, shortly after the killings in Benghazi, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson stressed the urgency of putting together an ECOWAS-led force. Any solution “must be dealt with through security and military means”, he said.

But the Pentagon, including its five-year-old Africa Command (AfriCom), is reportedly somewhat less gung-ho, according to Pham and other analysts who stressed that many more steps, including the creation of a popularly supported government in Bamako and the reconstruction of the army, must be taken before any military intervention is attempted.

In many ways, Mali and its once thriving, albeit clearly fragile, democracy were collateral damage resulting from last year’s western-backed overthrow of Libya’s leader Moammar Gadhafi.

Tuareg fighters employed as mercenaries by the fallen dictator returned home in northern Mali with sophisticated weaponry and, backed by Ansar and AQIM, soon overwhelmed Mali’s army and triggered the coup d’etat in Bamako by a U.S.-trained officer, Captain Amadou Haya Sanoga. Ansar and AQIM then turned against those of their Tuareg allies who did not share their Islamist agenda.

More than 300,000 people have fled their harsh rule, which has reportedly included the forced recruitment of children into their armed militias, according to the U.N. and human rights groups.

While the vast region they control is mostly desert, it includes lucrative smuggling routes for everything from tobacco and narcotics to arms and sub-Saharan African migrants hoping to reach Europe.

As a result, the region offers not only a potential safe haven and training ground for militant Islamists, but also one that can sustain itself economically. U.S. officials are particularly worried about reports that members of the Nigerian group Boko Haram are travelling to northern Mali for training.

The Nigerian army, which has accumulated considerable peacekeeping experience, is regarded as critical to an effective ECOWAS force that is expected to also include troops from Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Some officials here are touting a so-called “Somalia model” in which U.S.- and western-backed troops from nearby African states, combined with a weak Somali army, effectively wrested control of most of the country from another Al-Qaeda affiliate, Al-Shabab, earlier this year.

But that parallel strikes some experts as far fetched, at least in the short to medium term. “Look at how long that Somalia effort went before there was any progress at all,” noted David Shinn, a former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia who now teaches at George Washington University.

The U.N.-authorised operation took more than five years to gain control of key cities and parts of the countryside, Shinn pointed out.”I can understand the general concept that must be the same, but keep in mind it took a heck of a long time in Somalia, and that could be the same result in Mali,” he told IPS.