The collapse of
America's 'second front' By
Jeremy Keenan
It started in 2002 with a
few hesitant probes that were low on intelligence,
high on imagination, and short a couple of
helicopters reportedly lost in the desert
wastelands of northern Mali. Then, in 2003, the US
launch of a second front in its "war on terror"
moved into top gear.
In collaboration with
its regional ally Algeria, the administration of
US President George W Bush identified a
banana-shaped swath of territory across the
Sahelian regions of the southern Sahara
that presumably harbored
Islamic militants and sympathizers of Osama bin
Laden on the run from Afghanistan.
Although the United States had vague
suspicions that the Sahel region of Africa might
become a terrorist haven after its dislodgment of
the Taliban from Afghanistan, the gear change was
triggered by the hostage-taking of 32 tourists in
the Algerian Sahara. The US attributed their
capture in March 2003 to Algeria's Islamist
militant organization, the Groupe Salafiste pour
la Predication et le Combat (GSPC). The presumed
mastermind of the plot was the GSPC's
second-in-command, who goes by many aliases,
including El Para after his stint as a parachutist
in the Algerian army.
The GSPC held the
hostages in two groups about 300 kilometers apart
in the Algerian Sahara. An Algerian army assault
liberated one of the groups. The captors took the
other group to northern Mali and finally released
the hostages after the alleged ransom payment of 5
million euros (about US$6.3 million). The
hostage-taking confirmed US suspicions. Even
before the hostages were released, the Bush
administration was branding the Sahara as a terror
zone and El Para as a top al-Qaeda operative and
"bin Laden's man in the Sahel".
The US
spin on these events was all very dramatic. And it
was all largely untrue.
The pan-Sahel
initiative In January 2004, after visits
from the US Office of Counterterrorism to Chad,
Mali, Mauritania and Niger, Bush's Pan-Sahel
Initiative (PSI) rolled into action with the
arrival of a US "anti-terror team" in Nouakchott,
Mauritania's capital. US deputy assistant
secretary of state Pamela Bridgewater confirmed
that the team comprised 500 US troops and a
deployment of 400 US Rangers into the Chad-Niger
border region the following week. (In 2005, the
PSI expanded to include Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco,
Senegal and Nigeria and the organization became
the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative.)
By the end of January 2004, Algerian and
Malian forces, reportedly with US support, were
said to have driven the GSPC from northern Mali.
Then, in a series of engagements, a combined
military operation of Nigerien and Algerian
forces, supported by US satellite surveillance,
chased El Para's men across the Tamesna, Air and
Tenere regions of Niger into the Tibesti Mountains
of Chad. There, thanks to the support of US aerial
reconnaissance, Chadian forces engaged the GSPC in
early March in a battle lasting three days,
reportedly killing 43 GSPC members. El Para
managed to escape the carnage but fell into the
hands of a Chadian rebel movement. This group held
him hostage until October 2004 when he was
returned to Algeria, allegedly with the help of
Libya. In June 2005, an Algerian court convicted
him of "creating an armed terrorist group and
spreading terror among the population". It
sentenced El Para to life imprisonment.
Within a year, the US and its allies had
transformed the Sahara-Sahel region into a second
front in the "global war on terror". Prior to the
hostage-taking in March 2003, no act of terror, in
the conventional meaning of the term, had occurred
in this vast region. Yet by the following year, US
military commanders were describing terrorists as
"swarming" across the Sahel and the region as a
"swamp of terror". The area was, in the words of
the US European Command's deputy commander,
General Charles Wald, a "terrorist infestation"
that "we need to drain". Stewart Powell, writing
in Air Force Magazine, claimed that the Sahara "is
now a magnet for terrorists". Typical of the media
hype were articles in The Village Voice such as
"Pursuing terrorists in the great desert".
But the incidents used to justify the
launch of this new front in the "war on terror"
were either fiction, in that they simply did not
happen, or fabricated by US and Algerian military
intelligence services. El Para was not "bin
Laden's man in the Sahara" but an agent of
Algeria's counter-terrorist organization, the
Direction des Renseignements et de la Securite.
Many Algerians believe him to have been trained as
a Green Beret (US Army Special Forces member) at
Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in the 1990s.
Almost every Algerian statement issued
during the course of the hostage drama has now
been proved false. No combined military force
chased El Para and his men across the Sahel. El
Para was not even with his men as they stumbled
around the Air Mountains in search of a guide and
having themselves photographed by tourists. As for
the much-lauded battle in Chad, there is no
evidence that it happened. Leaders of the Chadian
rebel movement say it never occurred, while
nomads, after two years of scratching around in
the area, have still not found a single cartridge
case or other material evidence.
How and
why did such a deception take place? The "how" is
simple. First, the Algerian and US military
intelligence services channeled a stream of
disinformation to an industry of terrorism
"experts", conservative ideologues, and compliant
journalists who produced a barrage of articles.
Second, if a story is to be fabricated, it helps
if the location is far away and remote. The Sahara
is the perfect place: larger than the United
States and in effect closed to public access.
The "why" has much to do with Washington's
"banana theory" of terrorism, so named because of
the banana-shaped route Washington believed the
dislodged terrorists from Afghanistan were taking
into Africa and across the Sahelian countries of
Chad, Niger, Mali, and Mauritania to link up with
Islamist militants in the Maghreb. Hard evidence
for this theory was lacking. There was little or
no Islamic extremism in the Sahel, no indigenous
cases of terrorism, and no firm evidence that
"terrorists" from Afghanistan, Pakistan or the
Middle East were taking this route.
Washington appears to have based its
notion on some unpublished sources and Algerian
press reports on the banditry and smuggling
activities of the outlaw Mokhtar ben Mokhtar. It
also misconstrued the Tablighi Jama'at movement,
whose 200 or so members in Mali are nicknamed "the
Pakistanis" because the sect's headquarters are in
Pakistan. Finally, local government agents told US
officials what they wanted to hear.
Notwithstanding the lack of evidence,
Washington saw a Saharan Front as the linchpin for
the militarization of Africa, greater access to
its oil resources (Africa will supply 25% of US
hydrocarbons by 2015), and the sustained
involvement of Europe in America's
counter-terrorism program. More significant, a
Saharan front reinforced the intelligence
cherry-picked by top Pentagon brass to justify the
invasion of Iraq by demonstrating that al-Qaeda's
influence had spread to North Africa.
The Algerian connection
Washington's interest in the Sahel and the
flimsiness of its intelligence were extremely
propitious for Algeria's own designs.
As
Western countries became aware of the Algerian
army's role in its "dirty war" of the 1990s
against Islamic extremists, they became
increasingly reluctant to sell it arms for fear of
Islamist reprisals and criticism from human-rights
groups. As a result, Algeria's army became
progressively under-equipped and increasingly
preoccupied with acquiring modern, high-tech
weapon systems, notably night-vision devices,
sophisticated radar systems, an integrated
surveillance system, tactical communications
equipment, and certain lethal weapon systems.
Whereas the administration of US president Bill
Clinton kept its distance, the Bush administration
invited Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika as
one of its first guests to Washington. Bouteflika
told his US counterpart that Algeria wanted
specific equipment to maintain peace, security and
stability.
The events of September 11,
2001, offered a golden opportunity for both
regimes, especially Algeria, which sold its
"expertise" in counter-terrorism to Washington on
the basis of its long "war" against Islamists
through the 1990s that left 200,000 people dead.
This common ground in the "war against terrorism"
was the basis of a new US-Algerian relationship.
However, by late 2002, Algeria was publicly
admonishing the United States for its tardiness in
delivering on its promises of military equipment.
But Washington's caution was justified by the fact
that Algeria was on top of its "terrorist" problem
and consequently no longer in need of such
sophisticated equipment.
El Para was proof
that "terrorism" was far from eradicated in
Algeria and that Islamic militancy now linked the
Maghreb and Sahel. His activities not only eased
Washington's political reticence on military
support for Algeria, but also provided the missing
link in its banana theory of terrorism.
Who conned whom is perhaps immaterial,
although the United States' lack of human
intelligence on the ground and its cherry-picking
of unverified intelligence certainly made it
unusually receptive to the wooing of Algeria's
military intelligence services. The situation
resembled Ahmad Chalabi's manipulation of US
intelligence agencies in the run-up to the 2003
invasion of Iraq. However, while Algeria certainly
duped US intelligence services, the overall
fabrication of the so-called "second front"
involved the collusion of both parties. US
monitoring of the hostage situation, including the
use of AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System)
surveillance, speaks to Washington's willing
participation.
The front collapses
The second-front deception has done
immense damage to the peoples and fabric of the
Sahara-Sahel region. The launch of a Sahara front
in the "war on terror" has created immense anger,
frustration, rebellion, political instability and
insecurity across the entire region.
The
successful Mauritanian coup, the Tuareg revolts in
Mali and Niger, the riots in southern Algeria, and
the political crisis in Chad are direct outcomes
of this policy. It has also destroyed the region's
tourism industry and the livelihoods of families
across the entire region, forcing hundreds of
young men into the burgeoning smuggling and
trafficking businesses for a living. In
Washington, the same people who failed to find
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and al-Qaeda
links to Saddam Hussein are now busy classifying
these innocent victims of US foreign policy as
putative "terrorists".
Fortunately for the
people of the region, this "second front" is
collapsing. US regional commanders admitted to a
German journalist this past spring that their
EuCom predecessors had over-hyped the terrorist
situation. In the meantime, US skullduggery in the
region is likely to be exposed further by
President Bouteflika's recent investigation into
fraud and corruption by the Halliburton subsidiary
Brown & Root Condor (BRC), set up and
registered as an Algerian company by Dick Cheney
in 1994.
The Bush administration
fabricated an entire front in the "war on terror"
for its own political purposes. Its obsession with
secrecy is not for reasons of national security
but to conceal falsehood. That is why the Senate
Intelligence Committee is stalling its
investigation of Douglas Feith and his role at the
Pentagon's controversial Office of Special Plans.
The investigation is likely to open "an even
bigger can of worms", as one former intelligence
officer has warned.
The collapse of the
second front is likely to have widespread
implications for America's "war on terror". At a
global level, it will reduce the credibility of
the Bush administration still further, reinforcing
the already widespread belief that much of what it
has been saying about terrorism is simply not
true.
While of little consequence for
those countries with which US relations are
already at an all-time low, the ramifications will
be far more serious for countries such as those in
the European Union on whom the United States still
relies for a modicum of support. Increasing public
skepticism toward the Bush administration's claims
about terrorism and disapproval of the conduct of
its "war on terror" have been forcing the
governments of many of these countries to
reconsider the extent and nature of their support
for the US. This erosion of US credibility in the
world will carry over to subsequent US
administrations, even ones that attempt to reform
US foreign policy.
This North African
imbroglio also holds serious implications for
America's principal regional allies in the
deception. In Algeria, Mali, Niger, Chad and
pre-coup Mauritania, the launch of the Saharan
front went hand-in-hand with an increase in
repressive behavior by the security establishments
of these countries against their civilian
populations.
Not surprisingly, the front's
collapse is now leading to outbreaks of rebellious
anger against these governments and a consequent
increase in political instability and insecurity.
In a terrible irony, the attempt to fight
terrorists in a terrorism-free land might
ultimately produce the very movements and
activities that the US government claimed it
wanted to expunge in the first place.
FPIF contributor Jeremy Keenan
is a teaching fellow in archeology and
anthropology at Bristol University. He is also a
visiting professor at the Institute of Arab and
Islamic Studies at Exeter University, where he is
director of the Saharan studies program. His
book Alice of the Sahara: Moving Mirrors and
the USA War on Terror in the Sahara will be
published by Pluto Press in 2007.
