Goooooooood morning, Vietnam! No, sorry,
that was another quagmire.
The soundtrack
then was Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Motown and
Stax. Now it's Goooooooooood morning, Mali! Yet
the soundtrack can't be something as
transcendental as Rokia Traore's Dounia,
or as delightfully psychedelic as Amadou and
Mariam's Dimanche
a Bamako. It's way more menacing. Something
like - he's inescapable - Hendrix in Machine
Gun.
Timing - as in the expansion of
the Global War on Terror (GWOT) - is everything.
Carefully choreographed Libyan blowback in the
Sahel could not be a better
replacement for NATO raising a monster white flag
in Afghanistan. There's no Goooooood morning,
Kabul! anymore; there's just the sorry countdown
to see the last NATO helicopter leaving Bagram -
Saigon 1975-style.
The Economist - the
voice of the City of London - is even promoting
"Afrighanistan". There are nuances, of course.
NATO had its ass kicked in Afghanistan by all
sorts of Pashtun factions bundled up as "Taliban".
But NATO "won" in Libya. With a certainly foreseen
spin-off; the Islamist brigade which attacked the
In Amenas gas field complex in the Algerian desert
was using NATO-facilitated Kalashnikov AK-104s, F5
rockets, 60 mm gun-mortars and, in a nifty NATOGCC
fashion touch, the "chocolate chip" camouflage
Qatar handed out to the NATO rebels in Libya
(yellow flak jackets with brown patches). What
next, the cover of Uomo Vogue?
I'm your
bogeyman, turn me on Inevitably, that most
convenient of bogeymen - al-Qaeda - is once again
back in fashion, the whole nebula of Salafi-jihadi
groups and sub-groups promoted by the
French-Anglo-American triad as the root of all
evil in Northern Africa (but not in Libya, where
they were exalted as "freedom fighters").
Mokhtar Belmokhtar, one of the founding
members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM),
is for all practical purposes an easily digestible
Osama bin Laden remix. Belmokhtar was a classic
"Arab Afghan" - part of that multinational legion
trained by the ISI/CIA axis to fight the Soviets
in 1980s Afghanistan. When he was back in Algeria
in 1993 he joined the local jihad, as part of the
Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).
AQIM since 2007 was very close to the
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), whose
fighters were also trained in Afghanistan by
ISI/CIA. And all the time LIFG was always
conveniently manipulated by the CIA and MI6
against Col. Muammar Gaddafi.
After the
targeted assassination of Gaddafi, AQIM was duly
weaponized by LIFG, and even presented with scores
of jihadis. Thus, unsurprisingly, there were
plenty of LIFG fighters involved in the In Amenas
raid. On top of it AQIM is also very close to the
al-Nusra Front in Syria, which Washington branded
as a terrorist organization (but not the eternally
bickering "coalition" which wants to topple Bashar
al-Assad).
The key point is that Qatar is
financing all these people - AQIM, the splinter
MUJAO, Belmokhtar's brigades and the Salafist
Ansar Ed-Dine, a bunch of Wahhabi takfiris who
have absolutely nothing to do with tolerant Mali
culture.
What does stand out is the
absolutely perfect pretext for NATO to get down to
the groove in Northern Africa after its
humiliating Afghan defeat. But wait; AFRICOM is
already there! Still, Algeria - a secular Arab
republic who historically has been pro-Cuban and
pro-Soviet Union - better beware, and better get
its US$50 billion in reserves out of Western banks
as soon as possible. Sooner or later, the
AFRICOM/NATO hydra is coming to get you.
Islamo-gangsterism, anyone? For
now we have the spectacle of Paris involved in the
"cleansing" of Mali from not only weaponized
Islamists - extraneous to Mali culture - but also
indigenous, weaponized Tuaregs with legitimate
grievances. The master plan is to support an
absolutely corrupt regime in Bamako, led by a
military coup plotter, the Fort Benning-trained
Captain Amadou Sanogo.
This is the meat of
the matter of the new mission
civilisatrice, protected by a convenient,
UN-enabled smokescreen; a batch of impoverished
African countries who will foot most of the bill -
and come up with the 5,800 soldiers for another
one of those impossibly ridiculous UN acronyms,
AFISMA (African-led International Support Mission
in Mali). Who pays what is still a mess; there
will be a meeting next Tuesday in Ethiopia where
they will all be haggling with the proverbial,
reluctant "international donors".
Even in
France nobody knows who is fighting who and what
are these people, really. Check out the hilarious
semantic swamp here
(in French). Le Monde believes it has solved the
riddle; Paris is fighting "Islamo-gangsterism".
In this Folies de Pigalle in the desert,
Washington will be "leading from behind." Wise
move; shadow wars bypass quagmires. It's the
French - with typical Gallic grandeur - who will
remain infatuated with the illusion of soon ruling
the Mali desert. In fact they won't even rule
algae in the Niger river, because this will be a
protracted nomad war. The prospect of a succession
of sandy Dien Bien Phus looms.
And the
minute most of Mali's impoverished population -
for the moment in favor of getting rid of AQIM,
MUJAO, Belmokhtar's gang and Ansar ed-Dine - feels
the slightest whiff of neocolonial occupation, the
French are on their way to meet the American fate
in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's
enlightening to regard all this under the
perspective of President Obama 2.0
administration's foreign policy, as (vaguely)
outlined in his inauguration. Obama promised to
end US wars (shadow wars are much more
cost-efficient). He promised multilateral
cooperation with allies (while Washington
effectively calls the shots), negotiation (as in
our way or the highway) and no new war in the
Middle East.
To take the president at his
word, this translates into no US war against Syria
(just the shadow variety); no Bomb, Bomb Iran
(just murderous sanctions); and France gets the
Mali prize. Or will it? Zero Dark pulp fiction
starts now.
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