The US and UK have to pretend that everybody on earth with a turban and a grudge belongs to the mythical “Al-Qaeda” or people might question all of the previous spending and murder and torture in the name of fighting what may as well be Cobra or the League of Shadows. That’s the only reason a civil war in Mali “matters.”
Back when it was part of "French Equatorial Africa) -blue region of the globe (British Empire was red), was it ever surveyed? I think it probably has lots of good stuff underneath (gas, oil uranium, etc.) Otherwise, why bother with a few million square miles of desert? Timbuktu doesn’t seem all that important.
I suspect that France wants to keep its influence with whatever government emerges in Mali.
It is something of amazement that any time something of Africa is discussed the image of the dark continent returns as if we live in 1890.If only there was some resource to have knowledge about this place called Africa and Mali.…
Mali has been attracting investment in the mining sector for decades. It is not a mystery but it also isnot in the Sahara part of Mali where the richness is, the gold is in the West. Malian Sahara has not great proven resources.
It is important to add that it is not needed to make speculation without any knowledge to understand the French motivations. There are very large numbers of Franco-Malians living in Bamako and environs, and it is also a long french involvement in the Sahra and Sahel, although Americans know nothing of this.
I’m an American and I know all about this, but thanks for playing.
I haven’t seen any evidence that the Jihadist in Mali are actually affiliated with al-Qaeda in the sense that others in the Middle East have been. They may become so in the future, but they appear to have only local ambitions at this point.
Well, one of the groups adopted the name “Al-Queda in in the Islamic Maghreb” in 2007. So they obviously want to be seen as affiliated with Osama bin Laden’s old group, anyways.
Oh, there is no doubt the name has a certain cache to it. But I wouldn’t read anything substantive into the name alone.
There seems to be a lot of concern that that’s precisely what it’s become:
[QUOTE=Washington Post]
Libya’s upheaval the past two years helped lead to the ongoing conflict in Mali, and now Mali’s war threatens to wash back and further hike Libya’s instability. Fears are growing that post-Moammar Gadhafi Libya is becoming an incubator of turmoil, with an overflow of weapons and Islamic jihadi militants operating freely, ready for battlefields at home or abroad.
[/QUOTE]
It would be more accurate to say that after having seen US armament flow to Islamist groups in Libya, this administration is worried about having that happen again in Syria.
[QUOTE=NY Times]
The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.
…
The Obama administration did not initially raise objections when Qatar began shipping arms to opposition groups in Syria, even if it did not offer encouragement, according to current and former administration officials. But they said the United States has growing concerns that, just as in Libya, the Qataris are equipping some of the wrong militants.
[/QUOTE]
<nitpick> Cachet. A cache, while still vile Frenchified stuff, is a different thing altogether. <pointless outrage> And y’all shouldn’t pronounce them the same way, either !</po> </np>
This is not synonymous with jihadist fiefdom.
They’re not commonly pronounced the same way, in my experience.
I can’t argue much with this prediction, not that I fully agree with it, but it’s probably more important for the Syrian rebels to worry about Assad and then maybe when the fiefdoms start to form we can more easily and clearly support those we can work with.
I do understand though, there was a fight near the border with Turkey between al-Nusra and and the Syrian version of the PKK and I wondered who to support in that mess?
Besides their organizational name, does it really matter if they themselves have ambitions to terrorize the US or France? After all, failed states or large swathes of territory under fundamentalist Muslim controls such as NW Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen have all been places from which terrorist attacks on us or our allies have originated.
It’s not just a conflict between Islamist sepratists and the French-supported Malian government. Al-Jazeera’s got a good primer on the various factions here. And possibly the best coverage on the web too from what I’ve seen.
As to why it matters, civil wars are inherently nasty things and the dissolution of one state almost inevitably threatens the stability of those states around it. This is already happening - the In Amenas hostage crisis earlier this month is linked to the Malian situation.
I just wanted to share this interesting bloggingheads interview Robert Wright did with Demba Boundy (a Malian Independent journalist). It seems that the French military intervention is extremely popular in central/southern Mali so this might seem like an easy win for France (and French power/influence) in the region.
Good point, but it’s a bit moot, because in the In Amenas siege they were specifically targeting western hostages, and in the case of the American hostages, they specifically called for the immediate release of the Blind Shiekh, Omar Abdel Rahman, who was implicated in the WTC bombing, among many other global acts of terrorism and calls for attacks within the U.S.
So, it seems pretty clear that their ambitions were wide-ranging, and not just confined to carving out their own little Sharia safe-haven in Africa. That, along with their MO, including bomb-vests, strongly suggests that they not only walked and quacked like a duck, their quacks also echoed like a duck’s. 
I suppose it is because the post-colonial news out of Africa has been so horrible so often. Certainly not the only things going on there; but the “blood diamond” trade, monster-dictators like Idi Amin and Bokassa, endless bloody civil wars with noncombatants’ arms chopped off and so on, low-tech grassroots genocide in Rwanda, anarchy in Somalia, pandemic AIDS in South Africa and government’s crackpot HIV-denial response to same, those are the things that stick in the public mind.
I completely forgot about that, thanks.
It’s “The Domino Theory” of the 21st century.
The fall of Libya was certainly the straw that broke the camel’s back. Libya was employing a good number of Malian mercenaries, and upon the fall the returned home armed and restless. Mali has had really mixed feelings about Libya lately. They’ve had a long love-hate relationship with the French, and they enjoyed getting US military aid, but Libya had done a few high profile projects (including a much-needed bridge in Bamako) just before the fall and that won some goodwill. When you are that poor and you have a country that rich making friendly gestures to you, it’s hard not to like them a little bit. But there is more to this than just spillover from Libya. The former president wasn’t actually as popular as everyone wanted to think he was, the Tuaregs continued to piss lots of people off by existing, military and intelligence stuff keeps getting weird, and Mali continues to be about as poor as it gets.
Central and Southern Mali would like to see the pseudo-Islamists go away so they could get back to what they’d really rather be doing- harassing Tuaregs. For years before the coup, Mali has been getting all kinds of military and intelligence aid from the US in order to keep AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Maghreb) out of the desert. All they really want to do with it, however, is address what they see as the real threat, which is Tuareg separatism. This is a thousand year old fight, and there is no easy solution for it.
I think everyone has been somewhat surprised that the pseudo-Islamists (who are often ordinary gangster types capitalizing on a well known brand name) teamed up with and apparently overshadowed the Tuaregs. Islamist types and the Tuaregs really don’t have anything in common, and radical Islam isn’t an obvious fit for the relaxed and Sufi-influenced Malian society. It’s an odd fit.
I think there is some hope right now that these guys are not actually particularly organized.and they don’t have much popular support, and that maybe whatever cooperation is going on with the Tuaregs won’t really hold. It’s easy to rile up a few young men and take over a poorly secured town, but it’s another thing to keep it.
Unfortunately, if we got about this the wrong way and people start seeing a lot of damage from Western action, Al Qaeda-ish stuff will be seen as popular resistance, as the little guy against the big guy, and we will build them a nice little fan base and recruiting pool.
In a way, getting dragged into this is exactly what the real Al Qaeda would want. They’d like nothing better for the US to get bogged down in an unwinnable war that will piss people off, hurt the US financially, kill our soldiers, and damage our reputation. That was their goal in Afghanistan and it worked like a dream. But if they can get random narco types and whatever to start provoking us using the Al Qaeda brand, they can achieve the same thing without having to even do any of the work! If they can do this right, they’ll be able to turn a fairly Western-friendly relaxed Muslim country into a thorn in our side for decades to come.
Our allies Saudi Arabia and the Gulf kingdoms are all supporting them though and we’re not trying to stop them so we’re indirectly supporting them. The current and former administration have supported terrorist groups in Iran and a lot of the “freedom fihters” we were directly supporting in Libya seem to be jihadis. Now that we’re on the way out of Afghanistan we’ve even discovered there are moderate Taliban that we can negotiate with, which is almost full circle to reagan again.