And that is supposed to convince us that adherence to radical Islam is overwhelmingly due to young men wanting to appear rebellious and stand out from the crowd?
“They’re just showing off” doesn’t strike me as a well-reasoned analysis.
If Mali was already radical, why would the country be so full of the Sufi shrines the Islamicists smash up, the world-reknown musicians they keep banning, and the unmarried mothers they apparently want to round up?
The answer is that this is all quite new, and comes from Malian semi-mercenary fighters who had been working in Libya coming down, restless and armed, after the collapse of Libya. Mali itself is traditionally a very relaxed and inclusive form of Sufism that mixes easily with local traditional beliefs. These Islamicist movements do not, at the moment, reflect the religious point of view of the general population. But times are changing, drugs are pouring through Mali, and criminal networks are growing more and more international. And when it comes to recruiting foot soldiers and tapping into local power networks, Al Queda-ish radical Islam is a brand name with increasing heft.
Can you find me any radical Malian, anywhere, who is not either a would-be warlord or a broke young man following a would-be warlord?
Malians are fairly aware of foreign involvement in their country. In 2007, I took a long, slow boat up to Timbuktu with a handful of what turned out to be the Malians who could not afford the bus. They told me, in detail, their opinion of the CIA involvement in Timbuktu (which can be verified through current news sources) at the time. Malians are not looking forward to being the next front for the war against terror, but the previous government and some power players encouraged it, because it’s been an easy way to score luxurious US and French military assistance, which they can use in their ongoing low-scale war with the Tuaregs.
Let’s look at another example here, where a politician in Gao, a North Mali city currently held by Islamicists, laments the local hand-chopping-off trend:
He said it himself- this is all a big dick show for a global audience as well as the locals. In the meantime, women and children are emptying out of the entire region, as the young men involved in this rape women under the banner of “forced marriage.” It turns out that, after all, is probably an easier way to attract foot soldiers than religion.
The end game? First you attract the angry, armed, restless young men that can help you hold some territory warlord style. This part is easy, as aimless youth can be attracted to fight for any vaguely plausible cause, especially if given the promise of some looting and pillaging (or at least something more exciting than sitting around the family compound watching the cows). Then, you bill yourself as an Islamist state, to attract those copious terror dollars. Money flows in from massively rich Middle Eastern terror financiers, who would love nothing, nothing, nothing more than to draw the US and our allies into another long, expensive, demoralizing foreign war. Foreign countries and random terror groups will send over soldiers, just like they did in Afghanistan, and these soldiers will build the kinds of international networks that made Al Qaeda work, while they get in some real life training that will make them tougher than any remote “terrorist training camp” could.
What’s the benefit? Besides draining our coffers, wasting the energy we’d be using on real economic growth, and deepening the rifts in American society, these wars do a great job attracting future terrorists. In one generation, this kind of war can take a country from mildly suspicious about the US into an active hotbed of anti-US sentiment that will plague us for generations. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. This global polarization also gives a good structure for random whackos and trouble makers to hang their crazy around, as the crazies start saying they are doing their shoe-bombing and subway pushing in the name of Jihad or anti-Jihad, further promoting terror and hate, allowing it to chip away at American society. Finally, terror money loves drug money, and if they can use this control the burgeoning West African drug routes, all the better.
In the meantime, the people who started this get rich off the terror funding and the spoils of tearing a nation apart and parceling out the good parts to yourself and your friends. . Their buddies get rich. Their families get rich. Their kids will probably end up going to the Sorbonne and summering in Malibu. On the other side, our defense contracts and aid workers will get rich. We will eventually come to “rebuild” the country, pumping in the billions and billions that we never thought to spend when it was just a regularly, non-terror oriented hellhole (metaphorically, of course, at peace, Mali is a poor but otherwise wonderful place.) A good chunk of that money will go to the new governments, inflated expat rent for military and aid agencies and their workers, civil society grants that can be directed in favorable ways, and a million other ways that make the thugs who started this rich, and perhaps more importantly, feeling important. We’ll “rebuild” the infrastructure using US companies, giving new opportunities to either get in on the business, or turn it into a target, whatever suits the needs of the moment.
I’m not talking crazy talk here. This is a successful business model that has worked in the past. Radical Islam is basically a franchise or branding opportunity that allows old fashioned warlords to multiply their investment much more effectively than the old “Democratic People’s Revolution of Whatever” coup-based model, that only let the warlords take over what are usually pretty broke and un-fun to manage countries. In the absence of the old Soviet-vs.-US warlord funding streams, this is the best deal out there.
Who knows, maybe China will enter the mix one day, and I suspect their participation would actually calm things down, as China really wants friends but isn’t actually dangerously hostile towards us and would be freaked out by all this chaos. But I don’t think China is going to touch this mess.
Some sources:
Even sven, thank you for that instructive analysis of the typical cycle of local-regional-global button-pushing in much of the developing world. A great post, though it ranges far beyond the theme of the OP.
While the process you describe has certain flavors since the end of the Cold War, it’s general outline is nothing new. Read historian Richard White’s * The Middle Ground * for an account of various American Indian tribes playing the European colonial powers off each other for local benefits in what is now the US Midwest/Great Lakes region.
News updates:
A Taliban leader opposing polio vaccination has been killed in a drone strike:
“BAGHDAD – A car bomb explosion tore through a crowd of Shiite pilgrims returning home Thursday from a religious commemoration, killing at least 20 and reinforcing fears of renewed sectarian violence, according to Iraqi officials.”
Writing off these and other examples of Islamic extremism as “a big dick show for a global audience” continues to strike me as both an extremely simplistic and bizarrely Western-centric viewpoint.