Al-Qaida in North Africa: It's Not the Same Old Story
Many Western forces now have extensive experience in fighting al-Qaida
affiliates in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. But as the focus turns to
al-Qaida in North Africa, Henry "Chip" Carey warns that they should not be
tricked into thinking that they know what awaits them.
By Henry "Chip" Carey for World Policy Institute 25 February 2013
_____
Here's the situation in the Middle East: Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia was largely
defeated in Iraq by Sunni warlords and the U.S. counter-insurgency surge,
yet radical Islamic bombings are a daily phenomenon in Iraq today.
Al-Qaida's ally in East Africa, al-Shabaab, has been expelled from Somalia's
capital, Mogadishu, but has regrouped and rearmed in the Northern Province
of Puntland and in parts of Kenya. There are jihadist groups across northern
Africa, many with global aspirations, but only one with any direct
connections to the original al-Qaida. Jihadi terrorists threaten U.S. global
interests, but generally do not threaten the U.S. homeland.
These conflicts with the Middle East are complicated and should not simply
be described as religious wars, which is so often the tendency in the United
States. The temptation has been to assume that the groups in the Middle East
have only one identity, that of a radical strain of Islam, and only one
enemy, the West. In a frenzy to redirect aggression away from the Western
world, the United States and its allies have declared war on terrorism, but
they are not getting the war they want to fight. Militarization has not
stopped the spread of radical Islam or the threat to the West.
Starting with direct fighting or arming already weak, repressive states, and
poorly organized troops creates an atmosphere of chaos, which ultimately
breeds more hatred of the West, and with it, more terrorism. Drones
epitomize this strategic blunder, but the same logic applies to other war
strategies against asymmetric foes. In order to combat this growth in
terrorism it is imperative that we understand the concurrent phenomena of
jihadis, nationalism, ethnic separatism, and criminal networks. Only with
this understanding, will we avoid another disastrous intervention like Iraq,
Afghanistan, and our undeclared war in Pakistan, where not only does
al-Qaida hate the United States, but most of Pakistan.
The interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have provided the
United States with hands-on experience in dealing with al-Qaida-linked
groups, but North Africa is a completely new situation that should be
treated as such. North Africa has aspects of both Saddam Hussein's national
security state and the narco-guerilla warfare of Afghanistan. The Algerian
military defeated the Islamist threat through a combination of Qaddafi and
Hussein repression tactics, but still Algeria and Libya remain the springs
of many global militants. This is not a group that can be swept into one
seemingly all-encompassing category.
The alarms about a worldwide conspiracy of jihadists have been ringing since
a spate of recent al-Qaida related incidents: the killing of dozens of
Algerian militants and their hostages, after the seizure of the
foreign-managed oil field, along with the presence of other "al-Qaida linked
militants" among the Libyan and Syrian rebels, followed by the French
invasion of Northern Mali to liberate the ancient cities of Goa and Timbuktu
of al-Qaida groups. Similar to the Iron Curtain that Winston Churchill
warned about in 1946 in Missouri, the concern has been raised about a new
Islamist Curtain from the Magreb-extending from Mauritania to Egypt,
including Northern Mali, Sudan, and the rest of the Sahara, and moving into
non-Arabic speaking Nigeria, and other parts of West Africa, as well as the
coasts of Kenya, Somalia, and Tanzania, and as far as South and Southeast
Asia.
When Prime Minister David Cameron has not been declaring the United
Kingdom's independence from the European Union, he has spoken of the various
North African terrorist groups representing an existential, global threat.
"What we face is an extremist, Islamist, violent al-Qaida-linked terrorist
group. Just as we had to deal with that in Pakistan and Afghanistan, so the
world needs to come together to deal with this threat in North Africa," On
January 20, 2013, Cameron declared, "This is a global threat and it will
require a global response. "It will require a response that is about years,
even decades, rather than months." However, the al-Qaida label does not fit
the complex, militant landscape, even if most guerrillas find the Islamic
discourse a convenient frame to pitch their battles.
Cameron has recently visited Nigeria to organize increased British
cooperation in the worldwide threat of arms from Libya getting in the hands
of Islamic militants, Boko Haram, who are as much separatists as jihadists.
The Algerian-dominated al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has reportedly
been training Boko Haram in Northern Mali to prepare for its assassinations
in Nigeria. Cameron has used the same, unhelpful, exaggerated language that
George W. Bush and Tony Blair used after 9/11. This hysteria is exactly what
these militants want to evoke: They want to seem omnipotent, united, and
ready to take over the world. Aggregating all the various elements of modern
radical Islam is absurd, even though self-styled terrorists, and various
ethno-national and religious groups, many of them old-style ethnic
separatists, will remain forces of instability. However, this shift back in
to historical grievances means that militant groups should not be lumped
together as a monolithic, united religious crusade. Ninety-eight percent of
the world's terrorists lack the ideology and the capability to attack the
United States. To consider most of the potential military targets is foolish
since the likely outcome would be to convert them into terrorists who not
only hate their own governments, but also hate the United States enough to
try to attack it.
Some warn of an "Arab Winter" having been suddenly unleashed by the Arab
Spring two years ago. Even if true to some extent, the persistent presence
of Islamic militants in the northern Mali desert had little to do with any
recent overthrow of autocracy in Mali-since Mali had been one of Africa's
stable democracies. Rather than resulting from the overthrow or opening of a
longstanding dictatorship, the situation in northern Mali has resulted from
a breakdown of Mali's longstanding democracy early last year. It also
reflects the authoritarian crackdown on Islamist rebels in Algeria by its
military dictatorship.
In fact, in some of these different countries, like Libya, Algeria, and
Syria, the rise of Salafist militia reflects the absence of democracy and
the presence of repressive regimes, often supported by the West. The same
debates about counter-terrorism versus a more comprehensive nation-building
and counter-insurgency strategy is present in every one of these potential
and actual interventions, with prospects of success no better than U.S.
strategies in Afghanistan.
Yet we in the United States feel threatened by al-Qaida's apparent
proliferation in North Africa, despite our lack of fear prior to 9/11.
Europe, in contrast, has been targeted for terrorism far more in past
decades, but they are not as fearful as Americans of these groups because
they seem to have a better understanding of the nature of the threat.
Europeans generally understand, having colonized the Muslim world in the
Ottoman Empire, from Morocco to Malaysia, that attacks will occur
periodically. Europeans understand that they will probably continue to be
subjected to these attacks for years to come. However, the risk of being
victimized by a terrorist attack in Europe, as well as the United States is
enormously less than our risk of dying in a traffic accident.
Even if it made sense to equate al-Qaida central in Afghanistan with a
rag-tag group in Northern Mali, it would not mean we were ripe for another
9/11 style attack. An attack on an oil refinery does not imply the
capability to make and send bombs designed to confuse Western security
infrastructure. Of the disparate Islamic groups, there are few that have the
wherewithal to pull off our stereotype of an al-Qaida style assault-a few
dissidents with a coherent base, led by highly competent commanders and a
visionary leader who is protected by a regime. There is hardly a militant
group that compares with what existed a dozen years ago. There are only lone
wolves who can launch small-scale attacks.
Neither Mumbai nor the Algerian oil refineries were part of any global
organization. Just as Osama bin-Laden unified disparate groups two decades
ago, someone could do so again. But, so can provocative Western
counter-terrorism policies that alienate a Muslim postcolonial world,
through reckless, if not deliberate, armed attacks on militants that end up
killing many civilian bystanders. The fragmented, Al-Qaida linked groups are
proliferating, even if the only common thread they share is funds. Al-Qaida
did not invent armed insurgencies and terrorist attacks, even among
religious terrorists.
The United States has repeatedly been ignorant of context in its foreign
policy. Its interventions in Vietnam, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya
were all based on almost caricatured descriptions. The more recent
developments in Algeria and Mali are part of the al-Qaida network that the
United States assumed was controlled by al-Qaida central in Afghanistan.
Yet, Islamist terrorist networks are not from a chief base. The very term
"terrorist network" is misguided.
Each radical Islamic insurgency has its own agendas and methods, sometimes
often based on nothing more significant than fighting for local, tribal or
religious sect goals, or opportunities for profit. To the communities that
support the insurgencies, their activities are not ones of terrorism. In
fact, those same communities define the United States and the regimes that
it supports as state terrorists. On the ground, they often see many more
civilian casualties as a result of these internationally espoused regimes
than from the supposed 'terrorist networks'.
The constant splitting off and proliferation of new factions amounts to
confusion, but it is a pattern that continues a longstanding tradition that
started with secular national liberation movements ending colonialism.
Western analysts often forget that colonialism was not so much defeated
through conquest as it simply yielded to asymmetric warfare (what the West
normally calls terrorism), because the costs of colonialism came to greatly
exceed the benefits.
Many Islamist guerrillas from North Africa have been prevalent in the wars
of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Algeria, and Mali-including those who were
tortured by the United States or its agents in some or all of these
countries. Connect the dots: The Libyans, who comprised half of al-Qaida in
Afghanistan, were water-boarded by the United States, then tortured in Libya
by Qaddafi, then armed by the United States to overthrow Qaddafi, and have
armed al-Qaida in Mali. Many of these fighters have shifted among various
groups, in the same way that many of the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) lost many of its fighters to even more radical leaders like Abu Nidal
and George Habash.
_____
For additional reading on this topic please see:
<
http://isn.ethz.ch/isn/Digital-Library/Publications/Detail/?fecvnodeid=1063
50&groupot593=0c54e3b3-1e9c-be1e-2c24-a6a8c7060233&dom=1&fecvid=33&ots591=0c
54e3b3-1e9c-be1e-2c24-a6a8c7060233&lng=en&v33=106350&id=157604> Algeria, the
Sahel, and the Current Mali Crisis
<
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Digital-Library/Publications/Detail/?id=131209&l
ng=en> Al-Qaida's Uncertain Future
<
http://isn.ethz.ch/isn/Digital-Library/Publications/Detail/?fecvnodeid=1281
34&groupot593=0c54e3b3-1e9c-be1e-2c24-a6a8c7060233&dom=1&fecvid=21&ots591=0c
54e3b3-1e9c-be1e-2c24-a6a8c7060233&v21=128134&lng=en&id=159766> European
Strategies Against Jihadist Radicalisatio
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Received on Tue Feb 26 2013 - 09:13:08 EST
