Africa: Securitization or Terrorization?

Africa: Securitization or Terrorization?

By Jacob Mundy, 14 March 2013

http://allafrica.com/stories/201303180593.html?viewall=1

 

US counterterrorism policy and the crisis in the Sahara-Sahel

 

In a number of ways, the American counterterrorism doctrine, which is a part

of a long-time transnational destabilization of the Sahara-Sahel, has helped

create the current conflict in the region

 

'All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east

to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the

generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and

political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than

some benefits for their private companies.'

 

Scenes of a hostage crisis at a natural gas installation in eastern Algeria

likely came as a shock to many longtime observers of the region. During the

last two decades of armed violence in Algeria, very rarely did Islamists

groups attack energy infrastructure, and almost never in the Sahara. Yet the

ease with which it seems that a small group of Algerian and internationalist

fighters were able to seize the energy facilities in In Amenas raises

several difficult questions. Why has the Achilles heel of the Algerian state

never been targeted by groups allegedly bent on its overthrow? Groups, that

is, who seem to have absolute freedom of movement across vast stretches of

the Sahara, picking and choosing targets at will?

 

Embarrassment, however, is not Algiers' alone. The prolonged crisis in Mali,

which has finally been subjected to a long intimated French intervention,

points towards a more disturbing complex of factors driving the

transnational destabilization of the Sahara-Sahel. Attempts to historicize

current events in the region have often pointed to the coup in Mali, the

flood of arms unleashed during the 2011 Libyan civil war, the presence of an

Al-Qaida franchise (AQIM, Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghrib), and the cycles

of Tuareg rebellion since the end of French colonialism.

 

What has often been missing from these conversations is an appreciation of

the US role in the destabilization of the region. Mali, after all, was the

centerpiece of US counterterrorism doctrine in the Sahara-Sahel under the

Obama administration and his predecessor. As has been noted by many

commentators, the coup leaders had been the recipients of US military

training and Azawad separatists easily confiscated military equipment

supplied to Mali in the name of countering terrorism. But the processes by

which US efforts to stabilize the Sahara-Sahel region have actually resulted

in its profound destabilization are much longer in the making. These

processes are simple to understand and not uncommon in the world of

counterterrorism. That is to say, counterterrorism doctrines seem to have an

amazing ability to produce, and then reproduce, the conditions of its own

necessity.

 

It is one thing to say that the current crisis in the Sahara has been

deliberately engineered, as that begs the questions 'By whom?' and 'For what

purpose?' That is not what is being suggested here. The processes by which

we have arrived at France's intervention in Mali and the attack in In

Amenas, I believe, lack coherence or a unitary logic. These processes can

nonetheless be accounted for within a framework that seeks to appreciate the

hegemony of US power in global affairs, a hegemony that is inefficient and

obtuse but is nonetheless built upon a structure of historically and

globally unrivaled capacities to appropriate and mobilize political,

financial and military power.

 

Here are some analogies. Scholars working on the problem of persistent and

protracted famines, notably in Africa's Sahel (though more historical cases

bear mention), have long recognized that mass starvation is not always

intended but there are nonetheless benefits to be reaped. The process here

is not unlike the one identified in Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. In its

more abstract form, the basic proposition is quite simple: those who are

best able to manage -- and thus benefit from -- the chaos of catastrophic

situations are often those who made the catastrophe possible in the first

place, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes serendipitously, and sometimes

deliberately. Yes, it is a conspiracy theory. But it is a conspiracy in

which the world's most pervasive and powerful ideology is in the driver's

seat (for Klein, Neoclassical Economics and Neoliberal governance). We do

not need a bunch of smoking men in a dimly lit room in the Pentagon to make

sense of the world.

 

Like capitalism, terrorism -- that is, late counterterrorism doctrine -- has

had a similar propensity to manufacture the conditions of its own necessity.

In the world of (counter)terrorism studies, Joseba Zulaika has stood out as

one of the few scholars to recognize and warn against the dangers of this

pathology. Adam Curtis' documentary, , vividly narrates the ways in which

Al-Qaida and the US Neoconservative movement had, for decades, been mutually

constituting each other through their blind dedication to ideology and a

politics of fear. Lisa Stampnitzky's forthcoming [url=

[url=http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item7118829/?site_locale=en_

GB]Disciplining]http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item7118829/?site

_locale=en_GB]Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism"[/url]

promises to be the definitive account of how terrorism has been more made

than found.

 

In the Sahara-Sahel, a similar pattern has emerged, albeit constrained by

local specificities. In other words, US counterterrorism doctrine has helped

make the conflict we see today possible. Invention is the mother of

necessity.

 

To better understand what is going on in the central Sahara and the western

Sahel today, one has to first look at the ways in which US counterterrorism

doctrine in the region has understood itself. At the ideational level, US

securitization -- or rather terrorization -- of the Sahara-Sahel is rooted

in the problematization of 9/11 style terrorism as a confluence of vast

spaces allotted to weak governments where radical ideologies can stage

global war. That is, the safe haven myth. Early US initiatives were not

premised on the existence of terrorism in the Sahara, but rather on an

imaginative cartography of anticipation.

 

Roughly three months before the GSPC shocked the world by abducting several

dozen European tourists in Algeria in early 2003, the US government was

already implementing the Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI). The language of this

counterterrorism program is drenched in the rhetoric of empty spaces, porous

borders, and suspect mobilities. Nearly three years into these initiatives,

the International Crisis Group, well known for its on the ground research,

was still asking the basic question Is there even a threat here? Contrary to

this critique, journalists like Robert Kaplan and Joshua Hammer, who were

allowed to report on US Special Forces training programs in the Niger and

Mali, respectively, were quick to note the uncharacteristically preventative

nature of these programs.

 

The symmetry between the anticipatory cartography driving these preventative

programs in the early 2000s and the now extant conflicts that materially

populate Africa's 'arc of instability' is startling. The Pentagon has

postulated many arcs of instability across the globe, but across the Sahara

an arc of instability has been said to run 4,000 miles from Somalia through

the Sahel to the central Sahara. This arc was imagined early in the war on

terror, when there were only vague indications that the GSPC was operating

in the Algerian desert. Now experts debate whether or not there are

'operational' linkages between several groups that did not even exist before

military planners in Washington constellated this arc -- that is, between

Al-Shabab in Somalia, Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, and AQIM in the

central Sahara. Either the Pentagon was extremely prescient or something

else is going on here.

 

For its part, the Obama administration has done little to change his

predecessor's Saharan initiatives. Late in the George W. Bush

administration, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) examined the

Trans-Saharan Counter Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP), citing key deficiencies

in its implementation. Yet if one scrolls through the GAO's list of

recommendations to the State Department (which leads the "partnership") and

the Department of Defense (which gets most of the money), all say "Closed -

Not implemented." According to the GAO, the TSCTP -- five months into the

2012 Mali crisis -- was still largely running on documents created in 2005.

Yet the beauty of US counterterrorism doctrine's self-understanding is the

extent to which abject failure (e.g., Mali today) is also a key rationale

for more of the same (e.g.,

[url=http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/29/us-mali-rebels-niger-idUSBRE9

0S0DX20130129]a new drone base in Niger[/url). The now demonstrated power of

armed Jihadi groups in the Sahara-Sahel will not force a rethink of US

counterterrorism in the region; it will likely constitute a key argument to

justify the amplification of Africom's budget.

 

What US counterterrorism doctrine in the Sahara-Sahel is unable to account

for is its participation in the imaginative and material elaboration of the

very conditions that have led to the crisis we see today. Did the TSCTP find

terrorism in the Sahara or did it help make it? A good place to start

looking for an answer is to trace the effects these initiatives have had on

the region's political economy. A number of competing and evolving factors

likely affect the forces that are now driving armed conflict in the region,

but central to the recent 'radicalization' of Tuareg and Arab communities in

the western and central Sahara is the loss of tourism revenue. The loss of

wholesale tourism witnessed in the movement of the Paris-Dakar Rally to

South America is but an indicator of the loss of smaller scale tourism

across the region, a loss that has hit Tuareg and Arab communities

especially hard. The counterterrorism policies of the United States did

nothing to address this flight of tourism and, in many ways, they

exacerbated it by insinuating a threat that had yet to take significant

material form.

 

Furthermore, in working closely with the governments in Bamako and Niamey

(capitals gerrymandered by French colonialism to rule over far off Saharan

populations), the US government was arming and training militaries that the

Tuaregs have been fighting since the 1960s. Morocco, another key US partner

in the region, has been at war with Arab Sahrawi nationalists since 1975.

Thus it should come as little surprise that Rabat has been very keen to

promote the arc of instability idea too, such that the western tip of the

arc conveniently lands at the headquarters of the Frente POLISARIO, the

Western Sahara independence movement based near Tindouf, Algeria.

Washington's support for the new revolutionary regime in Tripoli is also

likely to exacerbate a disturbing native/settler discourse in contemporary

Libya. Northern Arab and Berber revolutionaries are portraying supposedly

darker skinned populations (Tawergha, Tebu, and Tuareg) not only as Gaddafi

loyalists to be mistrusted and imprisoned, but also as non-indigenous

populations to be denied citizenship and expelled, by force if needed.

 

A more thoughtful approach to Saharan-Sahelian security might begin with the

simple acknowledgement that the core stakeholders should be, first and

foremost, the people who live there, not the corrupt politicians who claim

to rule there. Yet US counterterrorism policy has allied itself and worked

through regimes that have historically seen indigenous Saharan populations

as threats to their access to the wealth of the Sahara. These are conflicts

that predate 9/11 by decades.

 

There is also an important knock-on effect of US

securitization/terrorization of Saharan life and mobility. This is the loss

of any incentive for the Sahelian and Saharan governments or local

communities to combat smuggling, or at least keep the routes far away from

tourism sites. Shifts in global narcotics flows also help to account for the

recent transformations in the Saharan livelihoods, from one dependent on

foreign travelers to one increasingly dependent on trafficking human and

goods. Compounding the issues at the micro level, the region as a whole is

being acutely affected by global warming, which has likely contributed to

increased frequency of crop failures and famines along the Sahel. Moreover,

the global food price index has not significantly abated since peaking with

the outbreak the Arab Spring in early 2011. And so what little food is

available remains dangerously expensive.

 

Life in the Sahara and Sahel is not essentially precarious. As we know from

Judith Butler, the life is made precariousness by our politics. Life in the

Sahara-Sahel has been recently produced as extremely precarious by forces

largely beyond the control of the people who live there. One of the most

potent forces is US counterterrorism doctrine. After a decade of US

counterterrorism initiatives in the Sahara-Sahel, the greatest achievement

of these programs (to which we can now add the US Africa Command) is in

having made their warrant real and durable.

 

Jacob Mundy is an Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at

Colgate University, where he also teaches African and Middle East studies.

He is the coauthor (with Stephen Zunes) of Western Sahara: War, Nationalism,

and Conflict Irresolution and coeditor (with Daniel Monk) of the forthcoming

The Post-conflict Environment. An earlier version of this paper was

presented at the Kent State conference 'Humanitarian Dilemmas: Debating

Interventions in Africa and the Middle East' in April 2012.

 

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