Mali’s Secret Infrastructure

by SASHA ROSS

The armed Islamists who fled to Mali after the fall of Qaddafi’s government are significant, but they do not represent a complete rationale for French intervention. The Tuareg rose up in revolt partly due to Islamist influence, but also through nationalist impulse due to the general patterns of land and water grabs that marked what was considered by the North Atlantic countries to be the “stable democracy” of Amadou Toumani Touré.

The government of Touré fell due to the military’s frustration over the wildfire advance of Tuareg militancy, but the coup government’s failure to stem the tide of revolt brought in foreign powers. The tipping point of French intervention came not on Sunday, January 13, but as early as April 5 of last year, as Tuareg forces swept further along the Niger River to Douentza. At that point, the fifteen West African countries began planning a military intervention against the rebels with the logistical aid of France. The plan was OKed by the UN Security Council in December.

On Monday, January 14, the day after the French air strikes commenced, Tuareg rebels took over the town of Diabaly (the site of the summary execution of 16 unarmed preachers by the Malian army in September of last year), advancing the border of territory claimed by the rebels even closer south towards the capital.

As air strikes continued in Mali, President Hollande of France lectured the World Future Energy Summit about investing in renewable energy to avoid ‘catastrophe’. The immediate contradiction between the expenditure of fossil fuels and greenhouse gasses to fuel the global military industrial complex is merely the beginning of a tangled web of modern colonial relationships being established in Africa today.

The Malibya Canal

Mali is not known for being a nation with many natural resources, so Hollande’s insistence that the invasion comes at the insistence of the international community to remove militant Islamists from the country’s north seems to hold up. But tilting lances at Islamists is not quite enough: the de facto leader of Libya today, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, has declared that Shari Law will now define Libya’s juridical order, yet French corporations have paid regular visits to his government. The fight in Mali is not about only about Islam, but about the relationship between Islam and investment, land, and particularly, water.

In 2009, Patrik Lukas, the head of the Africa Division of France’s main body of transnational corporate interests, Medef International, called for help from the French government. Complaining of competition from the Chinese government during a visit to Mali and Senegal, Lukas insisted that “there is a real issue that goes beyond the issue of the private sector… The French government should definitely help the private sector working in Africa”.

At the time, Libya was endeavoring in a full-scale land and water grab in Mali, choosing to work with Chinese contractors instead of French. In the years leading up to his ouster, Qaddafi was seeking to diversify the Libyan economy in keeping with a neoliberal restructuring that included developing domestic agriculture as well as importing agricultural produce from his neighbors to the south. Building up a proxy corporation called Malibya Agriculture with money from Libya-Africa Portfolio Fund for Investment, Qadaffi secretly purchased 100,000 acres (roughly 156 square miles) along the Niger River region of Boky Wéré in 2008 for cultivation of rice and biofuels. To irrigate the massive tract of agricultural land, Malibya endeavored with the help of Chinese contractors to dig a 25-mile canal that holds dire ecological prospects, not just for biodiversity but also for local fisherfolk and farmers.

In an article published by Yale environmental rag, Environment 360 in February 2011, freelance journalist Fred Pearce states the canal “will enhance Libyan food security at the expense of Malian food security by sucking dry the river that feeds the inland delta, diminishing the seasonal floods that support rich biodiversity—and thriving agriculture and fisheries vital to a million of Mali’s poorest citizens—on the edge of the Sahara desert.” Geopolitically, the canal is almost at the point of distinction between the North and South.

Pearce went on to prophetically note, “(w)ith Al Qaeda busy recruiting disaffected people such as the Tuareg nomads around Mali’s borders, any disruption to the traditional way of life could feed its violent agenda.” As the French flew into Mali on January 13, the rebels were advancing to Diabaly, drawing the border of claimed territory over the Malibya canal like a blanket.

The volatile combination of Al Qaeda and the Tuareg is more important to France now than ever. While France holds the primary position in international development assistance to Mali (quite convenient for rebuilding purposes after air strikes), Libya has also become a heavy investor in Malian infrastructure and construction. With the French intervention in Libya, the agricultural situation of that desert nation, which imports ¾ of its grains, shows up on France’s own balance sheet.

In November 2011, an agricultural delegation from France spoke to members of the Libyan government about encouraging the agricultural sector—particularly livestock, which eat rice bran and hulls, among other grains. Thus, projects like the land and water grabs in Mali take on an utmost importance for the Libyans as well as the French. Keeping Mali out of the hands of the Taureg dissidents is imperative to maintaining the “soft imperialism” of North Atlantic hegemony in Africa by increasing the amount of land under control of the West for investment in “renewables”, for instance biofuel cultivation which currently takes up about 60% of all agricultural lands recently purchased in Africa.

Sasha Ross lives in Portland, Oregon where he directs the Cascadia Field Office of the Earth First! Journal, and works at local bio-diversity group, Bark. He is currently editing an anthology about the Global Land Grab.

This article is also being published at the Earth First! Newswire.

France’s Tragic Path in Mali

by BARRY LANDO

Paris.

With hundreds of French troops in Mali, and hundreds more headed that way, the U.S. among other countries, has also pledged some limited support: intelligence, communication, logistics, unarmed drones. But Washington obviously would like to keep a low profile. Washington, in fact, had been militating against just such a move, fearing that another Western intervention in an Arab land would provide another ideal recruiting target for erstwhile jihadis across the Muslim world, not to mention to provoking a spate of terrorist attacks in Europe.

In fact, though, it turns out that the U.S. has already played a major role in the crisis. It’s a devastating lesson of plans gone awry, another dreary footnote to the law of unintended consequences.

According to an excellent New York Times account, for the past several years, the United States has spent more than half a billion dollars in West Africa to counter the threat of radical Islam, America’s “most ambitious counterterrorism program ever across these vast, turbulent stretches of the Sahara.”

The aim of the program was that, rather than rely on the U.S. and its allies to combat Islamic terrorism in the region, the United States would train African troops to deal with the threat themselves.

To that end, for five years U.S. Special Forces trained Malian troops in a host of vital combat and counterterrorism skills. The outcome was considered by the Pentagon to be exemplary

But all that collapsed as the result of another unintended consequence– of the French-led intervention in Libya. After the fall of Khadhaffi, droves of battle-hardened, well-armed Islamic fighters and Tuareg tribesmen, who had been fighting in Libya, swarmed into Northern Mali.

Joined by other more radical Islamist forces, some linked to Al Qaeda, they had no trouble defeating the Malian army.

Why? Because of the defection to the rebels of several key Malian officers, who had been trained by the Americans.  Turns out that those officers, who were supposed to battle the rebels, were ethnic Tuaregs, the same nomads who were part of the rebellion.

According to the Times, The Tuareg commanders of three of the four Malian units in the north, at the height of the battle, decided to join the insurrection, taking weapons, valuable equipment and their American training with them. They were followed by about 1600 additional army defectors, demolishing the government’s hope of resisting the rebel attack.

In other words, it’s very likely that the French and their allies-to-come in Mali will be battling rebel troops trained by the U.S. Special Forces.

Caught totally by surprise by the whole ghastly mess, the American officials involved with the training program were reportedly flabbergasted.

There are obvious questions: How was it possible for the Special Forces and their Pentagon bosses and the CIA to have had such a total lack of understanding of the Malian officers they’d trained and the country they’d been operating in for over five years? But you could ask that same question about U.S. military actions in any number of countries over the past few decades, from Lebanon to Iraq to Afghanistan, where the most apt  comparison might be to releasing elephants into a porcelain shop.

Which leads to a more fundamental question: how is the U.S. to avoid similar catastrophic mistakes down the road? The Pentagon has recently announced that some 3,000 troops, no longer needed in Afghanistan, have been reassigned to work with the local military in 35 countries across Africa–to deal with the threat of Al Qaeda-linked terrorism.

Sounds just like what was going on in Mali.

But does anyone really think the U.S. and its military will have a better understanding of the myriad forces, tribes, religions, governments, legal and illicit financial interests struggling for power and influence in those countries than it did in Mali?

Or in Iraq, Or Afghanistan or Iran or Somalia or Lebanon, or Vietnam or Cambodia.

And has France now embarked down the same tragic path?

Barry M. Lando, a graduate of Harvard and Columbia University, spent 25 years as an award-winning investigative producer with 60 Minutes. His latest book is “Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush.” Lando is currently completing a novel, “The Watchman’s File”, concerning Israel’s most closely guarded secret (it’s not the bomb.) He can be reached through his blog.