For Pacifica Radio, November 30th, 2012, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Friday from 630 to 7 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.
I keep all my interview archives at scotthorton.org, and you can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slash scotthortonshow.
Tonight's guest is Alan Boswell, Africa correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers at mcclatchydc.com, based out of Nairobi, Kenya.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Yeah, I'm doing pretty good.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
Absolutely.
Mali, first of all, could you take us back a year and explain, as you do in your writings, let me hear a mention real quick.
Mali's looming war.
Will military intervention drive out the Islamists?
That one's at Time Magazine, and then there are quite a few here for McClatchy Newspapers as well.
And you explain in your articles how the war in Libya helped lead to the current situation.
So it seems like that's probably a pretty good place to start.
Yeah, I'm glad we're starting there.
About a year ago, actually, I was in a neighboring country to Mali, which is Niger, and I was in close to the northern part up there in a town called Agadez.
And it was right after Tripoli fell and the Qaddafi regime was toppled.
And I was kind of surprised by what I found, which was there was just a major rush from Libya, especially from a group, an ethnic group called the Tuareg.
And many of those Tuareg, even though they weren't from Libya, fought on the side of Qaddafi and were part of his armies for many years.
And essentially what I found, you know, at a border post at the southern part of the Saharan desert, was that there was a big stream of these former Qaddafi fighters.
There was a big weapons market, basically, that was taking place outside the town.
And it was very clear that, you know, that things were not going to go very well in the near future.
The Tuareg had a history of starting a number of rebellions since the 1960s.
And so in Niger, actually, the government in that country made a lot of immediate outreaches to the returning Tuareg and managed to, well, still, there's been no major uprising or anything in Niger.
But in Mali, which is where the problem is now, that didn't quite happen.
And essentially the rebels, the returning rebels from the Libyan conflict, you know, gave an ultimatum to the government and started a rebellion.
What led to the situation we're at now is that in doing so, those rebels splintered among many factions.
And some of those factions basically struck convenient relationships with an al-Qaeda group, which was operating in the Mali desert also.
And as the Malian state more or less collapsed, it was the al-Qaeda aligned groups that ended up taking over control of pretty much all of northern Mali.
All right, well, geez, there's already a lot to go over right there.
First of all, the different experts I talked to, well, and let me just, I'm sorry, let me just mention to the audience, in case you don't know, I didn't either.
I had to look it up, too.
Mali is a kind of oddly shaped state, as so many of them are, in West Africa, on the western edge of the Sahara Desert.
Basically, I guess, south of Algeria and Morocco and southwest of Libya by, I'm not sure how many miles, it looks like a thousand miles or quite a few hundred miles to the southwest of Libya there.
But just so people can kind of have an idea in their head of where we're even talking about in the world.
Mali could be anywhere, I think, to most people.
But now, so I wanted to ask you real quick, because my experts that I've interviewed on this show in the past have sort of had different ideas about this.
And it's sort of just kind of a minor footnote in a way, maybe not.
But was the president of Mali, before this took place, before the coup and all these consequences last year, would you count him as a real little-D democratic reformer?
I guess the story is he was a former military guy who took off his uniform and stood for election.
But so you can see why some people would just look at that quite cynically.
Whereas others, I think Stephen Zunes said, like, no, this guy was really trying.
And this was really, you know, it wasn't perfect, but this was the most democratic state.
And this is a major setback for, you know, popular elections and a modicum of self-government in that part of the world.
Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting question about all this.
The president definitely had a history, a strong history of helping Mali, basically, in their progression in democracy.
And it was stronger than most of the other states in the region.
However, it's a bit of a complicated question, because he, basically his regime was seen as being very corrupt and mismanaging the country's affairs quite badly by the Malian people.
And the interesting thing is that although a lot of Malians are not happy with how the country has turned out since the coup, a lot of them were very sympathetic to the military coup itself and to the ousting of the president.
And so in some ways, he was elected by, you know, I mean, he was definitely elected as to whether or not he was governing, you know, with what we would consider kind of accountable democratic principles, you know, and keeping things from corruption.
You know, it's much more debated, and a lot of the Malians, you know, were not so sad to see him go.
And then, now, am I correctly oversimplifying it to say that the Tuaregs that came back from working for Qaddafi and brought all their weapons with them after being defeated by NATO, that they had basically said, we have autonomy, but that's not good enough?
Or they wanted to secede and break Mali apart?
Or what?
Well, they wanted to secede, and they didn't really have a really functional autonomy in northern Mali.
But there's a lot of, I mean, it's unclear exactly if the rebels, you know, had a really strong political program, or if it was more kind of start up a rebellion, see what concessions you get.
And, I mean, northern Mali is a place where there's very little government control to begin with.
And, you know, often how, you know, rebellions are ended, not just in West Africa, but, you know, in many parts of the continent, is, you know, the people who cause the trouble are often the ones who benefit from the resolution of that trouble.
But their purported, you know, the goals they said they had was to secede the northern part of Mali from Mali.
And then, so that was what precipitated the coup, really, right?
Was the military said, there's no way in hell we're going to let that happen.
And the president wasn't doing enough to stop it, they said.
Well, what precipitated the coup was that the Malian army was essentially just, you know, not combating the rebels very well.
And the rebellion basically brought out a lot of the grievances within the army, because the army hadn't been well equipped, it hadn't been well trained, there was a lot of corruption within it, a lot of people basically weren't getting their paychecks.
And so now that they all of a sudden had to fight a rebellion, those issues kind of rose to the forefront.
The coup itself, by many accounts, you know, was actually possibly a bit of an accident.
In as much as it was basically a pro, basically a mid-ranking, a lot of lower rank, a lot of the lower ranks, you know, and a few of the mid-ranked officers basically were protesting a visit from the executive.
And, you know, out of that kind of, the protest kind of turned into a spontaneous demonstration which ended up taking the state house.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, I guess I hadn't read that kind of detail of how the coup actually took place.
That's interesting to know.
That sounds pretty grassroots to me, but I don't know, junior officers, maybe not.
Yeah, well, and the interesting thing is the guy who ended up becoming the leader of it, Sunogo, was trained by the U.S. military as part of one of our many officer training programs that we have.
And so anyways, when he got put in camera the first time, he kind of pointed at his military training in the U.S. as proof as to why he'd be, you know, capable of kind of leading the government.
Yeah, I remember reading that they had some training exercises with the Americans coming up in just a couple of weeks away from the time of the coup, that kind of thing.
Are there any suspicions there, like there are here right now, that the Americans had anything to do with this coup?
I didn't hear any of that when I was there, about Americans having anything to do with the coup.
I mean, in essence, the U.S. policy since the coup has been really complicated because U.S. law bars any direct U.S. aid to either the government Mali or, sorry, the Malian government or the Malian military after the coup.
Until there's new elections.
So in essence, it's actually kind of made the U.S. a more marginalized figure as compared to, like, France.
As, you know, the whole world kind of debates what to do about the crisis now.
Right.
Again, I'm talking with Alan Boswell.
He's in Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya, writing for McClatchy Newspapers.
And there's one also in Time Magazine about the crisis in Mali.
And now, so this is the part that blew me away.
Well, one of the things that blew me away in your reporting was learning that northern Mali is the size of Texas.
And the reason that impresses me is because I'm from Austin and I know how big Texas is.
And Texas is freaking huge.
From Austin, the center of Texas to El Paso in the west is halfway to Los Angeles.
So that's big.
That's really big.
And so I don't know how any foreign army, I don't know, the French, anyone else can come in here and decide who's going to be who and who's going to have the power after this.
No foreign army could ever take Texas.
Yeah, I mean, it's one of the more amazing parts about this entire story is the size of the territory that was taking.
And the kind of lukewarm response that the world had to the crisis.
Because essentially, as you explained to your listeners earlier, where Mali is, it's in basically the backwaters of Africa.
It doesn't attract a lot of attention.
So even though it was a huge territorial advance, essentially it was still a very footnote story.
But it's the size of Texas.
In that size of Texas, there's not anything that you would even categorize as a proper city.
So a lot of it is empty desert space.
But that doesn't mean it's useless empty desert space.
It's a huge basically trafficking network now for, well, for weapons, but also for cocaine, which is coming up through West Africa now and crossing and then going to Europe or the Middle East from there.
So basically, it gives these Al-Qaeda linked people a really firm grasp on some pretty good revenue sources.
And since they know everyone's talking about intervention, but no one expects intervention to happen for about a year at the earliest, they really have a long time to dig in, basically.
And the troops they're talking about sending in are not – they're Nigerians, for instance, who would have no experience in dealing with a desert operation.
Well, I saw that Hillary Clinton was trying to get the Algerians to do something.
And were they resisting?
Well, the Algerians don't want the military intervention.
And they're not alone in that respect.
The ones who want the military intervention tend to be the ones more to the south or parallel with Mali.
The Algerians, the Al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb, who are the splinter group that kind of started a lot of this, they're actually originally from Algeria.
And they – Algeria's been kind of having a counterinsurgency with them for a long time.
And so Algeria is not terribly interested in having people come from the south in intervention force and basically push them back into Algeria.
So Algeria and some of the other countries around them would prefer some sort of negotiated settlement.
All right, now tell me all about Al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb, because any handful of kooks can call themselves Al-Qaeda.
Are these guys the real deal or what?
Well, that was a really big debate before a lot of this happened, and it's still a debate now.
Before, actually, a lot of people saw the group as essentially almost revenue generators for the – they're kind of founders in Algeria.
So what they would do is they would take hostages, Western hostages, and get giant ransoms from most of the European countries.
And they basically taxed the different smuggling, drug, and weapons traffickers who were going through the area and kind of whored up that money.
But they weren't taken very seriously by a lot of the – by a lot of security analysts, because they never seemed to really make a concerted effort at actually pulling off some giant terrorist attack against Western targets.
A lot of people called them gangster jihadis, basically.
And so – but what's happened since then is that it's really not clear exactly who AQIM is anymore, because the ranks – since they took northern Mali, the kind of organization has changed in as much as there's a – there's multiple splinter groups now, and there's a lot of fighters coming in from other parts of the region who – you know, who this is their – this is their big fight.
So the actual ranks are changing and growing really fast, and it's not clear if the organization itself, you know, exactly knows what it's planning on doing.
Yeah, well, so if it was a year from now and we're having this conversation and the French Foreign Legion's finally getting its trucks together and whatever, they're going to go do something about this, do you expect that to be very effective?
This has sort of been the struggle throughout the whole terror war, right?
How do you kill the guys you're trying to kill without making 100,000 more of them in their place?
And so far, all we seem to do is make more and more of them in their place.
Right, and that's actually a really big concern of – well, actually, the U.S. has been pushing back on an intervention plan at the U.N. and trying to slow the French down, and the U.N. Secretary General yesterday gave a report to the Security Council.
Basically, you know, in slightly more diplomatic language, saying that the intervention plan that's kind of been put forward is very problematic and will have – and is going to be very difficult to do.
So what's happening now is partly because of exactly what you described, the blowback in other parts of the world, when Western powers get so closely involved is they're trying to get an African force of African troops to go in, and then those troops would be supported logistically, you know, and I'm sure in some other ways, but in less visible ways on the ground.
So in essence, it would be an African force of about 3,000-plus Malian troops who are being retrained after the coup, who would be the ones going up and doing this.
And while that's – the problem is, while that sounds nice in practice, there isn't a force really ready to actually undergo that operation without – you know, except basically being trained from scratch for that.
And there's a lot of concern that – I mean, there's a big concern, basically, that it's a very big crisis and there's no good solution.
And no one wants to leave these guys up there in an area the size of Texas indefinitely, when you can kind of get there from any other part in the region and have a giant safe haven.
And no one has also come up with a really great plan on exactly, you know, how to militarily solve that.
Yeah, well, you know, they could fly in their drones, but in Somalia, it seems like basically that's the same model, right, is you have proxy armies go in there and then you have the CIA back them up, but they don't seem to really ever weaken al-Shabaab.
I guess they chase them out of Kismayo, but they're still running around with rifles and, as far as I know, getting more and more powerful all the time still.
Yeah, I mean, Shabaab is definitely weakening.
What's happening with Shabaab is they're weakening militarily on the ground, but in some degrees their wider network in East Africa is possibly getting stronger, by some accounts.
But actually, a lot of people are pointing to the Somalia story and what happened there actually as a blueprint for success, which is somewhat ironic because if anyone asked, like, two years ago, if the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia had been a success, you'd have a really hard time finding anyone.
But with their, you know, recent gains recently, that's kind of the vogue thing to point to.
The issue is that they're not really direct comparisons between Somalia and Mali.
And one of the big issues is that Somalia actually had a number of neighboring countries who very much wanted to be involved in the situation there and considered it kind of partly their issue also.
West Africa doesn't quite have those same powerhouses, like the Ugandan military or the Ethiopians or even the Kenyans.
And those leaders don't seem nearly as willing yet, anyways, to make this conflict their own.
So the Somalia one was an interesting case study where, unlike a lot of UN peacekeeping missions, where you had kind of troops who didn't really care about the conflict at all coming in, you actually had troops who did care.
And this is kind of an attempt to replicate that, but without necessarily those countries to draw upon, you know, with troops who will actually put up a real fight on the ground.
Right.
So, good.
Well, so as much as a success as Somalia has been, this will be less than that.
Great.
Some people think that's true.
All right.
Now, you know what?
You don't have to answer this, and I don't know, you can if you want to.
I don't know if you can report about this or not, or whether you'd like to share your opinion about things like this or not.
But I saw, and this could have been a year ago now, I don't know, it's been a little while, but I saw General Ham, and it wasn't quite a year ago, it must have been half a year ago.
I saw General Ham saying, well, you know, we got al-Shabaab in Somalia, which, of course, we didn't talk about, but I'm sure you understand well as a symptom of our regime change there at the end of 2006, beginning in 2007.
And then we got these terrible al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb guys coming to more power and influence in Libya, and now in Mali, and there's Boko Haram now down in Nigeria.
And so, maybe America needs to begin intervening in Africa now.
And I thought, they're doing this on purpose!
They're creating enemies, and then following the enemies that they create to their new crisis, and then they create another new crisis, and then they do it again, and it's not because they're stupid and terrible and incompetent, it's because that's their game.
Pretending that history began yesterday, and everything that's their fault is just the excuse to do what they want to do next.
Yeah, I'm not sure I'd agree necessarily with that analysis.
I would say that in Somalia, U.S. policy definitely did not help.
It definitely partly led to where we're at now.
And I think some of the countries who are our allies on the ground are kind of haplessly making the situations much worse.
Washington's actually trying fairly hard not to get too involved in some of these conflicts.
There would be U.S. commandos on the ground, or U.S. troops, or other Western troops, could theoretically go in on a much shorter notice, and make much cleaner work of an issue such as in northern Mali.
But because our policy now is to let Africa solve its own problems, basically, the solutions, while causing much less backlash and possibly being much wiser, they actually involve way less U.S. direct intervention and way less U.S. resources.
The military hasn't actually put a lot of resources behind the Africa Command or AFRICOM that they've put in Germany.
And General Ham actually says quite a bit in public.
Well, I mean, they certainly are doing more of a Rumsfeldian, transformational, light-touch way of doing things, and having proxy armies, you know, more the Somalia model than the Iraq model.
They've at least been able to learn that lesson, right, that just sending in the entire U.S. infantry divisions to occupy a place forever is bad news.
But it doesn't seem like they're... well, I don't know.
You're saying it really seems like they don't want much to do with Mali or even Libya anymore, or what?
Yeah, I mean, they prefer these issues to be...they prefer these conflicts to be mostly solved on their own, while giving very limited support in areas they can, basically, for direct counterterrorism, such as the drone strikes and intelligence.
But otherwise, they do really want African countries.
And the thing is that the African countries themselves want to solve these issues, too.
So, I mean, the U.N. report that I was talking about, which was quite kind of critical of this intervention plan, the president of the AU, the chair of the AU, put out a statement yesterday, basically, really criticizing the U.N.'s take on it, and saying, you know, this force has to be authorized right away, or else we're going to have even more problems in our backyards.
So, in some ways, even recently, even on the Somali crisis, the U.S. has actually been the one kind of even urging its African partners to take a much wiser approach to military intervention, so that it doesn't cause more, you know, just make the situation a whole lot worse.
And I do think we've definitely learned from the wars in the Middle East over the past decade, and how it works with local civilian populations.
All right.
Now, if I could just ask you one more thing.
I've been terrible about covering the war in the Congo, and I know millions of people have died, you know, directly in combat, and also just from deprivation and stuff over the past years.
And I don't know if I've done a single interview about it, honestly.
But now, I'm seeing all this reporting in the media about it.
Like, somebody's got an agenda that I ought to start to care, and I just wonder if you have any idea what's behind that.
The media part.
I'd say the media coverage of it.
You know, and a lot of these people writing the stories are my peers and colleagues here.
A lot of them are based out of Nairobi.
Foreign media has basically just been really drawn thin.
And the Congo is one of these stories that just often is the one that gets basically pushed off to the side until it really flares up.
I mean, you could make a case for Congo being on the front page, you know, for almost the last 20 years.
And basically, the world, you know, only really pays attention when all of a sudden, everything hits the fan.
So, in terms of all of a sudden, the sudden media, I mean, I think it's a bit of a shame, actually.
Basically, as far as I see it, it just has to do with limited resources.
And the Congo just hasn't been made a priority of any of the Western governments.
And therefore, not really the Western reporters.
So, what's changed is that, I guess, there's been recent gains by the so-called rebels in a major way, things are changing on the ground there.
And so, finally, we just are getting lucky in a sense that some good journalism is finally breaking through and getting notice is all.
Yeah, I mean, so, what happened, I mean, this recent rebellion has been going on for several months.
What kind of prompted this, what prompted all the headlines that you're seeing now is that the rebels took what's, in essence, basically the international base in Eastern Congo where the UN and a lot of the aid agencies are based and, you know, have their houses on the lake.
And when that fell, that's what basically sparked the kind of giant panic across the world.
When the rebellion was happening in the rural areas, you know, in villages that basically there weren't really any white people, people paid much less attention to it.
Yeah.
All right, well, I'm sorry we're all out of time.
I saw where you got into a dispute with some of these people writing about the Sudan and everything.
I want to catch up on that and hopefully get you back on the show to talk a little bit about that stuff, too.
Yeah, I'd be happy to talk about that.
Okay, great.
Well, thank you very much for your time, Alan.
I really appreciate it.
Cheers.
All right, everybody, that is Alan Boswell, Africa correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, again, at McClatchyDC.com.
And he's got one here also in Time Magazine as well.
And that's it for the show tonight.
Thanks, everybody, very much for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio here every Friday from 630 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
My full interview archives can be found at scotthorton.org.
Thank you.
