01/11/13 – Stephen Zunes – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, Joe, welcome back to the show.
Our first guest is Steven Zunis from Foreign Policy In Focus joining us on the line from Berlin.
How's it going?
Very good, thank you.
Well, good.
I appreciate you joining us and I know you're very busy, but I was hoping that you could tell us about Mali.
You wrote the book on Mali, literally.
Well, actually I wrote an article.
I wrote the book on Western Sahara, which is a nearby country, but that's a separate issue.
Oh, I thought Mali was a big part of that whole thing.
Yeah.
And Western Sahara is a country that's occupied by Morocco.
Oh, you know what?
I just did the Sarah Palin thing, right, where I confused West Sahara with Western Sahara.
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
A lot of people do that.
Boy, am I stupid.
But I can tell you, I have written a couple of articles about Mali and I'm happy to talk about that.
Okay, great.
Well, let's talk about Mali.
First of all, it's a real funny shaped country, isn't it, where it sort of seems to me when I look at it like it already ought to be a north and a south split anyway, no?
Yeah, in a sense, I mean, virtually all the borders you see in Africa, particularly that part of Africa, were drawn arbitrarily by European colonialists in the classic kind of divide and rule kind of issue, or no relation to natural geographic boundaries or ethnic groups or anything like that.
And basically, they made them continually to be dependent and impoverished on the colonial power.
Right, yeah.
If it has anything to do with the ethnic divisions, they deliberately cut the lines all screwy in order to divide and conquer, right?
Exactly.
All right.
So now, would it be the case then that northern Mali, that's mostly where the Tuaregs live, or there's always Arabs and Berbers and all different kinds of people there?
I mean, it's just sand dunes or what?
No, it's a mixture.
It's what they call Sahel, which is sort of where the more verdant parts of Africa gradually make their way into the Sahara Desert.
There is some farming, but mostly grazing and herding.
Tambak too is located in that area, that famous trading center.
And the Tuaregs are the predominant ethnic group of northern Mali, but also southern now Algeria and a lot of neighboring countries.
They periodically had rebellion against the governments of other ethnicities that dominate them.
Though Mali, interesting story, it looked for a time like it had been a big success because 20 years before the Arab Spring, they had one of these nonviolent people power revolutions.
They didn't have Facebook or internet or any of this kind of stuff.
And they were able to bring down the Eritrean dictatorship despite massacring hundreds of people.
Very impressive nonviolent revolution.
It gave Mali one of the most democratic countries in West Africa for the subsequent 20 years.
The Tuaregs, they were able to make a deal where they could get some limited autonomy and the Tuaregs ended up ending their sporadic arms struggle.
In fact, there was this big ceremony where they put all their weapons in a big pile and set them on fire and things looked really cool.
But because of the war in Libya, the NATO intervention in Libya, these fellow Tuareg tribesmen who were up in parts of Libya got a hold of all these weapons and they brought it down to their brethren in northern Mali and said, hey, we've got all these weapons now.
Maybe we can renew our arms struggle, especially since the democratically elected government in Mali was less popular than it was before, there was some corruption and other things.
But flushed all these weapons, thanks to NATO's intervention, they got a rebellion and ended up taking over the northern half of the country.
And then that prompted a military coup in the southern part of Mali, the main part of the capital, by a soldier, a captain who'd been trained by the United States, another kind of unfortunately typical thing that seems to happen in that part of the world.
And that, in turn, caused internal chaos.
The army totally dropped the ball.
And then these radical Islamist types, Al Qaeda, the types of people who identify with Al Qaeda and that kind of extreme Salafi thing, they ended up taking over from the Tuaregs.
And so now northern Mali is in the hands of these real nasty type people who are destroying these historic shrines and making everybody abide by their extreme version of Islam.
And now the West is saying, oh dear, Al Qaeda, we've got to intervene now to try to solve this big threat, when, of course, as we've seen before in many other parts of the world, the whole mess got started with Western military intervention in the first place.
Right.
Oh, man.
So now, jeez, there's so many different angles to go, but let's start with this Al Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb.
Tell me everything about them, first of all, and then tell me about, you know, elaborate, please, about them coming down and taking over.
Seems like they didn't have any trouble pushing the Tuaregs right out of their way.
Basically, it was these folks also had gotten a hold of a lot of weapons, thanks to the all, I mean, you know, there's such chaos with the, you know, unlike the nonviolent uprisings which overthrew Arab dictators, when there was at least some kind of orderly transition.
In Libya, of course, it was total chaos.
You have all these weapons going around North Africa, and these are places where you have bandits and smugglers, and, you know, it's kind of a lawless area anyway.
And it was in this vacuum that you had these Al Qaeda-related extremists.
There's some debate about, you know, how much they're, you know, official Al Qaeda and how much they are just sort of, you know, trying to imitate that kind of thing, but they don't have much popular support, but they do have guns, and, you know, this is an underpopulated area, so it doesn't take a whole lot of people with lots of guns to take over, you know, large areas.
And, you know, a lot of the talk about Al Qaeda and the Maghreb has been exaggerated as a means of justifying, you know, more Western military intervention, but the one place where they really have indeed seemed to have taken over is, again, this northern part of Mali.
Now, part of the problem also, and this is too classic, I mean, it would be funny if the results weren't so tragic, is that they ended up overrunning these military, the United States had supplied the Malian army with these, like, 92 land cruisers and the sophisticated satellite communication equipment and all that kind of stuff.
Well, guess who controls all that now?
The Al Qaeda people overran these Malian military bases and got all this fancy new U.S. equipment, and now they got this stuff.
And so, which helps them become even a more formidable military force.
Well, you know, I'm reading about, and, you know, I had heard that these guys had their own kidnapping business up there in Algeria, that kind of thing, so maybe they had made a bunch of money, but Thomas Mountain was writing, I think he's just assuming, but it seems a pretty safe assumption, that when these Al Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb guys, as they're called, they're driving around northern Mali in their brand new Toyota pickup trucks with their mounted machine guns in the back, that that's the Saudis, man, just like everywhere where the hobbies blow up anything, it's the Saudis financing it.
I haven't seen evidence that, you know, there's a direct Saudi government funding of these specific groups, but, you know, it's the Saudi funding of these, you know, these madrasahs, these Islamist schools that teach this ultra-ultra-conservative, you know, Salafi version of Islam, which is not the way the Muslims of North Africa have traditionally been into it.
The Muslims in the Sahel, that area, I mean, they're devoutly religious, but they're much more laid back in their religiosity, but, you know, because these countries are so poor and so corrupt, you end up in a situation where, you know, this is the only schooling available, and hey, the Saudis are paying for it, so great, let's just send our kid to the school, and they get indoctrinated in this kind of extreme theology, which doesn't necessarily lead to terrorism, al-Qaeda stuff type of behavior, but it certainly lays the theological foundation that makes that transition possible, and indeed, that's part of what's been, you know, what's been going on there.
It's a real tragedy, because, you know, especially for Mali, which, you know, for 20 years had been, again, one of the most stable democratic countries in the region.
Well, and you know what, too, it's not like we're talking about old guys with walking sticks left over from the 80s jihad against the Soviets.
We're talking about the veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who are the guys that we fought a war for in Libya, and the guys who are fighting a war for us right now, for us, I should say, right now in Syria, and that's how these guys actually, you know, have their act together at all, is they've already, you know, gone through that rite of passage.
They're already veterans of one war, and they're on to spread the thing now further south into Africa.
And that's why a relatively small number of people have been able to take over all that land.
It's not, again, it's not just the equipment that they were able to get a hold of in Libya and elsewhere, but, you know, these are experienced fighters.
These are Algerians, they're Somalis, they're Nigerians, they're other foreigners.
Who have, who are, you know, veterans of the, many of whom are veterans of the Iraq war, who got their training, got their radicalization, and just as the Soviet invasion occupation of Afghanistan radicalized this, you know, generation of jihadists back in the 1980s, the United States, through its invasion occupation of Iraq, has radicalized a new generation of jihadists who are even more ruthless and even more extreme and better armed.
All right, now forgive me for oversimplifying this, but I ain't never been over there, I don't know.
But it sure does seem like we fought a war in 2011, the United States fought a war against Gaddafi, whose number one attribute out of western eyes ought to have been he was good at keeping al-Qaeda down, and we fought a war for al-Qaeda and for the veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq's war against the Americans in Libya.
And then now, that, you know, and to skip over, you talked about how the Tuaregs went home with the weapons, but now they've been pushed out of the way by these guys.
Now they're the excuse to intervene there.
The same thing sort of seems like it's happening in Syria, where for a year, you, me, and Pepe Escobar and everybody's been saying, geez, we're backing al-Qaeda in Syria.
And now all of a sudden Obama's going, you know what, you're right.
Maybe we're going to have to begin to intervene there now, since al-Qaeda's there.
And just ignoring the fact that he's the one who's been giving them all this money and weapons, and of course, you know, working with the Saudis and the Qataris.
They're just cut-outs.
That's no excuse.
Yeah.
I mean, it is a little more complicated than that, but yeah, basically you got it.
And this should be a lesson, you know what I mean?
And it's a lesson that people like you and me have been saying for years, that even when it seems like an intervention is great for humanitarian reasons, responsibility to protect, you know, all this, there's a terrible, terrible dictator who's murdering his own people, you know, even though, you know, even though that may be true, it always seems that when the West intervenes, it ends up just making things worse.
In fact, what's interesting about Mali, I mean, you know, the International Crisis Group, you've probably talked about them before, you know, they're this international group of foreign policy elites from around the world, and, you know, their former head, Gareth Evans, is one of the folks who's, you know, been big intellectual architects around the responsibility to protect and all that kind of stuff, you know.
But even they have come out and said, intervening in Mali would be a really bad idea.
But right now we're hearing the French president, Hollande, talking quite openly about intervening very, very soon.
The U.S. and others have been trying to get ECOWAS, the Coalition of West African Countries, to have a military presence.
You already have a small-scale military presence of Western-backed African states and the French and others, and with the French, you know, wanting an even bigger intervention, it raises a lot of questions.
And of course, remember, the French are to this part of Africa what the United States is to Latin America and what the Russians are to Eastern Europe.
There's a history there, and people don't like it.
And people are going to resist, even if they don't like al-Qaeda.
Right.
All right, now, the coup.
I'm sorry for jumping around here so much, but you talked to me before about the former president.
He was a former military man who took off his olive green and then stood for election a couple of times.
I've heard different stories about just how credible those elections were and just how democratic he was, but certainly seemed to be, especially the way you tell it, certainly seemed to be the best in the region, and really trying.
He seemed to, I guess you got, you were under the impression, he really did want for there to be some kind of self-government and real regular elections and stuff like that.
It wasn't just a put-on.
Is that correct?
Yes.
Yes, it was.
I mean, yes, there was corruption, other problems, and he was, but the thing was, he was about to, his term was about to expire.
He was not going to seek re-election.
A lot of criticism of him was legitimate, it wasn't like he was a dictator that was trying to hold on to power forever.
He was on his way out anyway, and so this, again, there was really no justification for this coup, and there's no evidence to suggest that the United States was behind the coup, especially, and the U.S. actually did come out pretty strongly against it, at least verbally, but the very fact that he was U.S. trained, that his branch of the military had all this new U.S. equipment and stuff, certainly helped make the coup possible.
And now, so I don't know, I mean, if you're a colonel, I mean, this is just speculation I guess now, but if you're a colonel in the Mali military and you've got some upcoming training exercises with the Americans and all this relationship, you don't need a wink and a nod from the CIA to tell you that it's okay to go ahead and do it?
I think, you know, the internal situation was, you know, pretty complex, and France is actually still a major outside power in that country, so, you know, I think, again, you obviously can't rule something like that out, but, again, I've seen no evidence to suggest that.
Sure.
Okay.
And then, but we have seen evidence, right, of the Joint Special Operations Command running around there because there was a truck flipped over and one of them died, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, definitely we're getting this, I mean, it's pretty small in overall numbers, but we are definitely getting elements of the U.S. military, there's a whole big thing to try to set up this Africa Command, and there's a special, you know, concern about parts of West Africa, which not coincidentally are near these new, heavily, new promising oil deposits, mostly offshore, but there's some that, some on the mainland as well.
The U.S. is quietly getting more and more involved militarily in West Africa, and there's been virtually no debate about this in Congress, or much less in terms of the American public.
All right, now, so the news is that the rebels, as they're calling them, the Al-Qaeda guys in northern Mali, have just taken a new city, I had it in front of me, but I don't know what the hell, but apparently they're doing better, and so this is, they're saying, you know, the French are on their way now, the U.N.'s already authorized it, correct, and now, so I guess, assuming that's right in the setup to the question there, do they have any chance of going in there, finding these guys, cleaning them up real quick, and putting the government of the south back in charge in the north, that kind of thing?
Or is this going to be, you know, Iraq writ small, or Somalia all over again?
Well, the original idea was that there'd be this process, which they figured would take months, where the French and the Americans and others would help train, organize this ECOWAS force, that is, from this group of West African nations, and in large part because they didn't want to have any North Americans or Europeans getting killed, and they also figured that having Africans do it instead of Europeans and North Americans would not provoke the same kind of nationalist reaction, and that kind of thing.
But because the AQM people, the Al-Qaeda folks, are advancing more rapidly, in fact, they are heading towards the capital, there is now talk of more direct intervention.
My guess is that, you know, the French are not going to try to reconquer the north, but they are going to probably bring in air power and start bombing any kind of rebel columns, basically, I assume there's going to be some kind of deal where they say, okay, we're going to draw this line in the sand, both literally and figuratively, and if the Al-Qaeda groups don't get in any further, there's going to be bombing, and there will probably be some ground forces to back that up if necessary.
So basically the idea is going to be a holding action for now.
But I have no question that there is going to be some kind of an attempt.
It may not be until the fall, but there is going to be some kind of attempt, and within the next year, for some kind of Western backed multinational force to reclaim the north from AQM.
All right, now, I guess technically, I won't be officially wrong about this for 20 years, but my prediction in 2011 was America will be involved in Libya for 20 years, and that sooner or later, even if the special forces and their, you know, front men, local militia guys in the airplanes can take out Qaddafi and take over Tripoli, that eventually we're just a couple of suicide bombings away at some point, or some factional militia fight away from further intervention.
And maybe, you know, Obama's scared to do it, but I just wonder, was I completely wrong about that?
Are the people of Libya working things out, and they're going to have themselves a great little democracy now while we're not paying attention, or what the hell is going on in Libya now?
Well, there are two things.
I mean, on the positive side is that, you know, they did have some reasonably free democratic elections, and some fairly, you know, reasonably moderate elements ended up winning and forming a coalition government.
The bad news is that in a country of barely 6 million people, you have over 200,000 men under arms and militias that are not controlled by that government, and are, you know, fighting each other for the spoils.
I mean, every few weeks I'll read a story about these rival militias fighting for control of the Tripoli airport, you know, to take advantage of the taxes and that kind of thing.
I remember reading a little piece about this hotel where this militia leader had been living there for months, hadn't paid his bill, and they finally threw him out, and he came back a few hours later with his militia, and they shot up the place.
I mean, and of course, we saw what happened in Benghazi.
So there's a, it's, you know, so on the one hand, you know, in terms of the official stuff, things have actually been going surprisingly well, but when you have, when people get the lesson that power comes from the barrel of the gun, you know, there are going to be people who are going to try to assert their power that way, and that's the problem.
The nonviolent revolutions, I mean, even though in places like, you know, Egypt, you got the Muslim Brotherhood who, and the military still has some sway, I mean, a lot of problems in Egypt.
At least you still have an active civil society, and you have people protesting in the streets, and there are people who are saying, okay, at least we got rid of Mubarak, we need to make things better, but let's keep on struggling, and maybe a retracted struggle, but through massive nonviolent resistance and civil society mobilization and that kind of thing, we can create change ourselves.
But if you overthrow a dictator through armed struggle, either you risk becoming another dictatorship or you get, again, you get this kind of chaos and these rival militias fighting each other and coups and this kind of craziness, and so I think that's, and of course when you have that kind of stuff going on in a country that's strategically located with a lot of oil, of course you're going to have the United States saying, oh gee, maybe we need to intervene or have a major military presence and that kind of thing, so I think you're, unfortunately I think your prediction on Libya may not be too far off.
Hey, you know, it's our proudest tradition, going back to Thomas Jefferson.
Yeah, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, Stephen Decatur, first military intervention in Libya was back in 1802, so we have a history, we've been doing this for a while.
Hey listen, thanks very much for your time on the show today, I appreciate it as always, Stephen.
Sure, my pleasure.
Alright everybody, that's the great Stephen Zunis from Foreign Policy and Focus, we'll be right back after this.
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