01/18/13 – Stephen Zunes – The Scott Horton Show

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For KPFK, January 18th, 2013, I'm Scott Wharton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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More than 2,700 of them now, going back to 2003.
And tonight's guest is Stephen Zunes from Foreign Policy in Focus.
He is professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.
You can check out his website at stephenzunes.org.
And, of course, find him at Foreign Policy in Focus.
That's fpif.org.
Welcome back to the show, Stephen.
How are you doing?
Pretty good, thank you.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show tonight.
Now, I meant to mention in your intro there, you are co-author with Jacob Mundy of a book called Western Sahara, War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution.
Now, that's not specifically about Mali and Algeria, but it goes to show you have some expertise in the region of Africa where America has a brand new war.
I mean, they call it a French war, but it's an American war there in Mali right now, isn't it?
Well, we're certainly keeping abreast of the situation.
I don't doubt we're providing satellite information, and we have our folks working in close conjunction with the French.
So it is only, as far as we know, there are only French forces involved in the actual fighting.
Right, yeah, so far.
But now Panetta says, hey, we're committed no matter what, et cetera.
So assuming the French get tired and surrender or something like that, then it's on the Marines to go in and clean up their mess, huh?
In certain ways, I'm pretty hopeful that will not be the case, simply because we generally, even under Reagan, when there was a conflict in Chad, and he quite explicitly said, oh, this is the French sphere of influence, and the French actually have some pretty strong, despite all the bad jokes, have a very powerful, well-armed, well-coordinated, interventionist-ready military.
They have had a history in West Africa similar to the United States and Latin America.
They know the area, and they fought a number of wars there, including, of course, the long, bloody civil war in Algeria.
They've intervened in Central African Republic, in Chad, in Niger, and a bunch of countries in that part of the world from time to time.
So I think it really is going to be mostly a French operation.
The problem is that the extremists don't make that big a distinction between France and other Western powers, and they know that the United States, in leading the so-called global war on terror, is very much supportive of the French operation.
So whether the Obama administration plans to get involved, or even has serious contingency plans to get involved, one way or the other, this could very well affect us.
Indeed, there appear to have been already some American hostages among those killed in the Algerian desert.
So that brings us up to the breaking news and what's going on.
This giant hostage-taking by some group of crazies up there in Algeria, and then a giant rescue effort with apparently a lot of casualties and collateral damage around, but a lot rescued, too.
More than 100, I read, somewhere, anyway.
Can you update us the best you know about that?
Well, this is a natural gas facility owned by BP, pretty much smack dab in the middle of the Sahara.
I mean, it's one of the most remote outposts of its kind in the world.
Just a little footnote, it was designed by the notorious Kellogg Brown Roots, the Halliburton subsidiary that we all know and love from Iraq and other disasters.
But in any case, it's very much in the middle of nowhere.
The vast majority of Algeria's population, of course, is in the far northern part of the country, which has more of a Mediterranean climate.
But the vast majority of the land mass of Algeria is the Sahara Desert, pretty much how we picture it, with sand dunes and rocky escarpments and that kind of thing.
This is where this facility is located.
And this facility was attacked, and they're a large facility.
Large numbers of people held hostage.
The Algerians came in with a rescue operation.
What's coming out of there is really, really sketchy, but we know a large number of foreigners were killed, as well as some of the terrorists.
A large number managed to escape or were rescued.
The group behind it appears to be the remnants of the GIA, the armed Islamic group that led a horrific insurgency in the 1990s, which prompted a horrific counterinsurgency by the Algerian government.
The Algerian regime ended up victorious, and there had been a pretty good degree of stability then.
But occasionally we have had these reprises, if you will, and this is by far the most dramatic one we've seen in quite a few years.
Again, this remote area, apparently in retaliation for the French intervention in neighboring Mali.
Right, but of course, as we've seen for more than a decade now, every attack is the beginning of a brand new day.
And so now, all of a sudden, we've got a terrorist problem in Algeria, and it doesn't matter what happened yesterday and the day before that to provoke it.
Very much so.
And also, on the one hand, people can say, hey, these really are crazy extremist people.
This is a situation where some degree of force is necessary.
If the local forces can't handle it, maybe we do need some kind of foreign intervention.
But, you know, whenever this kind of thing happens, it just seems to create even more violence.
And the cycle continues, and it grows, and it escalates.
And, again, as we talked just a few days ago on one of your shows, we both were talking about the very real possibility that this French intervention in Mali would create some kind of a horrific counterattack.
And lo and behold, that's exactly what happened.
And scores of foreigners, including Americans, have been caught up in the middle of it.
Well, and speaking of which, you do such a good job of giving the background of this.
Looking back not very far at all, just in the last couple of years, we can see that actions have consequences, theory of American foreign policy, and specifically when it comes to the case of Mali.
Very much so.
What happened, how did these Tareks get all these weapons that the long-dormant rebellion was able to succeed in capturing the northern half of the country, which then led to the Islamic extremists taking over immediately afterwards?
It was because this huge, huge flush of arms that suddenly became available as a result of the NATO-led war in Libya.
People talk about, oh, this is successful.
They got rid of Gaddafi.
He was a bad guy, et cetera, et cetera.
But unlike the nonviolent revolution in Tunisia, which had a positive contagion elsewhere, in North Africa and the Middle East, this armed foreign intervention that figured, oh, we've got a better way of overthrowing dictatorships than a nonviolent revolution.
Let's do it through foreign military intervention.
We're seeing a very negative contagion that is spreading to Mali and then now to Algeria.
Well, and the hypocrisy here is something amazing, too, because it's not just the West generically and mostly meaning America.
Specifically, the French, too, have been very recently in with the United States on the war in Libya and the war in Syria, both of which are being fought pretty much directly on behalf of the veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq, from the Libyans and Syrians who traveled to Iraq to fight against the Americans there.
And then just like the United States, they're backing those groups in Libya and in Syria against Gaddafi and Assad.
But the mujahideen are the excuse for the intervention in Mali.
So that can't really be what it's all about, Stephen.
Exactly.
I mean, we all know how the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created this whole new generation of Islamist radicals, including, of course, Assad and Laden and al-Qaeda and the Taliban, of course, grew out of the refugee camps in large part through U.S.
-Saudi support of the more radical Islamist elements because we thought they would be better fighters against the Soviet and the communist Afghan regime, less likely to compromise.
Then we saw how this blew up in our face with the rise of al-Qaeda and a series of attacks on American interests, culminating, of course, in the horrors of 9-11.
And then we have with Iraq, just like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it also brought these radical Islamists from all over North Africa, Middle East, Central Asia, parts of South and even Southeast Asia, who became radicalized in their fight against the U.S. invasion and occupation, to learn the skills of urban guerrilla warfare as well as terrorism and tactics and use of explosives and arms and everything else.
Now they are going back to their countries, stirring up things.
So this is also a legacy not just of Libya, of course, but of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
That was one of the arguments many of us who opposed the Iraq invasion were making back then, that it would create this kind of blowback that would come back to haunt us in many ways, in many places we couldn't predict at the time.
And again, this goes back to the theme that people like the two of us have been talking about for so many years, that these actions, these military actions, end up creating their own reactions, which then are used to justify further military actions, which then lead to yet more reactions.
And this is craziness.
There are a couple of ways you can look at this.
One, of course, is just this overemphasis on military force, and the old saying that if you only think of a toolkit as a hammer, pretty soon everything starts looking like a nail.
We're used to responding to all sorts of crises simply by military force, because that's about the one thing the United States is still number one in the world now.
And so we try to address these complex political problems through military force.
But also, you know, there's a tendency of just not knowing the areas.
You see, things are very complicated.
And here's just a little sigh here, but it shows how screwy it is.
One of the hopeful things in Northwest Africa is that the people of Western Sahara, formerly known as Spanish Sahara, it's a territory on the Atlantic Ocean just south of Morocco, they were invaded and occupied by Morocco in 1975 with U.S. and French support.
And despite promises of independence, despite their right of self-determination, despite decisions by the International Court of Justice and unanimous U.N. Security Council resolutions, et cetera.
And the people, the Polisario Front, after years of guerrilla warfare, went to a stalemate, decided to stop fighting and have a referendum on the fate of the territory.
But Morocco reneged on their promise and kept on the occupation and repression.
But instead of returning, during this whole struggle, not once did the Polisario ever use any acts of terrorism.
In fact, they signed on to the Fort Geneva Convention and everything.
As far as armed struggles go, it was pretty clean.
But then when Morocco reneged, the people of Western Sahara, instead of going back to armed struggle, started nonviolent resistance.
Strikes and boycotts and protests, they were brutally suppressed, but they maintained this nonviolent discipline.
Well, what does the United States do?
Well, we redouble our support for Morocco, make them a major non-NATO ally, as they call it, signed a free trade agreement.
And then Hillary Clinton and others started making up these stories that supposedly the Polisario has ties to al-Qaeda, and we need to support Morocco even more, even though this is totally silly, because the Polisario is a secular organization, and the kind of Islam that the Safarawis practice is one of the most liberal and moderate and tolerant in the entire Islamic world.
Yet, as the Sahari are chasing after, trying to suppress the good guys, one of the more hopeful signs of change, people who use nonviolence, who want a democracy, who have international law on their side, and we support dictators like Morocco and the semi-autocratic regime in Algeria.
And one of the few democracies there, Mali, that government gets overthrown by a U.S.
-trained army captain, which helped precipitate the whole collapse, which led to the Tuareg and then al-Qaeda takeover of the north.
I mean, it's amazing.
Every time I try to contact people in Washington and say, hey, I'm an expert on this region, maybe I can tell you a little about this stuff, they never return my calls, they never talk to any of us who know the region.
They just think they have the very simplistic thing about who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, and the way you deal with the bad guys is to bomb them.
The way you deal with the good guys, supposedly, is to send them more and more arms and intervene on their behalf.
And in so many ways, it is just making a mess of things.
In addition to just getting a lot of people killed, it is creating the kind of blowback that very much is hurting our national interest.
And the thing about Maghreb, which is the name for that part of northwestern Africa, is that we're doing the same kind of crazy stuff we're doing in the main part of the Middle East, or at least in Iraq and Israel-Palestine and places like that, people are talking about it, whereas this stuff that's going on in northwest Africa is just as serious, but unless and until something horrible like this hostage situation gets on the news, most people, including critics of U.S. foreign policy, don't have a clue what's going on.
Right.
Hey, it's been my trouble trying to find good guests to talk about this over the past months.
Yeah, the old joke is the way Americans learn geography is the next country that the United States invades.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Hey, I didn't know where Timbuktu was.
Hell, I might have thought that Disney made that up for some cartoon movie or something, if you ask me.
I don't know.
It was a major-to-major trading center as far back as the 12th century, and it was a wonderful place for cultural celebrations, and now that's under, thanks to U.S. and French policy, it's now in the hands of these Islamist extremists who are destroying these beautiful ancient Sufi temples, and any other architectural or other wonder they consider to be somehow idolatrous.
Now, on the point of the relationship between the Tuareg rebels there, who have been pushing for autonomy and who have had their fight and their will to secede from the southern-dominated government all this time, versus the al-Qaeda guys, because I'm just guessing, but it would seem like the Western governments and the Western media would surely have it, that, oh yeah, it's al-Qaeda's who were fighting, these are the bad guys, but for all I know, they're playing the same kind of role they played in Iraq, where they're actually just a very small part of the insurgency.
They just get all the credit because they do all the crazy stuff.
They're a pretty small section in terms of popular support, but unfortunately they are a disproportionate number in terms of who actually have the guns.
You have basically five or six different major armed factions, about half of which are primarily Tuareg nationalists, about half of which are Islamic extremists.
Among the Islamic extremists, you have the Ansar group, which is sort of like the Taliban.
They are indigenous Tuaregs, but they really are hardcore Islamic extremists, which most Tuaregs are not.
I mean, they're devout Muslims, but they're not the craziest.
But then you also have the al-Qaeda in Maghreb, which is not nationalistic at all.
They basically have this extremely globalist vision of imposing their form of Islam, and they've got fighters from all over, from Algeria, from Nigeria, from Libya, from places further, from Morocco, from places further afield.
But it's mostly these two hardcore Islamist groups which have now pretty much taken over.
The problem is that given how little the French and Americans know about these groups, it's very possible you're going to actually, instead of trying to peel away the more moderate elements, they even negotiate with the nationalists and try to get some kind of compromise to isolate the extremists.
This is going to bomb the hell out of everybody.
That's going to, of course, strengthen the hands of the very extreme elements that we want to isolate.
Yeah, that's crazy.
And then, of course, as you said, the government we're fighting for in the South is a government of a bunch of mirrored sunglasses, colonel types, who overthrew the democratically elected president a year ago.
Exactly.
This is particularly sad in the case of Mali, because 20 years before the Arab Spring, that democratic government came to power through a massive nonviolent revolution, an unarmed civil insurrection where the old dictator's troops fired on the crowds, killed hundreds of people, but people kept on coming, kept being nonviolent, until the army just threw down their guns and ousted the dictator.
And they had 20 years of relative democracy.
I mean, there was corruption and cronyism and a lot of problems that a lot of these poor, artificially created African states have.
But compared to most countries in West Africa, it was probably the most democratic and the most free elections and everything like that.
And then with the Libya intervention and with the U.S. starting to train the Malian armed forces, they were emboldened to throw that government out.
And again, all of a sudden, U.S. arms coming in, supposedly for counterterrorism, to protect them from the al-Qaeda type.
Well, guess what?
Much of that equipment, including 92 land cruisers and sophisticated satellite communication equipment that the U.S. taxpayers provided the Malian army, are now in the hands of al-Qaeda.
It's just the same story, different decade, and the whole time in between then and now, too.
But one thing I think I still haven't really tried to pin you down on that I don't quite understand is what is the French interest in this?
I mean, other than is it just national pride, it's good politics for the guys in charge right now, or they're really just acting as a satellite of the United States in this case, or what?
Well, the French have always been the dominant power.
This is part of French West Africa, which combined with French Equatorial Africa, controlled about a good third of the continent for the better part of a century.
European colonialism, that is worse.
And when they allowed independence to these countries, mostly in the early 1960s, late 50s, they ended up carving them out in these really artificial ways, where you had ethnic groups that had always been together, divided between different countries, and then a bunch of different ethnic groups that never got along, kind of thrown together inside a country.
And they pretty much had destroyed the indigenous economies, like most good colonial powers tended to do, and made them dependent on France, and basically controlled their economy.
And the ministries were filled with French people that kind of told them how to do things, along the lines that they wanted to do things, and basically French economic interests dominated.
It was a classic neo-colonial situation, which made any kind of sustainable development virtually impossible, and made any kind of real political instability impossible.
And there was no surprise that within a few years of independence, virtually all these countries were under the rule of military dictators, and that's why Mali seemed to be one bright spot, since their nonviolent pro-democracy movement in 1991.
But unfortunately, many of the structural inherencies left behind by the French colonial efforts, and again, combined with the rush of arms from Libya, and the Libya intervention, and the radical fighters that trained and radicalized by the invasion of Iraq, have been able to set things back, and now Mali is in the center of this great tragic conflict.
But so, in other words, the French interest is, it has to be their way, and if it's out of hand, then they've got to put it back in hand, and it's as simple as that?
Not very much so.
So again, unlike a lot of things, this really is a French-led, French-dominated kind of thing.
They're not just being published in the U.S. or anything like that, but I do find it ironic that given the legacy of our country as one of the first revolutions against colonialism, that we have been such an enthusiastic supporter of neo-colonialism in Africa and elsewhere.
And now, are you familiar with this Professor Jeremy Keenan from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London?
Vaguely.
Oh, okay.
Well, he wrote this piece, I don't know if you read, I guess not if you say only vaguely, but I'm going to ask you about it anyway.
He wrote this piece, and I interviewed him about it earlier in the week, too, and he seemed really brilliant and very well-informed.
He had a very in-depth kind of background on Western interests in Mali, and going back really through the whole, you know, since at least, well, he goes all the way back to 1993 and the canceled election and all that, and especially picks up again with the war on terrorism and all that kind of thing.
And on the show, too, he made kind of a circumstantial case.
It didn't seem rock-solid, but I wonder what you think of his argument that the so-called Al-Qaeda and some of these other groups are really false flag groups run by the Algerian intelligence services.
Yes, and there's no question that during the counter-insurgency war against the GIA, the armed Islamic group, which was an indigenous group, though they were just about as extreme and crazy as Al-Qaeda, that there were a number of some of the more horrific terrorist attacks that were attributed to the GIA.
They have indeed been done by the Algerian government to try to stir up popular opposition.
I mean, the GIA did their own horrific attacks, to be sure.
But, you know, some of them, you know, there are some serious questions.
The Algerian government has never really come clean about some of these, where there are some suspicions.
The GIA, Al-Qaeda, Maghreb, these extremist Islamists are real.
But, again, at the same time, there are serious questions in a number of particular cases regarding the culpability of the Algerian counter-insurgency forces and others in some of these extremist elements.
And, of course, not surprisingly, the Algerian government have used this threat of terrorism to maintain their autocratic rule despite a desire for reform.
And, sure enough, you know, the people of Algeria have as much to complain about as just about anybody in these autocratic Arab governments.
They did not launch a revolution like you saw in Egypt and Tunisia and elsewhere, not because they don't have similar concerns, but they were so shell-shocked by the bloody civil war of the 1990s, which took over 200,000 lives, that they just didn't want to rock the boat.
So, in a sense, how much of it was actually planned this way by the Algerian government may be debatable.
But, in any case, this threat of Al-Qaeda and the Maghreb and like-minded groups has been used by the Algerian regime to maintain its control.
And now, do you suspect that maybe this could be an explanation for how it was so easy for them to marginalize the Tuaregs?
And then, one further, any chance that the Americans are in on the same scam?
They really just want trouble to justify more intervention.
They understand how it works as well as you and I criticizing them.
That the more conflict, the more conflict.
Hooray.
Certainly, a lot of the talk about Al-Qaeda and the Maghreb has been exaggerated to expand the U.S. military presence in West Africa.
It's been used to rationalize for U.S. support and French support for the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara and the like.
But I think, certainly, the tragic incident in Algeria was not something the French United States wanted, because the Algerians and French and Americans all want this natural gas to flow.
This kind of thing disrupts the markets and makes things difficult for foreign investments and for the Algerian intermediaries to profit from it.
So, I don't think any of them are happy that this happened.
I don't think there's any reason to suspect any kind of conspiracy.
At the same time, we all know they're going to take advantage of this as much as they can to justify further intervention and further militarization.
Right.
Yeah, just like with 9-11 or any of the rest of it.
Might as well have been them, even if it wasn't an inside job, you know?
Exactly.
All right.
Well, thanks so much for your time, Stephen.
It's great, as always, talking to you.
Likewise.
All right, everybody.
That's Stephen Zunis from Foreign Policy In Focus, Professor of Politics and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.
That's it for Anti-War Radio tonight.
Thanks, everybody, very much for listening.
We're back here next Friday from 6.30 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
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