02/15/13 – Stephen Zunes – The Scott Horton Show

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For KPFK, February 15th, 2013.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our guest tonight is Steven Zunas.
He is a senior analyst at Foreign Policy in Focus and professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.
He's also the co-author with Jacob Mundi of Western Sahara, War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution.
Welcome back to the show, Steven.
How are you doing?
Great to be on again.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Appreciate you joining us today and loaning us your expertise on the Western Sahara.
And your great new piece here at Foreign Policy in Focus is called The Mali Blowback.
More to come?
It's already started and, well, maybe the entire Mali catastrophe is a matter of blowback, as you put it in this article.
And we've got plenty of time, so why don't you go ahead and take us through the back story here and how it was that America and France have ended up at war in the Western Sahara Desert in the Texas-sized nation-state of Mali.
Well, Mali had been seen as something of a success story in that 20 years before the Arab Spring, they had their own largely non-violent civil insurrection that brought down a Western-backed dictator, Traore.
And they've had free elections ever since.
They struggled with issues of dependency and the International Monetary Fund and others trying to impose austerity and corruption and the like, but at least they had elections every year.
They had a vibrant civil society, which is pretty impressive for a country where nearly half the people are illiterate and is one of the poorest countries in the world.
And one of their triumphs was getting the Tuareg rebels, who had periodically been rebelling against the southern-dominated government, to lay down their arms.
In fact, they didn't just lay them down, they brought them all to the center of the capital of Bamako and set them on fire in a very impressive display of disarmament.
But unfortunately, the war in Libya certainly changed the dynamic, because when NATO intervened, it brought out what had been a largely non-violent, initially non-violent, struggle against Qaddafi.
The post-democratic revolution became an effort by Western powers to steer the direction of the country's future, and in the chaos from the bloodshed, which killed many thousands of Libyans, these huge arms caches that Qaddafi had had to fight against the periodic Western intervention got into the hands of these Tuareg tribesmen, who are nomadic people of the Sahara and the Sahel region, who were divided among a number of countries, including Libya, Algeria, Niger, Mali, etc.
And they got these arms to their cousins in Mali, who frustrated the pace of reforms, but also now having the means to escalate their rebellion, ended up scoring a series of military victories against the Malian army.
Now, the Malian army was upset the civilian government wasn't supporting their counter-insurgency enough.
The Malian government was afraid if they cracked down too hard, they might end up making things worse.
There was also a degree of ineptitude on their part, to be honest, but it was more of a calculated thing that said, hey, these guys want their freedom, if we mess with them too much, it could just get worse.
But there are elements of the Malian military, including a U.S.
-trained officer named Sanago, who ended up staging a coup, ending Mali's 20-year experiment with democracy.
Well, this created a lot of chaos, because people who didn't like the current president weren't real happy with the idea of the military taking over again.
And in the chaos, the military became even less effective in battling the rebels, and the Tuareg rebels ended up taking over the entire northern part of the country and declaring an independent state.
But they were stretched so thin at this point, by their unexpected and rapid takeover of the northern half of their country, they became vulnerable to another armed group, also flush with arms as a result of the Libyan war.
And these were hardline Islamists, including people involved in al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, who, along with a couple other allied militias, ended up taking over from the Tuaregs and basically installing a Taliban-type totalitarian regime on the northern part of the country.
And emboldened by that victory, several weeks ago they began to march south to seize more territory, which then prompted the French, the former colonial power, to intervene militarily with the support of U.S. transport planes, U.S. satellites, and drone surveillance and the like.
And they then ended up driving the hardline forces out of most of the towns to the relief of most of the inhabitants.
But now these Islamist forces are spreading out further into neighboring Niger, and some of their allies ended up with a spectacular terrorist attack in Algeria that killed a couple dozen foreigners at this natural gas facility.
And so the central government and the western forces have had a temporary victory.
We may very well have not seen the end of this, especially since, again, the radical forces have all these arms, courtesy of the NATO intervention, and I should quickly add, in taking over northern Mali and seizing some Malian army installations, they now have a hold of 92 brand new land cruisers, satellite communications technology, and other equipment that was provided by the United States to Mali, but now is in the hands of al-Qaeda.
What a horrible story.
You tell it so well.
For a long, complicated mess, you really set it straight there, real quick.
And just by the way, we've been wondering, where'd they get all the trucks?
I talked with Thomas Mountain from Counterpunch, and he was saying the Saudis must be buying them trucks, because look at all the trucks.
Oh yeah, those are American.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
I mean, it's a classic case of blowback.
I mean, we've seen this kind of thing before.
I'm talking with Stephen Zunis from Foreign Policy and Focus, FPIF, and there's quite a bit to go over there.
I hope that people were basically able to keep up.
What you're saying here is, you have this state, Mali, where the majority of the country is where the less population lives, up in the north, and that's the Texas-sized region where the Tuaregs live, and then you have the southern part of the country, where I guess most people are black and they're less Muslim, that kind of thing, sort of like Sudan, only with the power in the opposite place, right?
Yeah, pretty much exclusively Islamic, but yeah, there are different cultural differences, to be sure.
Oh, okay.
Linguistic and other, yeah.
I guess I was thinking they were more Christian because of the French influence down there in the south, but what do I know?
But anyway, the war in Libya led these Tuaregs to say that the autonomy that they had already won, and you said they had made peace, even held a bonfire and burned their weapons in the town square, what, back in 96 or something?
They said this autonomy was not good enough.
They wanted to secede from the Union, which as far as I'm concerned, that's their right, but the only reason they bothered to do it or could even try was because they had all of Gaddafi's weapons left over as a consequence of the American war there.
But then once the Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the Brotherhood signed in blood and whatever kooks came down from Algeria, they decided that actually secession wasn't good enough.
They wanted to march on the south too, and it was then that the French finally went ahead and started bombing.
Is that about right?
Exactly, yeah.
And then what can you tell us about American involvement in this mess so far?
Well, historically, the former French colonies of Africa have been seen to be in the French sphere of influence, and this is true even going back to, for example, there was a civil war in Chad.
Actually, there have been quite a few civil wars in Chad, but this particular one in the early 1980s where Gaddafi was allegedly supporting one faction, and they were making some advances, and the French intervened on behalf of the central government, and there was some logistical support for the United States.
But they asked President Reagan directly at a press conference, do you see the United States getting involved?
He said, no, this is in the French sphere of influence.
So they're quite explicit that the former colonial powers exert this kind of neo-colonial authority over their former colonies.
But as then, and prior to that, I remember the United States, under Carter, funneled, used C-130 transport planes to bring Belgian troops into the Congo, or then into Zaire to crush a rebellion against the western-backed Mobutu dictatorship.
But we usually allow the former colonial powers to take the lead.
But given the United States has what military analysts refer to as power projection capability, that is the means, because you have such a hugely bloated military budget compared to just about any other country in the world, we do have the C-130 transport planes, we do have some of the drones and other technologies for surveillance and things like that, that we are quite willing to make available to support military action, even if there are not many troops involved.
And we do have some advisors and technical support on the ground, but no combat troops.
Again, we leave this to the French.
But again, we are very much willing and capable of supporting this kind of intervention, using our far-flung interventionist capabilities.
Well, now, so I guess France is already its own kind of power.
So does that mean that you wouldn't consider them more like just the Ethiopians, in this case, as the American sock puppets fighting our war for us?
Because the war in Somalia, that's an American war.
I don't care what anybody calls it, right?
Yeah, I certainly agree with you in the case of Ethiopian intervention in Somalia.
We can think of all sorts of surrogate kind of wars.
But this is definitely a French-led effort, but one in which the United States does feel a sense of common cause and willingness to play a supportive role.
Okay, so now, what would have been so bad, from the French point of view, if the Northerners had marched on the South, taken the capital?
What kind of business would the French have lost?
What do they care, really?
Well, there are a number of things.
One is on the geostrategic level.
Obviously, they're concerned if this possibly was to become a base of operations for other rebellions and acts of terrorism and that kind of thing.
But, of course, there's also the fact that France is the overbearing economic power in the region.
Certainly, there's large underdevelopment, but certainly a potential mineral wealth in that part of Mali.
There's certainly French investments of various kinds.
Indeed, this is part of what they call the Communité Française, where basically, before they went to the euro, the French franc was the main currency.
And it was one of those classic neocolonial deals where the country pretty much had its own flag and its seat in the United Nations and that kind of thing.
But the economic relationship was very similar to a more classic colonial state.
It was interesting when then-Foreign Minister Sarkozy of France visited Bamako, I think, eight or ten years ago.
There were big demonstrations against the overbearing French economic influence and the austerity programs and the like.
And, again, that was a good thing about Mali.
They did have an active civil society where they were willing to do that.
And the good news was that, unlike a lot of African countries, they were allowed to protest and the police didn't come out and shoot them.
But the bad news is that they were so poor and dependent, they pretty much had to succumb to French demands and they remained a kind of neocolonial overseer.
And, of course, they would lose that kind of influence, obviously, if Barack Obama ended up taking over the country.
Yeah.
Well, so what about gold and uranium and then their hills and all that kind of thing?
Yeah, that's what I was saying.
It's somewhat underdeveloped, but potential for quite a bit of mineral wealth.
And as that is explored and developed, it is definitely the French who are first in line to taking advantage of it.
Yeah, of course, the whole story about Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from Niger.
The reason that the former ambassador was able to prove that that wasn't true was because he just went and talked to the French who ran all the uranium mines in Niger and said, did you guys sell a gigantic boatload of this stuff to Saddam Hussein?
And they said, yeah, no, we're sure we didn't.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
But they were who we asked, though, the French.
Obviously, because, again, these are ridiculously poor countries.
They're very underdeveloped.
They're the backwaters in ways.
Per capita income is only a few hundred dollars a year.
The infrastructure is very, very weak.
So, again, it's really a miracle that for so many years, Mali was able to have a somewhat democratic, pluralistic society despite the poverty and dependency.
But, you know, the problem, of course, is when you have that level of underdevelopment, that the foreigners end up coming in and taking advantage of the situation.
Well, now, so...
Development has less to do with anything innately cultural but about, you know, centuries of colonialism and exploitation and a very conscious effort to impoverish them and to make them dependent and to de-develop them, if you will, in order to maximize the profits and the political and economic control.
Now, so it seems like all things being equal, which they're not because of the Western intervention, obviously, but it seems like you would normally have these states break apart anyway, these two parts of Mali.
It seems almost rather than divide and conquer, the French could have drawn this border to unite very different people in order to give them other problems besides the foreigners to fight about, you know?
Exactly.
I mean, on the one hand, Mali back in the 12th century was a great empire, a prosperous empire, you know, one that, you know, with great wealth and that's where Timbuktu came into prominence as one of the most prosperous trading centers in the world.
That's why I emphasize that this kind of poverty and dependency is not something that has, you know, always been the case.
But, you know, with French colonialism, not only did they destroy the indigenous economies and these indigenous, you know, political and social orders, you know, they quite, as with the British and other colonialists, they quite consciously embarked on a policy of divide and rule.
And if you look at the old maps of Africa, you'll find that there's a whole section, you know, a whole thing.
Africa is usually divided between green and pink, you know, green being the French colonies, pink being the British, you know, colonies.
And the French controlled most of West Africa, you know, and going down, you know, from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Martinia, Senegal, you know, Mali, this whole area, you know, Cote d'Ivoire, and it was Togo, you know, Cameroon, etc.
But, you know, basically, while some of these, you know, countries had a history of a distinct identity, the vast majority were totally artificially created.
I mean, countries like Central African Republic and Chad, I mean, these did not exist historically.
Martinia, that did not exist historically.
But, you know, it makes me wonder whether the new plot is to go ahead and split them up and make them weaker in that way.
Yeah, it's until it gets too crazy.
If divide and rule ends up creating a whole bunch of, you know, ethnic conflict and fighting and that kind of stuff, it's ugly.
But it's a way of just keeping people apart from each other and dependent on the outside power that is to an advantage.
But the way they drew the map was totally arbitrary, both between the French and the British colonial powers, but also by the French themselves, where they had groups like the Tuaregs divided between different countries, and you had very disparate groups, very different cultures and historical traditions, and sometimes the history of animosity was forced into one.
And as a result, the politics in many of these societies was less traditional debates between left and right, or other strategies around development and various government policies.
It became an existential struggle between my group versus your group, you know, who gets the most out of the government and out of how we distribute the jobs and the economic goods and things like that.
And as a result, there are societies of mixed cultures and languages that if they're prosperous and if they're strong indigenously, like the Swiss, for example, they usually get along just fine.
But when you have a neocolonial power deliberately exacerbating these kinds of divisions and encouraging these kind of corrupt systems, where what little wealth the country may have is not distributed to all for the benefit of all, but for certain cliques who happen to be friendly with the neocolonial power, it's no surprise that this ends up manifesting itself in these kinds of divisions.
So in many ways, I mean, what can I reasonably debate about whether certain people have a right to see under what circumstances and that kind of thing, but I think even more fundamental than that is just the whole neocolonial system that's created the mess in the first place, that has exacerbated the mess and has made it impossible for almost any ethnic group in any combination to survive in any kind of way that gives people hope for a future and for their children.
In other words, they need, still, they need independence from the West first before they start declaring independence from each other.
Exactly, exactly.
All right.
Now, so what's the future of this insurgency?
Because when I talked to Eric Margulies, he said, well, the Tuaregs are going to quit pretty much immediately and the jihadists might fight for a little while, but there's hardly any of them.
And so this is not going to be an Iraq war, a Sunni-based insurgency, even though there have been a couple of suicide bombings and some IEDs and some things like that already.
Well, it's not going to be as bad as Iraq or Afghanistan, I think, in terms of being a major war that's going to drag out for some time, but it's definitely not going to quiet down.
I mean, the Tuaregs are still going to be pretty restive and are going to demand at least greater autonomy.
The extreme jihadist types, they've gone up to the mountains, and these are very rugged, remote mountains.
It's going to be very, very difficult to flush them out.
And they may seek sanctuary in other weak states in the area.
There are already reports of some movement into Niger.
And, of course, the risk of attacks of isolated places like the natural gas facility in Algeria increased.
So I think there's going to be not as intense a conflict as we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it's not going to be one that's going to be over any time soon.
And the trouble is, when you have such an asymmetrical kind of warfare, it sometimes encourages some of the worst and most extreme kinds of violence, such as the terrorism that attacked the natural gas plant.
And there's also even the risk that there could be attacks inside France and other places where there are immigrant communities from this part of the world where a small minority, a very tiny minority, but nevertheless potentially enough people to do damage, can be motivated by this intervention to take the battle to the colonial power itself.
Hey, let me ask you this, Stephen.
Did you see, real quick here, to finish up, did you see that piece in the Washington Post about a week and a half or two ago about how, yeah, you know, Stephen Zunes and them are right.
This whole thing is just completely blown up in our face.
And they talked about, you know, support for the guys who ended up doing the coup.
And so now they can't even help because it's against the law to help coup leaders and all this kind of thing, which is only kind of wink wink true.
But they were sort of complaining in there about how they're deaf and blind and stupid and in charge of American foreign policy.
And they have no idea really what to do.
And I think one of them complains about, you know, we just don't know how to measure it, whether we're succeeding or not with our North Africa policy.
And I just thought that really is how it's made is just a confederacy of dunces up there somewhere between the Pentagon and the State Department.
And that's how we get into the article.
But I think it's an important point here that I think people who think that the policymakers in Washington know what they're doing.
Either those who generally support the policy or those who are more skeptical.
In fact, there's one reason I'm skeptical about a lot of conspiracy theories.
Yes, some of them are real, but a lot of them sort of assume that there are people who are a little smarter and more involved and kind of know what they're doing than they really are.
I mean, the more I've looked into U.S. foreign policy, especially in regions that the State Department and the Pentagon and the White House don't know that well, such as the Sahelian region of West Africa.
They really don't know what's going on there.
And that's what's scary about these military solutions.
If you're going to go to war, given all the risks involved, given the costs, both human and material, and given that you do have this problem of blowback, backdraft, everything else, if you're going to get involved in military, you really ought to know what the hell you're doing.
You really ought to know about that country and its people and the issues and everything pretty darn well before you jump into trying to impose a military solution on such a complex political, economic, and social and cultural mess as we find in that part of Africa.
So, you know, that's a very, very important point here that I think in so many ways, we don't know what the hell we are doing.
And that's all the more reason why we should stay the hell out.
All right.
That is Stephen Zunis.
He is senior analyst at Foreign Policy and Focus and professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, co-author of Western Sahara, War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution.
Thanks very much for your time again, Stephen.
My pleasure.
Great talking to you.
And that is the show for tonight.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
We're here every Friday from 6.30 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is ScottHorton.org.
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