Murder in Mali

[Valin]

The American Spectator:

Our foes strike at a weak link.

Roger Kaplan

11.23.15

 

Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists killed at least 27 hostages in a Radisson-Blu hotel in the Mali capital of Bamako on Friday, before U.S. special forces backed by French and Malian military and police intervened to stop what would have been an even worse carnage. At least one hundred hostages, including hotel guests and staff, are wounded and three of the assailants are reported shot dead.

 

(Snip)

 

Virtually all Malians are Muslim, but the tribal, or ethnic — the word, despite its distasteful Soviet-era sound, is in common use — composition of the country is characterized by sharp divisions. These have produced recurring bouts of fighting since independence in 1961. The last campaign in what can be, imprecisely but not incorrectly, described as the Tuareg Wars, differed from the previous ones by the decisive presence of the veteran Tuareg fighter Iyad Ag Ghali on the side of the jihad boys, as the head of a force called Ansar al Dine (“defenders of the faith”).

 

(Snip)

 

On the ground in Africa, we and the French and our African allies likely are doing about as well as we can in the circumstances — the circumstances including short-sighted strategic thinking on the part of our elected leaders as well as the geography of the region and its, to our way of thinking, alien political cultures.

 

There is no question that the thinking about post-Gaddafi — if thinking of any kind there was — failed to anticipate not only the wreckage of Libya, to the benefit of the Islamists, but the chaos and violence it would add to a region already wracked by chronic low level warfare and terrorism.

 

It is difficult not to see in the fickleness of the Obama-Clinton manner of directing foreign policy a line, perhaps a jagged one but still a line, between the disaster at Benghazi and the spread of Islamist violence in the Sahel. Suckered into wrong policies, they proceeded irresponsibly and then refused to either acknowledge the lesson or learn from it. Were it not for military assistance programs in place long before they entered office, it is quite possible assaults all across the Sahel would be daily news.