The Saharan Conundrum
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magaz ... 3&emc=eta1
By NICHOLAS SCHMIDLE
Published: February 13, 2009
IN THE MONTHS AFTER 9/11, American forces in Afghanistan bombed the Taliban and, in vain, hunted for Osama bin Laden, while in Washington counterterrorism experts worried about “the next Afghanistan,” a safe haven where terrorists would train, test their weapons and organize attacks on the United States. These discussions produced a double-barreled national-security strategy that dominated President George W. Bush’s tenure. The first element of the strategy was to identify and eliminate terrorist networks that already existed. The second was to prevent new networks from flourishing by promoting open, democratic societies that, the thinking went, would be less susceptible to Al Qaeda’s message than closed ones. Hard and soft power would be brought to bear on all the potential Afghanistans, while Afghanistan itself would be kept from regressing.
The list of candidates for the next Afghanistan was long. Just about every Muslim-majority country, or even those with sizable Muslim minorities, was considered suspect. Intelligence analysts fixed their attention on remote islands and jungles in the Philippines and Indonesia and on the rugged mountains of Pakistan’s tribal areas. Africa emerged as one of the greatest areas of concern, and the Sahel, a scrubby band of ungoverned terrain straddling Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, proved especially troublesome. An Islamist government in Sudan was host to bin Laden for five years during the 1990s. In Algeria, an Islamist insurgency ultimately commanded by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, better known by its French acronym, G.S.P.C., was entering its second bloody decade. And in Mauritania only 3.5 million people occupied an area the size of Texas and New Mexico combined, making it — despite decades of oppressive military rule — one of the least-controlled parts of the world.
The Sahel soon became a laboratory for the United States to test its policies in the “global war on terror.” In 2002, the State Department started the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a counterterrorism program that involved working with local militaries in Mali, Niger, Chad and Mauritania. In 2005, the program, in partnership with the United States Agency for International Development and the Pentagon, expanded under a new name to Nigeria, Senegal, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Special Forces operatives remain in some of the countries year-round to train local armies at battling insurgencies and rebellions and to prevent bin Laden and his allies from expanding into the region.
Things haven’t quite gone according to plan. Rebels still threaten to overrun the capital of Chad, and in Sudan the violence in Darfur became worse. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda established sanctuaries in the Sahel, and in 2006 it acquired a North African franchise. Terrorist attacks in the region increased in both number and lethality.
Almost since the war on terror began, the Bush administration has been criticized for lecturing the Iraqis and the Iranians about democracy while supporting authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Despite an avowed national-security strategy that prized both democratic values and killing terrorists, the emphasis almost always fell on the latter. But in some places at least, the administration’s approach to counterterrorism has undergone significant changes. As the terrorist threat appeared to change its nature, certain administration policy makers responded with a level of nuance rarely associated with George W. Bush.
Nowhere was this shift more evident than in Mauritania, where, last summer, a military coup toppled a democratically elected government. The generals justified the coup on security grounds. The United States responded by suspending its military aid even as the junta highlighted the threat it faced from Al Qaeda. A month after the coup, militants claiming to be associated with Al Qaeda ambushed a military convoy in northern Mauritania and killed 12 soldiers. Was the United States putting its commitment to democracy ahead of its commitment to fighting terrorists? Or was the war on terror changing, with the United States no longer seeing every jihadist franchise as an existential threat?
I. The Democracy Agenda
“I have always thought that democracy was our best antiterror weapon,” Mark Boulware, the American ambassador to Mauritania, told me when I met him in Washington last fall. Boulware arrived in Mauritania at an opportune time. In April 2007, Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi became president after the country’s first transparent election. Cooperation with the United States on security issues immediately resumed, ending a two-year hiatus that followed a coup in 2005. With Abdallahi’s presidency, the Bush administration’s two dominant priorities, fighting terrorism and promoting democracy, appeared to dovetail perfectly.
Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte flew to Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, for Abdallahi’s inauguration ceremony. Months later, Bush invited Abdallahi to an intimate discussion among emerging democracies during the United Nations General Assembly meeting. Washington welcomed Mauritania into its Threshold Program, an anteroom to full membership in the Millennium Challenge Account — the flagship of the Bush administration’s approach to development aid, where funds became available only after countries achieved a certain score on a range of good-government indexes.
The democratic movement in Mauritania did not last long. Last August, Abdallahi’s generals overthrew him after he tried to fire them. The American partnership with Mauritania promptly collapsed. A high-tech American surveillance plane, which had been based in Mauritania to fly over the northern part of the country, searching for Al Qaeda training camps, was removed, as were the 80 or so Army and Marine Special Forces troops that were training a counterterrorism unit. The Threshold Program funds dried up, and Mauritania’s chances for membership in the Millennium Challenge Account disappeared.
“We were using Mauritania as an example of how countries should move forward with elections,” Dell Dailey, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, told me. Dailey served more than three decades in the army’s shadowy world of Special Operations, eventually leading such operations in Iraq and Afghanistan before joining the State Department in the summer of 2007. Dailey said the American message was simple: “When you hold elections, there are certain benefits, like assistance in security and law enforcement and economic development. The three pillars of trying to defeat terrorism and build a good society are development, good governance and security. In Mauritania, they were moving in that direction. The coup was extremely disappointing.”
The junta tried to convince the world otherwise, claiming that Abdallahi had been weak on terrorism. The new leaders said that, by legalizing an Islamist party and meeting with moderate Islamists to request help in challenging the growing militant Salafist movement in the country, Abdallahi paved the way for a string of terrorist attacks in Mauritania over the past two years. The military’s charges were ignored by Washington, however.
To this day, Washington considers Abdallahi the legitimate president of Mauritania. Two capitals coexist: one in Nouakchott, where Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz occupies the presidential palace; and one in Abdallahi’s hometown, Lemden, where he lives in internal exile. (On the anniversary of Mauritania’s independence day, Bush sent Abdallahi a congratulatory letter there.) Even the vocabularies used in the two capitals are different: Abdallahi and his supporters slip the words “democracy” and “election” into every sentence, while the junta talks about “terrorism” and “Al Qaeda” at every turn.
Now, the junta waits for President Barack Obama to give the country a fresh look. “We hope that your new president, a young man with the interests of Africa in mind, will be more understanding of our situation,” Mohamed Ould Moine, the minister of communication, told me.
II. The Franchise
When not pushing democracy, the Bush administration focused on finding and killing terrorists. Missiles from Predator drones were fired at militants in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. In the Sahel, counterterrorism officials faced people like Sidi Ould Sidna, a young Mauritanian who had a strange career as a foot soldier in an Al Qaeda affiliate. Sidna’s story demonstrates both how America’s jihadist adversaries have become more complicated than the Bush administration first envisioned and how, in the end, some figures on the administration’s counterterrorism team fashioned an unexpected response.
Late last year, I spoke to a number of sources in Mauritania and the United States, both inside and outside of government, about counterterrorism operations in the region and the activities of Al Qaeda associates there like Sidna. Many could not identify themselves in print because of the nature of their work, but from these interviews I was able to piece together a picture of jihadism in this part of the world.
Sidna grew up in a poor neighborhood of Nouakchott called Toujanine. When I went there one evening in December, I found kids playing soccer at dusk in a wide dirt road. Goats rummaged through trash that filled a ditch about five feet from the front door of Sidna’s home. According to friends, neighbors and relatives, Sidna had a reputation as a scrappy kid. “Sidi wasn’t a thief, because thieves rob you and run,” one childhood friend told me. “Sidi took your watch or your T-shirt right in front of you.” By his midteens, Sidna was smoking hashish, drinking wine and hanging out with an older crowd. He liked to dance and earned the nickname Lambada. Besides robbing people, he also stole cars. Friends and law-enforcement authorities claim that he was involved in multiple rapes.
But his conscience apparently caught up with him by his late teens. He joined a friend at a mahadra — an Islamic seminary — outside Nouakchott. He spent several months there and, like many restless young men in the region, grew fond of listening to jihadist audio recordings, particularly those of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Iraq’s Al Qaeda franchise, that circulated around the mahadra.
“Why Zarqawi?” I asked the friend who took Sidna to the mahadra. “What made his sermons appealing?”
“Everyone in the Muslim world wants to see American tanks blown up and their troops killed,” he said. “But bin Laden and Zarqawi were the only ones actually doing it. Sidna admired them for that.”
Sidna returned home to Toujanine a changed, yet no mellower, person. As part of his Zarqawi-fueled indoctrination, he adopted the ideology of takfir, or excommunication, which some extremists use to justify violence against nonbelievers. He began converting some of his fellow gang members into militant Salafists. Sidna ordered his sisters to cover their heads, patrolled the neighborhood for unmarried couples walking together and spent long hours arguing with his father, a Sufi, during which times he called him an infidel. He told his younger brother that he wanted to wage jihad against the Americans. Then Sidna headed off to a training camp.
In the spring of 2006, Sidna traveled to a camp in northern Mali run by the G.S.P.C., the notorious Algerian-Salafi group. He prayed that those running the camp would send him to Iraq to fight against Americans. The invasion of Afghanistan, followed by the one in Iraq, attracted young men from all over North Africa eager to wage jihad against the United States. Fernando Reinares, the director of a program on global terrorism at Elcano Royal Institute in Madrid, says G.S.P.C. camps served as one of the main conduits of foreign fighters into Iraq. “They recruited individuals at the local level, trained them and then sent them to Iraq,” he said. European police reported a growing number of G.S.P.C. cells in major cities. In 2002, authorities in Italy claimed to have disrupted a G.S.P.C. plot in Bologna to bomb the Basilica of San Petronio, which has a 15th-century fresco of the Prophet Muhammad being tormented by demons in hell.
Sidna was disappointed when he reached the camp. The G.S.P.C. was in the midst of an overhaul. He found that the group was no longer looking for able-bodied young men to dispatch to Iraq, in part because of American pressure on North African leaders to clamp down on the migration of jihadists to Iraq. But it was also by choice. Now the G.S.P.C. had a new mission, to recruit non-Algerian militants to spread jihad south of Algeria.
Sidna fit into the group’s plans perfectly. The G.S.P.C.’s finances couldn’t keep pace with its ambitions, however. So G.S.P.C. leaders reached out to Zarqawi, who, until he was killed by American forces in Iraq in June 2006, enjoyed not only name recognition but also a seemingly endless pile of money. With Zarqawi as matchmaker, the G.S.P.C. courted Al Qaeda itself. After lengthy negotiations, bin Laden’s deputy, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, announced the “blessed union” between the G.S.P.C. and Al Qaeda on Sept. 11, 2006. He declared that the merger would be “a bone in the throat of American and French crusaders.” Months later, the G.S.P.C. proclaimed its new name: Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or A.Q.I.M.
A.Q.I.M. immediately set its sights on Mauritania. Not only was the country mostly vacant space and therefore a potential site for training camps, but as a close ally of the United States and one of only three Arab League states to maintain full diplomatic relations with Israel, it presented an easy propaganda target. The G.S.P.C. had already sent Khaddim Ould Semane, a Mauritanian militant, back to Nouakchott with instructions to establish a cell. Semane named his group Al-Ansar Allah al-Murabitun, the Army of Allah in the Lands of Murabitun. (Murabitun was the 11th-century Islamic empire in North Africa.) He would eventually become a leader of A.Q.I.M. in Mauritania. Sidna was sent back to Nouakchott with orders to stay on the lookout for possible targets. Sidna returned to Mauritania feeling frustrated, according to his younger brother, whom I spoke to in December. Sidna knew how to shoot a gun (having served a year in the Mauritanian army), had an extensive background in theft and showed the vigor of a fundamentalist. But if he wanted to be part of Al Qaeda, he would have to earn the privilege.
Eight months after Abdallahi’s election established Mauritania’s democratic credentials and won it new support in the West, Sidna struck. On Christmas Eve 2007, Sidna, now 21, and two accomplices decided to stalk five French tourists just outside the town of Aleg, 150 miles east of Nouakchott. The French were picnicking in the shade of a tree around lunchtime when, authorities charge, Sidna or one of his accomplices opened fire with a Kalashnikov and killed four of them. The militants hopped into hired cars and escaped. After a three-week manhunt, through Senegal, Gambia and finally Guinea-Bissau, French intelligence agents arrested them.
On the day of his extradition to Mauritania, Sidna looked more like a club kid than a terrorist: blue jeans, brown leather jacket, clean-shaven. As he strutted past a battery of cameramen while walking toward the tan DC-3 waiting to fly him back to Nouakchott, he stared into one camera and said, “Guinea-Bissau will pay dearly for mistreating God’s warriors.” The tape played on Mauritanian television and radio for days.
Sidna escaped from prison three months later. He hid in a two-story villa that had been rented by Semane in an upscale neighborhood of Nouakchott. It was painted yellow with a white railing that wrapped around the upstairs porch. Inside, a handful of terrorists had amassed weapons, explosives and suicide belts. The day before Sidna arrived, they stole a car and parked it in the garage. (They didn’t know it, but the car was being used by Mauritania’s ambassador to the United States.)
Days after Sidna’s jailbreak, the police responded to a tip and encircled the yellow house. The militants shot and killed one policeman, sparking an intense gun battle that pockmarked the villa. The sound of automatic weapons resounded through Nouakchott’s usually placid streets. After 15 minutes, the terrorists piled into the ambassador’s car. Sidna filled ammunition clips in the backseat while Semane drove and others sat on the ledges of the open windows. As the garage door opened, the car burst out, broke through the police cordon and raced down the dirt roads. A terrorist was shot and fell out of a car window. But Sidna, once again, had disappeared.
Police arrested him three weeks later. On the day he was brought before the court, Sidna taunted the judge, shouting, “Our martyrs are in heaven, yours are in hell.”
The Algerian leader of A.Q.I.M. later said that Sidna and his companions were “connected” with his group, although the murder in Aleg, at least, seemed to bear Sidna’s personal stamp more than that of Al Qaeda or its North African franchise. “This is the shape of the future for Al Qaeda — free agents laying claim to the mantle of ideological coherence, all of which goes under the name of Al Qaeda,” said Mike McGovern, a professor at Yale University and former West Africa director for the International Crisis Group, an independent research and advocacy group.
III. End of the War As We Know It?
Are legions of these “free agent” jihadis, operating loosely in the name of Al Qaeda, more worrying or less worrying than a centralized Al Qaeda? Western intelligence agencies no longer agree on the nature of the threat. The Europeans generally consider A.Q.I.M. a far greater danger than do the Americans. This past fall, Germany’s intelligence service stated publicly that A.Q.I.M. had established training camps in the desert of northeastern Mauritania, in addition to those already present in Algeria and Mali. But when I asked one American counterterrorism official about the claim, he sniggered. “What are we calling a training camp?” he said. “Guys shooting small firearms? That happens at the local skeet range. A training camp suggests a level of organizational structure that I don’t think is there.”
In the early years after 9/11, scare-mongering about Al Qaeda dominated counterterrorism analysis in the United States. Almost anyone who partook in violence within the general confines of the Islamic world was tagged as a potential member of Al Qaeda, regardless of whom or what they were fighting for.
But political and religious violence in the Sahel usually had nothing to do with militias fighting for Shariah or bidding to join Al Qaeda. More often than not, the fighting involved long-running territorial disputes; ethnic, clan or tribal quibbles like those constantly plaguing Chad; and Muslims fighting Muslims, seen most vividly in Darfur. It is difficult to isolate and identify the extent to which Islam does or doesn’t play into each instance of violence in the Muslim world.
There is little question that A.Q.I.M. is composed of anti-American Islamic militants, but some regional experts stress that this doesn’t mean they take orders or receive money from bin Laden — or pose a serious threat to American security. What, if any, are the entitlements of membership in the Al Qaeda franchise? I asked Dell Dailey, the counterterrorism coordinator at the State Department, what the G.S.P.C. gained by changing its name to A.Q.I.M. He told me that when A.Q.I.M. members joined with Al Qaeda they received a “burst of money, maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars, that allowed them to knock out a few early suicide bombings with a strong Al Qaeda flavor.” The string of lethal attacks included explosions aimed at government buildings and naval barracks, and the bombing of a United Nations building in Algeria that killed more than 40 people, including, for the first time, a large number of foreigners. Dailey added, “Once they jumped on the A.Q. name, they showed an internationalist choice of targets that G.S.P.C. just hadn’t done before.”
Once they had spent the initial infusion of money, however, A.Q.I.M. reverted to its former ways. These methods included car theft, credit-card fraud, smuggling and kidnapping. Jean-Luc Marret, a fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris who is also affiliated with Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Transatlantic Relations, said that A.Q.I.M.’s fund-raising “is not about Saudi banking and global Islamic N.G.O.’s, but small, encrusted cells, trabendo (contraband) and petty smuggling.”
Dell Dailey said that A.Q.I.M.’s impulse to indulge in criminal activities is partly born out of the fact that they “can’t connect to the central branch anymore,” which affects personnel and finances. Not only are “raw recruits” like Sidna less able to get to Iraq or Afghanistan, but as an organization, Dailey told me, Al Qaeda is more constrained now. “They can’t move, communicate, recruit and post money as successfully as they could in the early days after 9/11,” he said. “We have given Al Qaeda too much credit from 9/11 onwards. We have embellished them more than they deserve.”
But just because aspiring militants in Algeria, Morocco or Mauritania might find it tougher to buy a plane ticket to Amman and slip across the border into Iraq doesn’t mean their grievances have disappeared. With, in the words of one American military official, “the demand signal [for jihadists] way down in Iraq,” there appears to be a reverse migration of North African fighters coming home to join A.Q.I.M. A result has been an injection of free-agent militants into the Sahel with crisscrossing loyalties, and no one is sure who is in command. There are even rumors of splits among the A.Q.I.M. leadership. “The A.Q.I.M. folks in northern Mali are not a monolithic group,” the official, who is a specialist in North Africa, told me. “Are the Mauritanians part of A.Q.I.M.? The debate remains unresolved. Some of them are taking orders directly from A.Q.I.M. Some have gone to the camps and then went back to Mauritania to start their own franchise. And there’s some home-grown factor. In Mauritania you see all of it.”
IV. The Attack
In early September, a month after the coup, top Mauritanian army officials learned that five vehicles carrying A.Q.I.M. fighters had crossed from northern Mali into Mauritania and were racing across the desert toward Zouerate, an iron-mining town about 500 miles north of Nouakchott. Zouerate is the heart of Mauritania’s economy. Iron accounts for almost half of the nation’s exports. Any disruption in Zouerate’s daily routine could cripple the country. A hastily organized government patrol — composed of 4 light-brown Land Cruisers, 19 soldiers, an officer, a civilian guide and 2 .50-caliber mounted machine guns — headed into the desert to take on the militants.
“Al Qaeda wants to destabilize our country,” Col. Mohamed Ould El Hadi, Mauritania’s director of national security, told me last month in his office in Nouakchott. It has had considerable success already. Even though A.Q.I.M.’s attacks have been less grand in scale than the bombing of the United Nations building in Algiers in December 2007, its Mauritanian operations have proved more debilitating. The murder of the four French tourists in late 2007, followed by a gun assault on the Israeli Embassy in Nouakchott in early 2008, dealt a devastating blow to the tourism industry. Not two weeks after the French tourists were killed, organizers of the annual Paris-Dakar Rally, whose route normally covers a considerable stretch of Mauritania, canceled the race. (The 2009 rally relocated to South America.) Some estimate that the number of tourists who visit Mauritania is down by half.
No one in the patrol sent from Zouerate had received American counter-terrorism training, and they soon went from hunters to hunted. Shortly after dark, they discovered a line of fresh tire tracks in the sand — made by A.Q.I.M. fighters, who had camped on a dune in the distance. The patrol motored up the tracks while the militants watched the headlights bounce over the dunes. The militants waited as the lights grew brighter and the whine of the engines of the Land Cruisers grew louder. The lead vehicle had just climbed into view when A.Q.I.M. opened fire.
Initial reports suggested that A.Q.I.M. had kidnapped the soldiers. Hoping to stop the terrorists before they returned to their sanctuary in northern Mali, the Mauritanian military asked the United States for help. The Americans refused, reaffirming the position that the junta should restore Abdallahi first.
Two days after the ambush, while the U.S. Embassy was still refusing to assist the ruling junta and the search for the missing soldiers continued, A.Q.I.M. issued a communiqué. The group boasted of a “new attack in the city of Zouerate in northern Mauritania against those who obey the Jews.” The communiqué went on, “By God’s grace, the brigades of Mujahideen set an ambush for the army of unbelief and apostasy that managed to take 12 soldiers prisoner, including a commander by the rank of captain . . . while the rest of Allah’s enemies escaped, fleeing their failure and defeat.” The next day, a Mauritanian official told me, a search-and-rescue team moved to an area where vultures were circling overhead and found 12 bloated, naked corpses, lined up side by side. Three of them were booby-trapped with dynamite. All but one was beheaded.
At the end of its second term, the Bush administration’s strategy for the war on terror remained within the framework in which the war was first conceived — destroy terrorist networks and promote democracy — but the manner in which those principles were put into effect had clearly changed. Even someone like Dell Dailey, who was deeply involved for years in fighting terrorists with traditional military tactics, had come to reject the idea of embracing a military government in Mauritania just because of the presence of an Al Qaeda affiliate inside the country. In its final year, the Bush administration seemed to understand that, in places like Pakistan, it had created legions of enemies with its unflinching support for President Pervez Musharraf. It hoped to avoid doing the same thing in Mauritania, even as the junta, like Musharraf, decried the former civilian leaders as corrupt and weak on terrorism.
The Obama administration is continuing the recalibration of counterterrorism. President Obama has promised to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently cautioned against the militarization of foreign policy. “Armed forces may not always be the best choice to take the lead,” he said during a speech in Washington in January, adding later that “we need to reallocate roles and resources in a way that places our military as an equal among many in government.” Similar themes have been echoed lately by the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, and others engaged in counterterrorism policy. The coup by the Mauritanian junta may have been badly timed. Part of the new strategic thinking in Washington involves being less optimistic about the power of militaries to solve political problems.
The war against Al Qaeda will undoubtedly continue, but a more nuanced analysis of Al Qaeda has led to a more nuanced approach to combating terrorism and a reconsideration of how the strategy that guided the war on terror in its early years should be put into effect. This is partly a result of new thinking in Washington and, according to security officials, partially a result of bin Laden’s questionable business model: the franchise. “Where G.S.P.C. was, to where A.Q.I.M. is today, I just don’t see the merger as a force multiplier for them,” a senior defense official familiar with Special Operations told me. The war on terror is being reconceived, and the result may not look very much like a war at all.