Perils of Intervention

When the French government donated tens of thousands of dollars to rebuild Gao’s central market after it had been destroyed in a fire ignited by a suicide bomber in February, residents of the main city in northern Mali responded with grateful appreciation. They named the new market after Damien Boiteux, the first French soldier to die, on Jan. 11, on the first day of the war that liberated northern Mali from the grip of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic extremists who had occupied the region for nearly a year.

But within days of the market’s inauguration, on April 25, appreciation gave way to disgruntlement. The French had miscalculated: the 480 carefully numbered stalls, with their gleaming tin roofs and sturdy wooden pillars, could not accommodate the needs of Gao’s merchants, whose numbers are nearly double that of the available booths. Once the gathering place for Gao’s multiethnic community, the market has become a friction point, where accusations of corruption and ethnic-based favoritism in the distribution of stalls have tarnished the value of the French gift, and now threaten to undermine the local government.

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Meanwhile, growing resentment toward France’s perceived support for the secessionist movement of ethnic Tuaregs — the very movement that precipitated the militants’ advance last year — has led to protests in the streets. Graffiti praising France’s military intervention has yet to fade from city walls, but already a new slogan is beginning to be heard on the streets: “La France est un escroc,” France is a swindler. On May 30, a coalition of neighborhood protection groups staged a 1,000-strong anti-France protest in what is now locally referred to as Shari’a Square, the central square near the Damien Boiteux Market where, six months ago, the militants used to hack off the hands of accused thieves in the name of Islamic law. Residents weary of waiting for the government to return, along with services and jobs, are beginning to look back on that time with nostalgia. “At least under the mujahedin we had running water and electricity. Now, in some parts of the city, we have neither,” says shopkeeper Ibrahim Konipo. In April, Konipo still favored the French. When reached by telephone a month later, he said he shared his neighbors’ frustrations. “People are starting to wonder what exactly France is here for.”

France may be wondering the same thing. In the past three years, its military has seen astonishing successes, first in Libya in 2011, where France led the international effort to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and now in Mali, where some 4,000 French troops, with Chadian military assistance, routed Islamist militants in the northern part of the country in just 19 days in January. These victories have earned the French international bragging rights: Western — especially American — commentators who had long dismissed France as a faded power, a country of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” could hardly question Gallic military prowess now.

By leading in Libya, France re-established itself as a military power. Its intervention in Mali, a former colony, was arguably more about France maintaining a sphere of influence in West Africa. In both places France is discovering, just as the U.S. did in Iraq and Afghanistan, that winning a war is only the beginning: it gets harder afterward. “From the moment France committed itself, it became responsible for what happens in [Mali],” retired French general Vincent Desportes told the magazine L’Express in February. “If … the situation deteriorates, Paris will get the blame.”

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In the decade following the bloody and expensive U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, discussion of interventionary wars became unfashionable in Western foreign policy circles. The initial successes of the international effort in Libya reversed that trend, sparking a new round of debate: Could intervention, done right, play a positive role? France’s campaign to rid Mali of the Islamic extremists who threatened to overrun the whole country was the first, hopeful foray into what appeared to be a new model of intervention. Already it is starting to show cracks, not just for Mali, but also for a poorly governed Saharan region that is starting to suffer the unintended consequences of France’s success. Security analysts and government officials in nearby Nigeria blame the recent uptick in terrorist attacks there on militants fleeing the French onslaught in Mali. And in neighboring Niger, where suicide bombers attacked a military barracks and a French uranium mine on May 23, killing 30, two al-Qaeda-linked groups with roots in the Malian conflict took responsibility, saying the assaults were revenge for the French intervention there.

French President François Hollande, in a May 31 television interview, acknowledged that extremists from Mali may have taken refuge in southern Libya, where the Libyan government has little power to control them. And in a report to the U.N. Security Council on June 8, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said: “The situation on the ground remains … fluid, with sporadic clashes between armed groups and continued asymmetric attacks across the three regions of the north.” The clashes include fighting between the military and separatist ethnic Tuareg rebels on June 5. In his report Ban also said there was a “danger of armed elements moving to neighboring countries to carry out terrorist attacks and engage in criminal activities.” The threat of an Islamist contagion across the porous borders of Saharan nations means that France may be tied down in the region for years to come. Hollande, in the TV interview, suggested that French troops might have to help other countries deal with the terrorist threat.

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As governments worldwide consider taking action in Syria, France’s experience in Mali is a quiet but painful reminder that intervention is rarely quick and never easy. “If the French imagined that by eradicating terrorism from Mali it would be the end of the crisis, they were wrong,” says Anouar Boukhars, a U.S.-based North Africa nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Jihadists are nomads, they go wherever conditions are optimal. Unless you address the political problems — the lawlessness and the corruption and the social inequalities that make green pastures for terrorism — it will not go away.”

Unintended Consequences
That successful battles have unexpected outcomes should not come as a surprise. After all, Mali’s crisis was in part precipitated by the defeat of Gaddafi’s government in Libya. When Gaddafi lost power, the ethnic Tuareg fighters from Mali’s north that he had employed as mercenaries returned home to resuscitate a separatist movement they called the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA). They capitalized on the grievances of a traditionally nomadic people who have long felt marginalized by the central government. To strengthen their cause, they allied with Islamist groups that had already established a foothold in the lawless wastes of the Saharan desert, including al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO). A March 2012 coup, led by an army officer, distracted the Malian military and political class, and allowed the alliance of militant groups to seize control of virtually the entire northern half of the country in just three days. Gao, a city of nearly 90,000 people more than 1,000 km from the capital, Bamako, was their operational base.

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The Islamists eventually turned on their Tuareg allies, forcing the MNLA to flee to neighboring countries while the Islamists made plans to take the south and establish Shari’a throughout Mali. When Hollande ordered his troops to intervene, 10 months later, the MNLA offered France its full support, hoping that a French victory would enable them to regain their footing in the north.

France still has some 3,800 troops in Mali, but the number will be nearly halved by July, when 12,640 African peacekeepers move in under a U.N.-mandated mission tasked with providing security that will help the government repair damaged infrastructure, stimulate the economy, reconcile with the MNLA rebels and oversee presidential elections on July 28. By December, France hopes to have only 1,000 troops left in the country, part of a counterterrorism force whose mission is to pursue al-Qaeda-affiliated militants across international borders, which the U.N. troops will not be permitted to do under their mandate. Malians say it’s an impossible, even irresponsible timeline. “We know when the French forces leave, the MUJAO will attempt to retake Gao,” says Ishakane Ag Oyé, a local community leader. “Our armed forces have already shown us once that they can’t stand up to fight. I don’t think it will be different six months from now.”

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Although French military officials claim that Operation Serval — the name given to the intervention, after a wild African cat — killed more than 800 al-Qaeda-linked militants, suicide attacks and roadside bombs continue to exact a toll. On April 29, France lost its sixth soldier to an improvised explosive device, and on May 4, suicide bombers killed two Malian soldiers in a town near Gao. While Hollande claims “there isn’t a corner of Mali under the thumb of terrorists,” it is likely that many of the militants have buried their weapons and blended back into the population, or have retreated to desert hideouts where they will continue to be able to launch attacks against incoming Malian or U.N. troops. “The French are so concerned about leaving that they are not seeing that these terror groups are reconstituting under their noses,” says Ibrahim Ag Mohamed Assaleh, leader of the MNLA’s political wing, speaking by telephone from Burkina Faso, where he is currently in reconciliation talks.

The Malian military, hollowed out by a legacy of corruption so bad that senior officers were repeatedly accused of selling weapons to both the MNLA and Islamist militants, is in no condition to secure the country, says a Western diplomat based in Bamako. The E.U. has contributed 200 military instructors and $16 million to train 2,800 Malian troops; the first battalion graduated from its 11-week program this month. But training is not a guarantee of success. The U.S. spent millions of dollars training Malian forces as part of its post-9/11 Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, which cost $500 million over six years (starting in 2005) and whose goal was to teach the militaries of Saharan nations the basics of counterterrorism — only to see hundreds of the soldiers it had trained, including senior officers, flee or defect to the rebellion. Another recipient of U.S. military training, Captain Amadou Sanogo, was leader of the 2012 coup.

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Few are confident that the African Union soldiers have the ability to combat Islamist militants on their own. Michael Sheehan, assistant U.S. secretary of defense for special operations, told a congressional hearing in April that he believes troops from West Africa slated to join the U.N. mission are being set up for failure. “It is a completely incapable force,” Sheehan said. “That has to change.” Even if all the African troops had the training and equipment to confidently take on returning militants, there are simply not enough of them to secure a country the size of California and Texas combined.

Unfinished Business
The MNLA say they have some 10,000 fighters, and claim to represent the interests of the country’s ethnic Tuaregs, a nomadic, pastoral people who are sprinkled across several North African and Saharan nations. Tuaregs, who are generally lighter-skinned than most Malians, make up less than 10% of Mali’s population, and while some have long fought for a separate homeland, they are in the minority, say analysts who follow the MNLA movement. Still, when French troops arrived in January, they took the strategic decision not to engage MNLA rebels. “From Day One the MNLA said they would help stabilize the area,” says Colonel Cyrille Zimmer, spokesman for the French military in Mali. “Since they never attacked us, I would say that we don’t consider them an enemy. The mission from our President is to destroy the terrorist infrastructure.” Yet France, by focusing exclusively on the defeat of al-Qaeda-linked militants, may be unwittingly undermining the country’s long-term stability.

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Not long after the French assault on the northern district of Kidal scattered the Islamists, the MNLA returned. They have set up roadblocks, appointed their own governor and are collecting taxes. They have refused to disarm, and say they won’t let the Malian military into the area. France says the standoff between the MNLA and the government is an internal issue and does not want to get involved. But the way most Malians see it, France has essentially given a large swath of territory back to the separatist militants who brought in the Islamists. “What the French don’t understand is that the real war in Mali is the war against the independence that the MNLA wants, which was the root cause of our suffering and which has not been won yet,” says Kata Data Alhousseini Maiga, a community organizer in Gao who says he counts Tuaregs among his friends but feels betrayed by their actions.

For its part, the MNLA worries that the military will seek revenge when it returns. The fear is not entirely unfounded. In other northern cities, the armed forces are accused by human-rights groups of carrying out reprisal killings and beatings of Tuaregs they say worked in collaboration with the rebels. Even elections, long held up as the ultimate symbol of France’s success, are under threat. While talks between the MNLA and Bamako are seeking to solve the impasse, it is still not clear that northerners will vote. And if they don’t, Assaleh of the MNLA tells TIME that unless the Malian military leaves the entire north, the MNLA will boycott the elections. A government spokesman has said a military withdrawal is out of the question. If northerners don’t vote, either because of a boycott or intimidation by the MNLA, the election could be cast as illegitimate, setting the stage for a return to insurgency. Order may already be breaking down in Kidal; the government has accused the MNLA of expelling non-Tuareg residents from the area. France says it will investigate the allegations.

The French intervention may have for the moment saved Mali from becoming an Islamist militant sanctuary in the heart of West Africa, but it has achieved little in terms of addressing the root causes of the crisis. Northern Mali remains a key transit point for drug smugglers traversing the Sahara en route for North Africa and the lucrative European market. Its ungoverned and difficult desert terrain makes an ideal hiding place for kidnappers-for-ransom. Weapons freely move in both directions, and, according to Western diplomats in Bamako, militant groups, including AQIM and MUJAO, are funding themselves from the profits of criminal enterprise — as they did before the French arrived. It may be years before AQIM and other Islamist groups regain the cash, the weaponry and the skills to rise up a second time in Mali, but if the government cannot address the grievances of its northern citizens, or if it fails to stop the trafficking, the militants will likely gain support and grow materially stronger. Even before France sends the last of its troops home, it may find the region pulling it back in again.

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