What are we doing in the Sahel?

In early June, Abdelmalek Droukdel was killed near the north-eastern Mali town of Tessalit, an event likely to provoke a response along the lines of: Who? Where? So What? To the casual observer it may have been an obscure event in an even more obscure location, but for the French defence minister, Florence Parly, it was a major triumph in the bitter, protracted and increasingly violent struggle against Islamist extremists in the Sahel region of Africa.

First, the Who? Droukdel was born in Algiers in 1970 and became a career terrorist, operating along the boundary between criminality and religious/political violence, a profile strikingly similar to his revered mentor Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the first leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Droukdel rose through the ranks to lead Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), an organisation with its roots in the civil conflict that devastated Algeria for much of the 1990s and which declared allegiance to Al-Qaeda in 2007. Parly went so far as to identify him as a member of Al-Qaeda’s “management committee”, though whether that has a basis in hard intelligence or was an easy boast in a tough campaign remains to be seen.

The policy of decapitation in counter-insurgency — specifically targeting insurgent leadership — is a hotly contested issue. British policy has often taken the better the devil you know line, particularly if it becomes possible to penetrate the organisation around the leadership and so derive long term intelligence access.

The Americans tend to a more whack a mole approach that engages each target as it presents, on the assumption that mortality discourages ambition. That’s not always a successful policy when fighting fundamentalists for whom death in battle is the highest expression of religious vocation. Whatever the relative merits, the French fall into the latter camp as part of a heavily attritional strategy and Droukdel was the target in a sophisticated special forces operation.

Next the Where? Tessalit is a fly-blown town close to the Mali/Algeria border in a region that bears vivid testament to the impact of climate change and the constant process of desertification. The contrast with the Malian capital could hardly be greater. Bamako has the appearance of a thriving Brussels suburb, where the number of French and EU soldiers, diplomats, humanitarians and support staff in residence have created a heavily militarised neo-colonial atmosphere and inflated the urban economy beyond the reach of locals.

Mali is part of the G5 Sahel, an organisation with Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad and Mauritania as partners and formed, under French mentorship, as a collective response to regional terrorism. The G5 form the west central part of the Sahel, the vast semi-arid southern border of the Sahara that runs as a contiguous geographical entity from Senegal in the west to Sudan on the shores of the Red Sea. While the Francophone influence is strong in the G5 countries, it is pre-dated by an imperial Malian tradition that has its own enduring cultural legacy.

As for “So What?” in 2011, President Gadhafi of Libya was overthrown by a light touch, western led intervention, aided by a number of Arab states. Sufficiently light touch to be characterised as a drive-by shooting rather than an attempt to re-order Libyan society; civil war followed and continues today.

Ethnic Tuareg militiamen from Mali were bit players in the Libyan drama and had long served as a mercenary force within Gadhafi’s army. Out of a job and flush with looted weapons, they returned to Mali determined to carve out a separatist state in the north of the country and willing to ally with the itinerant Islamist groups that were exploiting the huge ungoverned tracts of the northern Sahel. The combined insurgents overran Malian forces and triggered what amounted to the spontaneous combustion of the Malian state as the army overthrew the Bamako government. Then it got complicated.

The Islamists fell out with the separatists; the French intervened and tacitly allied with the Tuareg; and, neighbouring states piled in. Chaos ensued as displaced pastoralists from the north began to squeeze the more settled farming communities of central Mali out of their land. In turn, these dispossessed sought the protection of the Islamist groups who gained a secure operating base in return. The French then doubled down in 2014 with Operation Barkhane, under which umbrella 5,100 troops continue to operate. This is in addition to an EU training mission, the improbably named United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission (MINUSMA), the G5 Sahel Joint Force and an EU Capacity Building Mission which will have spent $9 billion on reinforcing state institutions by the end of this year.

Despite the absence of any public debate, stability and security in the Sahel have become the main pillars of the EU’s central foreign policy project. The stakes for the Union are high and all about stopping the export of terrorism and refugees across the trans-Saharan migration routes, into the Mediterranean Basin and then on to continental Europe. The particular sensitivity about refugee movement is evidenced by the fact that Chancellor Merkel is almost as frequent a visitor to the region as President Macron. So what are the chances of success?

Despite the range of contributing nations, the core of military capability fighting the Islamist insurgency is French and it is highly efficient. In terms of strike capability, its top end forces (including the Foreign Legion, returning to its spiritual home) are as good as any in the world; indeed, if there is a criticism it is that attritional success, of which the Droukdel operation is a striking example, is leading the French to try to kill their way to victory. Successful counter-insurgency operations are more complicated than that and are as much about offering protection and reassurance to friends and neutrals as visiting lethal effect on enemies. It’s almost as if the 60-year-old legacy of the Battle of Algiers still dominates the French military imagination, as the ghost of General Jacques Massu looks on.

Military techniques can be refined but what cannot be fixed is when the military strand of strategy supports flawed political objectives. As the EU and local elites see things, the current instability is an aberration triggered by the disintegration of Libya and stability can be restored by a return to something that looks like the status quo ante. In this analysis no account is taken, nor responsibility accepted, for power structures in which corruption is endemic and torture habitual in order to preserve the elite privileges of an ancien regime. The fact that the Sahel is the main source of their uranium also makes the French look as self-interested as their clients.

Meanwhile 5 million people are displaced as the Macina Liberation Front, Ansaroul Islam, AQIM and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara offer alternative local government structures and the long-term prospect of linking up with Boko Haram in Nigeria to form a greater regional Islamic entity. It is hardly surprising that the theatre has gained the colloquial title of Afghanistan in the West, into which we are about to commit combat troops.

Britain already has a small training team in Senegal and a Chinook helicopter detachment supporting the French in Mali. These will now be supplemented by a 250-strong ground reconnaissance force whose task will be to identify and close with the enemy. The British army, of course, will be delighted with the opportunity to hone its techniques, particularly in a role that evokes the revered memory of the Long Range Desert Group (precursor to the SAS) in World War II, but does it make strategic sense?

The advocates would claim that security is a strong suit in our future relationship with the EU and this deployment gives it manifest form. We also need a strong bilateral relationship with France under the terms of the Lancaster House Treaty and this is helping a friend in need.

Others might point out that if this is meant to thicken up UK/EU relations it would appear Mr Barnier has yet to receive the memo. The force is being committed to an irredeemable situation. The EU — essentially France — is dealing with a number of client states, each with its own problems; we failed in Afghanistan and Iraq when dealing with unitary authorities, what chance does France have in dealing with multiple separate agendas?

The EU/French campaign is curiously blunt, clumsy and maladroit and seems rooted in archaic doctrinal assumptions; neither does this flagship project have any popular mandate within the nations of the EU. Furthermore, in his recent speech on foreign policy, the Prime Minister suggested we were over-invested in Anglophone Africa; curious then, that we now look to invest in Francophone Africa. Finally, without the more fully committed military, economic, political and convening power of the US the entire enterprise is simply a folie de grandeur.

Let’s return to the title: what exactly are we doing in the Sahel?