To add to the material so far.
GE
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Mali military coup leader trained in U.S.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/leader-of-mali-military-coup-trained-in-us/2012/03/23/
The coup came a month before Mali — one of the few established democracies in the region — was to hold a presidential election. Mali coup leaders pledged a return to democracy and said they insurgency. A U.S. defense official said Friday that the leader of the military coup that deposed President Amadou Toumani Toure for his incompetence combating the Tuareg, received military training in the US on “several” occasions. Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo, who led a military faction that deposed Mali’s democratically elected president, visited the US several times to receive professional military education, including basic officer training, said Patrick Barnes, a U.S. Africa Command [AFRICOM] official in Washington...he could not provide further details about the duration or nature of Sanogo’s participation in the State Dept. funded International Military Education and Training program. whose foreign officers are generally selected by U.S. Embassy officials. The State Department condemned the coup and called for restoration of democratic rule...[but] has not suspended aid or diplomatic relations with the country....“The actions of the mutineers run contrary to everything taught in U.S. military schools, where students are exposed to American concepts of the role of a military in a free society,” said Hilary F. Renner, a spokeswoman for the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs...State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters the U.S. government will be required by law to suspend military relations with Mali because of the coup. J.Peter Pham, African affairs specialist at the Atlantic Council Washington think tank said “It would be hard to find an officer at [Sanego's] rank or higher in the Malian military who hasn’t received training. They’ve been a pretty reliable partner in terms of counterterrorism training.” In appearances on African television since the coup Thursday, Sanogo stated he had received U.S. military and intelligence training but did not reveal details.
Mali...is a key U.S. counterterrorism partner containing al-Qaeda affiliate in North Africa. The U.S. government has bolstered Malian security forces for years...AFRICOM's planned major regional military exercise in Mali last month was canceled because of Mali’s struggle to contain a Tuareg insurgency in the northern part of the country. The exercise, Flintlock 2012, was supposed to join security forces from West Africa, Europe and the US to coordinate counterterrorism missions.
US Trains for Counterterrorism Missions in Mali
http://crossedcrocodiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/mali-10-gao-spops.jpg
2006 US Special Forces worked with the Tuareg and Algerians to destabilize Mali. Now in 2009 the US is backing Mali’s current government against the Tuareg
The New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/world/africa/in-mali-coup-leaders-seem-to-have-uncertain-grasp-on-power.html> tells more about Sanogo’s US education 2004-2012, including at Fort Benning’s Coup School:
Mali and the United States have had close military ties in recent years as part of American counterterrorism programs. According to the State Department, Captain Sanogo attended an English-language instructor course at the Defense Language Institute, a special school for international military students at Lackland Air Force Base, Tex., from August 2004 to February 2005. Nearly three years later, in December 2007, Captain Sanogo returned to the United States, this time for more English language classes at Lackland before attending the Army’s entry-level course for intelligence officers at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., instruction that he completed in July 2008. Finally, Captain Sanogo attended the Army’s prestigious infantry officer basic training course at Fort Benning, Ga from August 2010 to December 2010.
Stars and Stripes gives more detail on the ongoing train and equip activities with Mali: Leader of Mali coup received officer training from AFRICOM under U.S.-funded International Military Education and Training (IMET) programs, confirmed by the Africa Command (AFRICOM) and the State Department...
The Special Operations Command – Africa SEAL team spent weeks in Mali working with a Malian special operations unit on advanced counter-terrorism training....to build on previously established relationships and help African partner nations... These capacity-development events support the regional interagency objectives of the U.S. State Department’s Trans Sahara Counter Terrorism Partnership program and the Department of Defense’s Operation Enduring Freedom (Trans-Sahara)...
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Assensoh, Akwasi B.
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 7:13 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Cc: guy2martin@yahoo.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: Murky motives behind Mali's crisis
Subject: Murky motives behind Mali's crisis
Analysis: The murky motives behind Mali's crisis
The small Islamist groups would find it near impossible to take the whole of Mali
Patrick Cockburn
Monday, 14 January 2013
France's intervention to stop the advance of Islamic Jihadi in Mali has similarities with French action to protect the people of Benghazi from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya two years ago. In both cases the motives of all players in the crisis are more complicated than they publicly pretend.
Al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqim) is demonised as threat to France and Europe because it might establish a Taliban type regime in Mali.
But Aqim has never launched a single attack in France or Europe since it was established in 1998. Its activities in the vast wastelands of the Sahel have been confined almost entirely to smuggling cigarettes and cocaine and kidnapping foreigners.
Aqim may hold the official al-Qa'ida franchise but the movement, founded in Algeria as a breakaway from an even more ferocious Islamic revolutionary group, has always been suspected of links with Algerian intelligence.
It still has some hardcore bastions in the Kabylia in northern Algeria, but its nucleus migrated south more than 10 years ago. It was previously under pressure from Colonel Gaddafi, who maintained a sort of order on Libya's southern flank, but this disappeared with his fall. It has money and has probably recruited some foreign Jihadi wishing to wage a holy war.
The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) and the al-Qa'ida-linked Ansar Dine are the two Tuareg groups that took over northern Mali – an area the size of France – in April 2012. The MNLA, the more secular and nationalist of the groups, wants independence for a homeland for the Tuareg ethnic group.
Ansar Dine, led by a famous Tuareg rebel, Ag Ghaly, joined hands with the smaller Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (Mujao) to brush aside the MNLA. The Islamist parties achieved notoriety by banning music, for which Mali is famous, and destroying ancient Sufi shrines in Timbuktu. These movements have their sponsors, open and covert.
Morocco has been enthusiastic for foreign intervention in Mali, probably as part of its rivalry with Algeria for influence in the region.
Algeria has opposed intervention by France in the past and has always been more concerned by ethnic separatists, like the MNLA, than it is by fundamentalist Islam.
Many of the MNLA fighters were previously with Colonel Gaddafi, who opposed Tuareg separatism, but offered opportunities for Tuareg in his security forces. For all the rapid advances and retreats in this war, the two Islamist groups have only an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 fighters and the MNLA about the same numbers. The great majority of Mali's 15 million people live in the south far from the empty lands of the north.
The small Islamist groups would find it near impossible to take the whole of Mali, which is the size of South Africa, despite French protestations to the contrary. But the vastness of the country also means that the central government, even with French air support, will have difficulty in eliminating the Islamists.
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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Assensoh, Akwasi B.
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 4:07 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: Mali and the Scramble for Africa
Subject: Mali and the Scramble for Africa
Mali and the Scramble for Africa
A New Wave of Barbarism
Global Research, January 14, 2013
The French military intervention into Mali on Friday — France’s second in as many years into a former African colony — was reportedly “seconded” by the United States. This ought to come as no great surprise, given the Pentagon’s deepening penetration into Africa.
According to the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), the Pentagon plans on deploying soldiers to 35 different African countries in 2013. As NPR reports, upwards of 4,000 U.S. soldiers will “take part in military exercises and train African troops on everything from logistics and marksmanship to medical care.” (The Malian army officer responsible for the country’s March coup just so happened to have received U.S. military training.)
Of course, the U.S. military already has a significant on-the-ground presence in Africa. For instance, the “busiest Predator drone base outside of the Afghan war zone” — with 16 drone flights a day — is located at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.
But as the Army Times notes, “the region in many ways remains the Army’s last frontier.” And in order to satiate the U.S. appetite for global “power projection,” no frontiers are to be left unconquered.
Thus, as a June report in the Washington Post revealed, the preliminary tentacles of the U.S. military already extend across Africa. As the paper reported, U.S. surveillance planes are currently operating out of clandestine bases in Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Kenya, with plans afoot to open a new base in South Sudan.
The Post reported further that, “the Pentagon is spending $8.1 million to upgrade a forward operating base and airstrip in Mauritania, on the western edge of the Sahara. The base is near the border with strife-torn Mali.”
And with such assets already in place, the Pentagon was in position to not only “second” France’s intervention into Mali, but, as the New York Times reported, to weigh a “broad range of options to support the French effort, including enhanced intelligence-sharing and logistics support.”
Illuminating what such U.S. support may come to eventually look like in Mali, J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center in Washington and a senior strategy advisor to AFRICOM, commented: “Drone strikes or airstrikes will not restore Mali’s territorial integrity or defeat the Islamists, but they may be the least bad option.” A rather ominous sign, given that employing such a “least bad option” has already led to the slaying of hundreds of innocents in the U.S. drone campaign.
Of course, much the same as with the drone campaign, the Pentagon’s push into Africa has come neatly packaged as an extension of “war on terror.” As a June Army Times report notes, “Africa, in particular, has emerged as a greater priority for the U.S. government because terrorist groups there have become an increasing threat to U.S. and regional security.”
But what intervention hasn’t come to be justified by employing some variant of the ever handy “war on terror” refrain? As French President François Hollande declared on Friday, “The terrorists should know that France will always be there when the rights of a people, those of Mali who want to live freely and in a democracy, are at issue.”
“The ideology of our times, at least when it comes to legitimizing war” Jean Bricmont writes in his book Humanitarian Imperialism, “is a certain discourse on human rights and democracy.” And, we might add, a certain cynical discourse on combating terror.
Naturally, then, the notion that the West’s renewed interest in Africa is derived from an altruistic desire to help African states combat terrorism and establish democracy is rather absurd. It was the NATO alliance, lest one forgets, that so eagerly aligned with Salifi fighters to topple Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Moreover, it is this very same military alliance that is now simultaneously cheering Salifists in Syria, while bombing them in the AfPak region, Somalia, Yemen, and now Mali.
Clearly, only those practicing doublethink stand a chance of comprehending the ever shifting terrain of the Western “war on terror.”
Indeed, for once the veils of protecting “democracy” and combating “terror” are lifted, the imperial face is revealed.
Thus, the imperative driving the renewed Western interest in Africa, as Conn Hallinan helps explain, is the race to secure the continent’s vast wealth.
“The U.S. currently receives about 18 percent of its energy supplies from Africa, a figure that is slated to rise to 25 percent by 2015,” Hallinan writes. “Africa also provides about one-third of China’s energy needs, plus copper, platinum, timber and iron ore.”
What’s more, as Maximilian Forte contends in Slouching Towards Sirte, “Chinese interest are seen as competing with the West for access to resources and political influences. AFRICOM and a range of other U.S. government initiatives are meant to count this phenomenon.”
And this explains NATO’s 2011 foray into Libya, which removed a stubborn pan-Africanist leader threatening to frustrate AFRICOM’s expansion into the Army’s “last frontier.” And this explains the French-led, U.S. supported intervention into Mali, which serves to forcibly assert Western interests further into Africa.
Intervention, we see, breeds intervention. And as Nick Turse warned back in July, “Mali may only be the beginning and there’s no telling how any of it will end.”
All that appears certain is a renewed wave of barbarism, as the scramble for Africa accelerates.
Ben Schreiner is a freelance writer based in Wisconsin. He may be reached at bnschreiner@gmail.com or via his website.
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