One of the lesser-known facets of the Bush administration's War on Terror is the work that the American military is doing in Africa to help local armies combat pockets of radical groups that have set up shop in their midst. Perhaps nowhere on the continent is extremism more evident than in Algeria, where the last several months have seen a surge in terrorist bombings that have killed nearly 100 people. Bombings in and around Algiers killed 50 just last week.
The group that claims responsibility for these attacks is Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM. They are radicals born of the Algerian civil war in the 1990s, and they earned the endorsement of Osama Bin Laden a year ago, on the fifth anniversary of 9/11.
AQIM is a major concern for African countries in the Sahara region, and for Europe and the United States as well. The Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, a five-year, $500 million program run by the Pentagon, has been established to combat the group and to strengthen security in the region. The program aims to promote cooperation between the U.S. military and African armies in and around the Sahara in an effort to make the zone less hospitable to terrorist groups.
To get an in-depth look at American military activity in the Sahara, I went to Timbuktu, Mali, earlier this year for Vanity Fair, and was embedded with U.S. Special Forces who were there on a mission of several weeks. What I found was a military unit trying hard to change the way the military does business. There were plenty of guns around, and plenty of the kinds of activities you might expect to see in the training of an army, but there was also a very clear attempt to make the U.S. military look more like the Peace Corps. The Special Forces team -- while I was with them -- spent more time caring for sick children and planning how to improve villagers' access to drinking water than it did coaching Malian soldiers at target practice.
It's an intriguing concept, the promotion of a kinder, gentler side of the U.S. military machine. But it's also very much a work in progress. The Special Forces guys thought nothing of rumbling through town in their Humvees, machine guns at the ready. I spoke with several locals who were far from happy about the presence of all that brash American hardware, no matter how many children got inoculated along the way. True, most of Timbuktu's residents seemed pleased that the United States was showing such interest in their home town. But the ones who were upset about it were perhaps the very people the Special Forces guys should have been most concerned about--members of the conservative Wahhabist Islamic community.
I visited the largest Wahhabi mosque in Timbuktu, and quickly found that the anti-American feelings there run deep and may even be exacerbated by the Special Forces presence. My send-off from the mosque was rather ignominious, punctuated by a group of rock-throwing young boys.
The Pentagon plans to have AFRICOM, its newest regional military command, up and running in Africa by September 2008. With the United States thus on the verge of a major increase in attention paid to the continent, and with the familiar linked interests of national security and oil at the top of the priorities list, now is the time to think about exactly how we should, and shouldn't, be trying to make new friends.
Here is the full account of my time with Special Forces in Timbuktu.
