#mali intervention

[newstfionline]

Why is France pushing so hard on Syria?

By Jamey Keaten, AP, Sep 17, 2013

CREIL, France (AP)--In a secretive compound north of Paris, colored blips and blotches on a computer-screen map of Damascus depict an armored vehicle at a highway, tanks, a blown-up building in a suburban field. An unusual glimpse at France's military intelligence headquarters demonstrates how closely the French are watching what's happening in Syria--and how involved the French government is in ending Syria's civil war.

As French President Francois Hollande keeps up the threat of military strikes against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime, he isn't just acting as President Barack Obama's poodle, as some critics maintain. France, Syria's onetime colonial ruler and a country eager to maintain its place as a military and diplomatic power, has plenty of reasons to be out front on Syria.

HISTORY. The Middle Eastern country took its current shape as a French mandate after being chiseled out of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, as did neighboring Lebanon, and French is spoken by many in both countries. France has particularly close ties to Lebanon and wants to prevent it from being sucked further into Syria's chaos.

The ties to the region also make Syria a particularly attractive place for homegrown French extremists. French Interior Minister Manuel Valls said this month that about 110 citizens or residents of France have joined up with jihadist fighters in Syria--about half the total number from European Union countries. French authorities fear they will return home to carry out terrorism.

Also, fear of chemical weapons runs deep in France. Many French people have ancestors who faced mustard gas in World War I, as chemical weapons scarred public consciousness for the first time.

INDEPENDENCE AND INTELLIGENCE. Dating back to the presidency of Gen. Charles de Gaulle in the midst of the Cold War, France has long sought to show it makes military decisions independently. A nuclear power, it has also built up one of the world's more robust intelligence machines, in part to show that it doesn't just rely on the United States for information.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian tried to drive home that point to a small group of journalists invited to the headquarters of DRM, France's military intelligence agency, in Creil north of Paris, and taken inside the high-security computer nerve center where images are beamed down from France's Helios and Pleaides satellites. The message was aimed mostly at domestic audiences, who are disillusioned with Hollande and wary of an intervention in Syria.

A high-ranking officer with the 13th RDP special forces regiment explained how French troops parachuted secretly into Mali--not showering for days beforehand because dogs can smell soap. Another showed a fake cinder block with a camera inside that could be planted near the suspected hideout of enemy fighters. A bogus stone made of plastic resin about the size of a volleyball hid a GPS beacon inside, to help with targeting.

THE MALI MODEL OF MILITARY MUSCLE. France's intervention in Mali has emboldened the government on other overseas operations. Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb was largely ousted from northern Mali. Only seven French soldiers died in the months-long intervention, while French officials say hundreds of militants were killed.

The Mali intervention offered France "an assertion of French military capabilities outside of an operation dominated by the U.S.," said Marc Pierini, a Frenchman who served 35 years as a European Union diplomat, including four years as its ambassador to Syria at the start of Assad's tenure.

SOLE STRENGTH IN EUROPE? After Britain's parliament blocked any potential British military participation in a Syria strike earlier this month, France stood alone as the European country most willing to wield the military threat alongside the United States against Assad's regime.

From a military standpoint, "none of the other European countries are needed," Pierini said. "The only European country that has Tomahawks is the U.K.--it's paralyzed politically--so the next best thing is the French Scalp," an airplane-fired cruise missile.

Former Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine said France also wants to give more teeth to the EU.

"The other Europeans are not in the mindset of 'Europe power,' but one of 'Big Switzerland'--that's to say an isolationist, pacifist evolution," and want to avoid "all foreign dramas and intervene as little as possible," he said in a phone interview. Not so France.

WANTING TO BE HEARD. A permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, France is often seen as a fading, if not already faded, power. Hollande wants to counter that, and is using France's vast diplomatic network to do so.

[newstfionline]

Western diplomats see danger in Mali

By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2012 JOHANNESBURG, South Africa--If top diplomats are right, the world's next inevitable war is in Mali, a West African country where Al Qaeda-linked militants have seized control of vast swaths of the Sahara desert.

Western capitals are desperately trying to prevent Mali from becoming the next Somalia: an African country with a notoriously unstable government challenged by Islamic militants who may also pose a risk to the United States and its interests.

Lending urgency to those calling for action, U.S. officials cited in news reports have implicated Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, one of the groups controlling northern Mali, in last month's attack on the U.S. mission in Libya that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

But the idea being touted--a difficult, Western-backed African military intervention against the rebels in the north--risks turning Mali into, well, the next Somalia.

And the model being suggested for the military operation? It's from Somalia.

A mission by African Union forces to defeat Al Qaeda-linked Somali rebels hasn't yet delivered clear victory, but its success in driving the militia out of the main cities, opening the way for the first government and president in 21 years, has fired military imaginations.

Like Somalia, Mali has seen radical Islamist fighters take over most of the country and institute a strict brand of sharia, or Islamic law, amputating thieves' hands, repressing women and recruiting children to fight. And like Somalia, Mali is a country with myriad complex tribal rivalries, shifting allegiances and long-held grievances.

But Mali isn't Somalia.

"The analogy overestimates the capacity of the West African forces," said Gregory Mann, a Columbia University expert on Mali, referring to troops that have been promised for Mali military action by ECOWAS, the regional leadership body. "There are huge logistical problems which ECOWAS doesn't have the capacity to solve on its own."

The U.N. Security Council has given the United Nations and ECOWAS until Nov. 26 to come up with a military plan to retake northern Mali from the Islamic rebels. France, the main champion of swift military intervention, has ruled out boots on the ground, while Germany and the U.S. have ruled out sending forces, but all have spoken of intelligence support, military training and other assistance.

Analyst Anouar Boukhars of the Carnegie Endowment said ECOWAS would need the support of a powerful foreign air force to prevail against the Islamists.

"We know that ECOWAS can't do it by itself, and they know it too," he said. "There has to be logistical support and air support, most probably from France."

Military and government officials from the U.S. met counterparts in Paris last week to discuss security and intelligence in the northern Sahel region, including Mali, news agencies reported. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton travels this week to Algeria, the most formidable military power in the region, which has dropped its outright opposition to a foreign military operation, according to news reports.

Mali was a flawed democracy of 20 years' standing in West Africa's troubled "coup belt," but years of mismanagement, corruption and the central government's perceived long neglect of the ethnic Tuareg people of the north sowed the seeds for the latest Tuareg insurgency early this year and the country's spiral into uncertainty.

The stunning April seizure of some two-thirds of the country was spearheaded by a Tuareg rebel group known as the MNLA. In the confusion that followed a March coup, the Tuareg group took advantage of a weak and divided Mali army, sweeping in and taking control of the north hand-in-hand with Islamic fighters from the group Ansar Dine, who were later joined by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and another radical group.

The Tuareg group, quickly outflanked by Ansar Dine, was forced out and lately has stepped back from its demands for an independent homeland, in what Mann says is an effort to woo Western military support and project itself as a local proxy force opposed to extremism.

Some have accused the West of overstating the threat. But to European and U.S. military officials, the risk of underestimating Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and allowing an Al Qaeda affiliate with a rich source of funding from criminal enterprises to dominate so much territory in northern Africa, is an intolerable one.

But the questions are myriad. A power-sharing government that took control in April after the coup leaders stood down is weak and lacks legitimacy, and has done nothing to prepare for elections or a transition back to democratic rule. Mali's army is divided, poorly equipped and ill-prepared for a long, intractable war in the north, which would probably claim many casualties. And if West African forces were deployed in the punishing desert terrain, it's not certain how they would cope against the combat-hardened rebels.