Edoardo Baldaro Scuola Normale Superiore – edoardo.baldaro@sns.it Istituto di Scienze Umane e Sociali

Convegno SISP 2016 – Milano, 15-17 Settembre

Section 8: International Relations

Panel 8.1: The US and the Challenge of Building Global Order from Regional Disorder

Constructing a Regional Order through Security: Strategies and Failures of U.S. policy towards the Sahara-Sahel region

Draft Version, Please do not Quote or Cite without Author’s Permission

Introduction

At the very beginning of 2012, few thousand of Tuareg fighters organized under the banner of the MNLA – Mouvement National pour la Libération de l’Azawad – gave birth to an uprising in the northern regions of Mali, a north-western African country with a long history of Tuareg rebellions1. After few weeks, the rebellion turned out to be a real war of conquest led by a coalition formed by MNLA, Aqim – al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb – and two more local Islamist groups, Ansar Dine and Mojwa2. During the war, the Malian army showed to be totally unprepared and unable to stop the rebels: in many occasion soldiers leaved their posts without fighting, abandoning behind them arms, ammunitions and a territory without defenses. On March 2012 the situation got even worse: a group of army officers ruled by Captain Sanogo organized a coup in Bamako, overthrowing the democratic elected president Amadou Toumani Touré (ATT), just few weeks before the planned presidential elections3. This episode strongly contributed to discredit the effective efficiency of the “poster child” Malian democracy. The chaos in the south and the lack of adequate defense forces in the north allowed rebels to conquest the most important cities in the

1 The Tuareg are a nomadic people of Berber origins who live in the Sahara-Sahel region, especially on the territory of Niger and Mali. Azawad is the way Tuareg call northern part of Mali: they consider the region as their homeland and as an independent territory 2 Ansar Dine (“Helpers of the Islamic religion”) is a militant Islamist group mainly formed by Tuareg fighters and led by Iyad ag Ghaly, a former leader of previous Tuareg rebellion who radicalized and started preaching an extremist interpretation of Islam after a period spent in Saudi Arabia. Mojwa (“Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa”) is a splinter group of Aqim which has been led for a while by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, one of the most famous terrorist in the region3 President Touré would not have participated to those elections, as he was finishing his second mandate, at Malian constitution does not allow a third re-election.

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north, i.e. Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu. From June, jihadist groups took control over the rebel coalition, and started imposing shari’a on the regions under their rule. Only the French intervention, launched in January 2013, prevented Aqim and its allies from creating an effective Islamic state in North-western Africa (Bøås & Torheim, 2013; Chauzal & van Damme, 2015; De Castelli, 2014; Galy, 2013; Harmon, 2014; International Crisis Group, 2012; Lecocq et al., 2013; Marchal, 2013; Thurston & Lebovich, 2013).

These events have been followed with a particular interest by the United States. Between 2002 and 2013, USA spent approximately one billion dollars in the Sahara-Sahel region, to plan and launch security, counterterrorism and institution-building programs. The U.S. considered the Sahel as the second African front of the War on Terror since at least 2003: according to American decision-makers, Mali and its neighbors formed a region where it was essential to bring order and stability, before that it turns into a terrorist safe haven (Archer & Popovic, 2007; Gutelius, 2007; Kennedy Boudali, 2007; Subcommitte in Africa - Committee on Foreign Affairs- Senate, 2009; Swedberg & Smith, 2014; Warner, 2014). The apparently stable and democratic Mali was considered as the pivot state of the American strategy: it was the country that received the biggest amount of aid, and its army was trained and equipped by American officers; moreover, captain Sanogo participated to IMET (International Military Education and Training) program, and followed a specific training in Georgia and in Quantico, Virginia (Whitlock, 2012a). The 2012 Malian events marked a clear failure of American counterterrorism policy in the region, and asked for a complete change in American strategy and approach to the issue, that it is still under process. The way the United States tried to create order in the region showed to be unable to stop centrifugal dynamics in the Sahel.

Even if the Sahara-Sahel region has never been a strategic priority for the U.S., neither a place of main engagement, the United States have become one of the main international actors in the area during the last fifteen years. In the Sahel they tested new, multi-sectorial and integrated approaches to counterterrorism and de-radicalization, which inspired both organizational and policy changes also in other areas (Kandel, 2014). We can then suggest that the collapse of Malian institutions under the attack of a “terrorist-driven” civil war in 2012, called not only for a revision of the American approach in the Sahara-Sahel, but asked for a change in the way United States support order and stability in world “peripheries” (Buzan, 1991).

Starting from these considerations, the main questions this paper aims to answer are: Why did the United States consider their security was at stake in the Sahel? How did they try to bring order and stability in the region? Why did they fail?

We consider the three questions as mutually linked by a casual and a normative chain. The United States defined their interest and their security in the Sahel according to their vision of order and threat in the International System. As a consequence of those interpretations, they elaborated norms and rules about how to intervene and modify institutional equilibrium in unstable regions. Exploring

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these rules and actions should allow understanding why the result did not coincide with American expectations.

This paper is partly based on our research experience: during the last two years we collected information and organized interviews in Washington, Bamako, Paris and Brussels. Because of the sensitive nature of the issue, particularly for what deals with terrorist and anti-terrorism activities, we agreed with our interviewed to adopt the “Chatham House rule”4. Any information received has been compared as far as possible, with other sources and with works by other experts.

How the world peripheries challenge international order and American security

According to Barry Buzan, 1989 represented the ‘meta-event’ that determined “the end of the twentieth century”, and gave birth to a new international order (Buzan & Hansen, 2009). During the Cold War the international system was based on the division between the East and the West, two conglomerates of actors who shared the same ideology and similar political and economic systems, and defined their identity in opposition to the other block. Nowadays, different authors suggested that the international system should be seen as crossed by a new “fault line”, a separation of its members along the North-South divide (Ayoob, 2005; Buzan & Hansen, 2009; Thérien, 1999).

Probably, the structural division between wealthier and less developed countries was an issue even before the end of the Cold War, but the West-East divide created a fracture that crossed the whole international system (Hettne, 2010). As long as crisis in the South were seen as an humanitarian and peripheral issue (Sending, 2004; Smith, 2009), the potential conflict between the North and the South was silenced, and regional dynamics in the South received an inadequate attention by security experts and decision-makers (Acharya, 1997; J. S. Nye & Lynn-Jones, 1988; Risse-Kappen, 1997). Facing the challenge to re-image the future of the international system after the end of the Cold War, Barry Buzan proposed to rediscover this hidden conflict: ‘Although South is a better term than Third World, the best available set of terms to capture the relationships of the 1990s comes from the centre-periphery approach elaborated in the dependency literature of the 1960s and 1970s. 'Centre' here implies a globally dominant core of capitalist economies; 'periphery' a set of industrially, financially and politically weaker states operating within a set of relationships largely constructed by the centre. This approach captures the key elements of hierarchy that now shape international relations, without necessitating recourse to misleading geographical images’ (Buzan, 1991).

Because of its institutional, political, economic and social characteristics, in the post-Cold War international system the Global South had the potential to become the new source of threat for the centre-fashioned international order. One of the main consequences of this new international division has been the redefinition of the concept of security: ‘The concept and practices of security 4 ‘When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.’ - See more at: https://www.chathamhouse.org/about/chatham-house-rule#sthash.V5pUKKgI.dpuf

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have experienced a global redefinition over the past quarter-century and particularly since the end of the Cold War. The key shift has been away from the definition of threats as driven by strategic interests and the global power-play of the superpowers. Rather, security today is more widely accepted to embrace insecurities driven by non-military challenges (Poku, Renwick, & Porto, 2007).

On the one side, Northern/Western conception of security essentially meant ‘the absence of a military threat or […] the protection of the nation (State) from external overthrow or attack’ (Haftendorn, 1991). This understanding of national security was and still is appropriate for those states that are sufficiently strong, which can be considered as unitary and sovereign actors who defend the interests of the national community in the international arena. On the other side, ‘Third World challenged the dominant understanding of security in three important respects: 1. Its focus on the interstate level as the point of origin of security threats. 2. Its exclusion of nonmilitary phenomena from the security studies agenda. 3. Its belief in the global balance of power as the legitimate and effective instrument of international order’ (Acharya, 1997).

Since the early Nineties, the main danger for the imagined “New World Order” (J. S. Nye, 1992; The White House, 1991) did not come from a strong, military developed state with imperialistic aims, but rather from the dis-order in the peripheries. On the one side, the different crisis erupted in the periphery of the world system – such as the implosion of Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, and the crisis in Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and in the Great Lakes region – showed the absolute pre-eminence of a “new kind” of multidimensional conflict, where political struggle and state actors were only some among others activating factors (Duffield, 2001, 2002; Kaldor, 1999; Knight, 2008; Paris, 2001, 2004). This represented a major challenge to the development of a new form of global security governance (Aydinli & Rosenau, 2005; Duffield, 2001; Kirchner & Sperling, 2007). On the other side, it soon appeared clear that in a world “freed” from bipolar constraints, both state sovereignty and Western-like territorial governance were weak institutions in the world peripheries, places where the liberal order would have hardly penetrated: ‘huge sections of the world's population have won the "right of self-determination" on the cruelest possible terms: they have been simply left to fend for themselves. Not surprisingly, their nation-states are collapsing, as in Somalia and in many other nations of Africa’ (Ignatieff, 1993). In the academic debate, positions supporting the idea that global peripheries would represent the new major threat to international order and a menace for the West rapidly appeared: great success was obtained for example, by the thesis contained in Brzezinski’s Out of Control (Brzezinski, 1993), Moynihan’s Pandemonium (Moynihan, 1993) and Huntington’s The Clash of Civilization (S. Huntington, 1996).

During the first decade after the end of the Cold War, the international debate started to focus and loosely define a particular category of state, which represented one of the generators, but also a consequence of the peripheral dis-order at the same time. Being inspired by the paradigmatic example of the collapse of the Somalian state, the category of failed or fragile states was put on the

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international stage5 (Call, 2008; Di John, 2008; Rotberg, 2003; Zartman, 1995). A failing or a fragile state is characterized by the collapse of its institutions and the resulting lack of ability to program, manage and implement the most basic public policies that define a full sovereignty. During the Nineties, fragile states have been observed using ‘humanitarian lenses’, as they represented only an indirect threat to international security (Patrick, 2011; Sending, 2004). In different occasion, such as in Somalia or in the former Yugoslavia, they have been used by the international community, as a trial for testing a new global governance, built on a liberal state-building agenda (Berger, 2006; Duffield, 2001; Paris, 2002, 2004). In the same years, debates around new strategic concepts such as peace-building (Boutros-Ghali, 1992) and responsibility to protect (Deng, 1996; International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 2001) linked this issue to the general pursuit of a global order.

The situation changed as a consequence of 9/11 attacks. ‘The post 9/11 moment brought more radical changes to the global periphery, as it was used as a pretext to reconfigure it as a space of in/security rather than as spaces of, for example, underdevelopment and poverty’ (Smith, 2009). After 2001, fragile states and disorder in world peripheries stopped to be a localized problem, becoming ‘the single most important problem for the international order’ (Fukuyama, 2004), in particular for the United States. This was a consequence of the plotting behind 9/11: the attacks were seen as planned and prepared in Afghanistan, one of the poorest and most fragile states in the world. Following the ‘Afghanistan frame’ (Entman, 2003; Michael Ryan, 2004), failed/fragile states started to be considered as the places where underdevelopment, lack of governmental control and corruption, along with impunity and poverty, nourish terrorists network and radicalize people: local dysfunctional governance is not only considered as a threat for people living under its rule, but it is now seen as a permissive factor, which allows the development of the terrorist menace (Call, 2008; Coggins, 2014; Patrick, 2006, 2007; Rotberg, 2002). Already in the 2002 National Security Strategy the White House affirmed that ‘America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones. […] Weak states […] can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states. Poverty does not make poor people into terrorists and murderers. Yet poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders’ (The White House, 2002). This idea has become a ‘strategic belief’ (Jervis & Snyder, 1991) that has influenced American decision-makers since then. For example, in the 2010 National Security Strategy (The White House, 2010) it is clearly stated that since Cold War’s end the United States are facing a fragmented world order. Terrorism is considered as one of the expressions of the ‘dark side of globalization’ - freed in the last twenty years - while failed states are still seen as a consequence of this broken order, and a factor that nourishes instability, conflict and asymmetrical threats.

5 The term “failed state” made its first appearance during the seventies, as a category elaborated by the literature in rental states. Starting from the nineties, the term partially changed its meaning, and was used more by development and security expert (Di John, 2008).

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One of the declarations that best expressed the new role failed and fragile states assumed in the post-9/11 international system was given by the former British Foreign Minister Jack Straw during a speech at the European Research Institute in Birmingham in 2002:

‘Yet the events of 11 September devastatingly illustrated a more particular and direct reason for our concern. For it dramatically showed how a state’s disintegration can impact on the lives of people many thousands of miles away, even at the heart of the most powerful democracy in the world. The shocking events of that day were planned, plotted and directed by a group which exploited domestic chaos to commit the most heinous international crime. […] We need to remind ourselves that turning a blind eye to the breakdown of order in any part of the world, however distant, invites direct threats to our national security and well-being. I believe therefore that preventing states from failing and resuscitating those that fail is one of the strategic imperatives of our times. For as well as bringing mass murder to the heart of Manhattan, state failure has brought terror and misery to large swathes of the African continent, as it did in the Balkans in the early 1990s. And at home it has long brought drugs, violence and crime to Britain’s streets. State failure can no longer be seen as a localised or regional issue’ (speech available on http://www.mafhoum.com/press3/111P3.htm, retrieved 31/08/2016).

This declaration by Jack Straw contains all the elements that transformed instability and state fragility in the peripheries in one of the crucial international threat. The same dysfunctional institutions that in the previous decade were seen as a matter of local development and justice became a threat to national security. The very nature of the state, together with its institutional structure and operational principles, became a source of threat. As a consequence, state-building was no longer only an objective to bring order and create like-minded units in the peripheries, but it was part of a wider security strategy. As former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice suggested in 2006: ‘the greatest threats now emerge more within states than between them. The fundamental character of regimes now matters more than the international distribution of power. In this world it is impossible to draw neat, clear lines between our security interests, our development efforts and our democratic ideals’ (available on http://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/59306.htm, retrieved 31/08/2016). One year before – following the recommendations contained in the 2002 NSS – the Agency for International Development (USAID) published its Fragile State Strategy, which confirmed the link between bad governance and security threats operated by U.S. administration: ‘governments collapsing, criminal and terrorist networks, humanitarian crises, and grinding poverty can have global ramifications. Weak states tend to be the vector for these destabilizing forces, manifesting the dark side of globalization, and pose a very difficult kind of national security challenge’ (U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 2005).

Once fragile states entered in the ‘Global war on terrorism’ framework (Buzan, 2006), another category emerged, as a corollary of the menace represented by failed states: the second part of the “Afghanistan frame” stated that terrorists would exploit ungoverned spaces hosted by fragile states,

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wherever they are in the world, to create their ‘safe haven’ (Innes, 2008; Korteweg & Ehrhardt, 2005; Menkhaus, 2003). What has been called the ‘safe haven myth’ (Walt, 2009) suggests that ungoverned areas - or areas of instability, we can consider the two as synonyms – identify territories where the sovereign and legal authorities are not able to exercise an effective and durable control. Most importantly, from this perspective even a territory where an alternative form of authority dominates the structure of the local governance is considered as non-governed. Ungoverned spaces deal at one time with a strictly territorial and fixed vision of space, and with a lack, or even the total absence, of governance. In these empty spaces characterized by a political vacuum and by the absence of state’s institutions, terrorists should find a favourable ground for their activities (Keister, 2014; Raleigh & Dowd, 2013; Walther & Retaillé, 2010). Some members of the U.S. administration even proposed to broaden the concept of ungoverned spaces, towards including in the definition also those policy sectors that the state is not able to manage and that are seized by potentially subversive actors (Whelan, 2010).

Looking at the main political and strategic reports and analysis that followed 9/11 attacks, it emerges how attention on terrorists’ sanctuaries and safe havens quickly gained momentum. The February 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism considered denial of sponsorship, support and sanctuary to terrorists its second goal in the War on Terror, just after the general objective of ‘Defeating Terrorists and their Organizations’ (The White House, 2003). The 9/11 Commission Report published the following year devoted significant attention to terrorist sanctuaries, defining them as places where terrorists have ‘time and space to develop the ability to perform competent planning and to assemble the people, money and resources needed for the terrorist act. […] A relatively undisturbed area to recruit and train those who will carry out the operation. […] Any area where there is lawlessness and the inability of a government to control its countryside’ (The 9/11 Commission, 2004). The focus on terrorists refuges was not new in U.S. strategy, but after 11 September 2001 the effort clearly increased worldwide (Innes, 2008). Still in the September 2006 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, denying sanctuaries and control of nations to terrorists are two of the four main priorities of action (The White House, 2006a). Also under the Obama administration, attention on sanctuaries and the definition of safe havens lay in the same line than before. In the June 2011 National Strategy for Counterterrorism we can read that ‘al-Qa‘ida and its affiliates and adherents rely on the physical sanctuary of ungoverned or poorly governed territories, where the absence of state control permits terrorists to travel, train, and engage in plotting. […] We will also build the will and capacity of states whose weaknesses al Qa‘ida exploits. […] Our challenge is to break this cycle of state failure to constrict the space available to terrorist networks’ (The White House, 2011). From these quotations it is very clear that American decision-makers understand safe havens as the result of broken governance and the lack of control over territory, two attributes that characterize fragile states.

Considering this framework, since the nineties African continent emerged as one of the most instable and potentially threatening place in the system. The westphalian model of state, one of the

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essential institution on which western-like international order has been built (Bull & Watson, 1984; Bull, 1977) did not fully take root in Africa. If we consider the five fundamental attributes of the westphalian sovereignty – the five domestic monopolies, on violence, taxation, citizens’ loyalty, judgment on disputes and representation in the international society (Williams, 2014a) – we will see that most of African states are not fully able to exert them (Bates, 2007). Confronting the African state with its Northern equivalent, it clearly appears that institutional arrangements and modes of governance follow specific rules, and apply different practices and an alternative distribution of power, in their quest for a durable equilibrium between wealth and violence (North, Wallis, Webb, & Weingast, 2007, 2012). Even the concept of security need to be revisited, when dealing with Africa: ‘an African perspective on security is a human security-based negation of conventional security perspectives, which in the African context have historically privileged the security of the state over its citizens, and military security over human security’ (Salih, 2010).

According to the main international indexes for state failure6, Africa is the continent that hosts the biggest part of fragile and failed states. This characteristic, along with its linked ungoverned spaces, allowed the continent to attract an increasing attention by security experts and practitioners:

‘[t]he threat posed by states that do not control areas within their borders is a central security issue, and addressing them has become a basic strategic and moral imperative. Narratives on threats originating from Africa are riddled with phrases of "ungoverned spaces" and "failed states." U.S. State Department officials and Defense analysts write about Africa's "anarchic zones" giving rise to "dangerous chaos," while threat briefings claim that the "vast stretches of ungoverned areas" – lawless zones, veritable "no man's lands” – demand constant levels of scrutiny.  As one analyst claimed, Africa, with its "war-ravaged areas and vast swathes of ungoverned territory," offers ideal conditions for extremists looking for a foothold’ (Metelits, 2014).

In the 2006 NSS it is written that ‘the United States recognizes that our security depends upon partnering with Africans to strengthen fragile and failing states and bring ungoverned areas under the control of effective democracies’ (The White House, 2006b).

The choice to launch a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks that should have been global in the scopes and long-lasting, was already taken by Bush administration in the second half of September 2001: a prominent role was played in particular by the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (Feith, 2008; Maria Ryan, 2011). In the same period while America was preparing and launching its wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, the Department of Defense, with the help of SOCOM7 and the others Regional Unified Combatant Commands, planned what became to be known as the Global

6 Among the others, we can signal the World Bank’s Governance Matters Data Set; the Failed States Indexelaborated by the Fund for Peace; the UNDP’s Human Development Index; the Freedom House Annual Surveys of Political Freedom; and the Index of State Weakness in the Developing World edited by Brookings. Every index focuses its attention on different factors.7 The United States Special Operations Command is the Unified Combatant Command charged with overseeing the various Special Operations Component Commands of the United States Armed Forces

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War on Terror (GWOT) – an expression that first appeared on the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (The Secretary of Defense, 2006). The GWOT strategy predicted that the United States should have conduct operation and fought terrorists also in those countries where they were ‘not at war with’ (Maria Ryan, 2011; The Secretary of Defense, 2006). Since the very beginning of the GWOT, the African continent started to be perceived and considered as the second front of this War (Berschinski, 2007; Dagne, 2002; Davis, 2007; David J Francis, 2010; Smith, 2009; Taylor & Williams, 2004). In the section of the report dedicated to the initiative to be taken to defeat al-Qa’ida, the 9/11 Commission proposed a list of the world ungoverned spaces to be monitored and, if necessary, where to intervene: an attentive focus was devoted to Western Africa, and in particular to the Northern regions of Nigeria and Mali (The 9/11 Commission, 2004). Since then, the Sahara-Sahel region officially appeared as a source of threat and a menace not only for the international order, but also for American national security: the following policies have been clearly influenced by this changed perception.

American norms and rules to bring order in the African ungoverned spaces

The Sahara-Sahel region became a recognized threat to international order and to American security only during the last fifteen years: before 9/11, American foreign policy decision-makers did not identify any different region in Africa, preferring to maintain bilateral relations with African countries. At the same time, even if September 2001 represented an important turning point, some of the norms that emerged during the Nineties still influence U.S. action towards the Sahel, and more general towards Africa. Aiming to explore the way the United States managed regional order and security, in this section we distinguish between a continental approach followed in 1991-2001, and a Sahel-focused policy born with the Global War on Terror.

Exporting liberal values: the American “soft pressure” towards Africa for stability, democracy and market economy during the Nineties

In the last decade of the twentieth century, Africa represented a peripheral area of concern for American decision-makers, a place where U.S. presence was guaranteed essentially by a restricted group of functionaries who managed almost every aspect of the policy (Schraeder, 1994). Moreover, those officials had to deal with a decreasing level of resources: the Republican majority at the Congress led a strong battle to cut budget for African policy, facing a weak, or even non existing resistance by the Executive (Bagayoko-Penone, 2003; Cason, 1997). ‘U.S. aid to Africa (inclusive of development assistance, economic support funds, food aid, and foreign disaster relief) fell from a peak of $ 1,93 billion in 1992 to $933 million in 2000, a 52 per cent decrease in overall aid’ (Schraeder, 2001). As the then Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs James L. Woods affirmed already in 1992, decision-makers could no longer see clear American interests on the continent (Subcommitte in Africa - Committee on Foreign Affairs- Senate, 1992). Even if Africa was not an American priority, in that period the U.S. approved some significant

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initiatives, with the aim to influence the future of the continent, in order to insert it inside the liberal international order.

The United States identified three main priorities to be pursued on African continent after the end of the Cold War: 1) spreading democracy; 2) spreading market economy; 3) contain violent crisis. Democracy and market economy were considered as the long term solution to obtain peace and development on the continent (Alden, 2000), while the latter priority was imposed by the recent “explosion” of political violence in Africa (Williams, 2014b). Even if these three objectives easily fitted with American interests in the post-Cold War era, United States never undertook decisive actions on the continent, creating a strong distance between a proclaimed will and effective behaviours.

The diffusion of democracy and market economies all over the world became a foreign policy paradigm under Clinton administration, as a consequence of its new doctrine called democratic enlargement (Brinkley, 1997). ‘Coined by National security Adviser Anthony Lake, democratic enlargement represents a ‘novel geo-economic synthesis’ (Cox, 1995) that overtly links the expansion of democracy across the globe with that of the spread of market economies’ (Alden, 2000). Founded on the Francis Fukuyama’s liberal and “triumphalist” vision of the end of the Cold War (Fukuyama, 1992), democratic enlargement suggested that after the victory in the Cold War, it was now possible to export the liberal ideology (Broderick, 1998). This doctrine was proposed for the first time in the National Security Strategy of 1994: in this same text, it is stated that ‘Africa is one of our greatest challenges for a strategy of engagement and enlargement. Throughout Africa, the U.S. policy seeks to help support democracy, sustainable economic development and resolution of conflicts through negotiation, diplomacy and peacekeeping’ (The White House, 1994). In the following National Security Strategies, Clinton administration insisted on the importance of the democratic enlargement and strengthened its engagement to spread democracy and free-market economies, proposing a additional strategy called Shaping (Bagayoko-Penone, 2003; The White House, 1997, 1998, 2001). According to this principle, the United States were called to re-shape the international security environment using their leadership, in order to support democracy and stability in as much regions as possible. In practical terms, the U.S. should put a “soft pressure” on peripheral states which had not undertaken liberal reforms yet, promoting at the same time every initiative inspired by liberal values and principles in the international arena.

Sahel was not an important place for U.S. engagement. The limited attention United States devoted to the continent was mostly captured by South Africa, and by the evolution of the conflicts in Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, or on the Guinean Gulf. Even if we can consider American action as “residual”, especially if compared with other countries such as France, nevertheless they took some decision that partly influenced local dynamics.

For what concern support for democracy, the United States elected Mali as their privileged partner in the area. During the ‘third wave of democratization’ (S. P. Huntington, 1993), the Malian

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military regime was invested by popular rallies and protests that lasted for almost one year: at the beginning of 1992 a coup organized by General Amadou Toumani Touré finally overthrew the dictator Moussa Traoré, transforming in a few months Mali in an electoral democracy (French, 2005; Galy, 2013; Harmon, 2014). Mali became the sahelian country that received the biggest portion of American aid during that decade: according to the OECD, exception made for 1996, the United States allocated to Mali never less than $ 40 million dollars of Official Development Assistance (ODA) between 1991 and 2000, more than the double the amount Nigeria received in the same period (OECD, 2016). Already in 1992, the former president Carter went to Mali to express American appreciation for the Malian political transition (“Mali: visite de l’ancien président américain Jimmy Carter,” 1992), while the Secretary of State Warren Christopher visited the country in 1996, during his first travel to Africa (AFP, 1996a, 1997; Bassir, 1996; Fralon & Tuquoi, 1996). In the same period, the United States condemned and sanctioned a coup d’état in Niger, which stopped the democratization process in that country8 (AFP, 1996b; AP, 1996a, 1996b; U.S. Department of State Office of the Spokesman, 1997). Mali was considered by the United States as the potential “force for democracy” and as a privileged partner that might act as an American proxy in the area, mirroring an approach followed also in the security domain. Diplomatic support for democracy was backed also by the National Endowment for Democracy, a private, nonprofit foundation, subsidized by the Congress and created in 1983 in order to grow and strengthen democratic institutions around the world.

Concerning the spread of market economy, new approaches for development aid and support to private sector in Africa were discussed since the beginning of the nineties (Subcommittee on Africa - Committee on Foreign Affairs - House of Representatives, 1991; Subcommittee on Africa and Subcommitte on International Economic Policy and Trade - Committe on Foreign Affairs - House of Representatives, 1992). An important part of American grants and development assistance’s programs in the region focused on the support for business initiatives, with the aim to create a positive environment for the development of private enterprises. The most important initiative taken by the United States in this sector has been the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), definitely approved in May 2000. AGOA created a commercial system – still in function – which guarantees a privileged access to the American market for hundreds of African products (Bagayoko-Penone, 2003; Latreille, 2003). Some authors suggested that AGOA could be considered not only as a commercial initiative, but also as an ‘indirect security strategy’ (Alden, 2000), which put in practice an economic form of soft power (Joseph S Nye, 1999, 2004).

Nevertheless, during the first decade after the Cold War the most urgent issue in Africa was violent political crisis. George H. W. Bush administration tried to promote a new form of global security governance and to support humanitarian intervention, participating to the United Nation mission in Somalia in 1992. As a former member of the Clinton administration told us, after the failure of the

8 A second coup took place in 1999, causing a similar reaction by the United States (AFP, 1999; U.S. Department of State Office of the Spokesman, 1999)

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operation Restore Hope and the consequent Presidential Decision Directive 25 - published in 1994 - American decision-makers joined the call of not intervening directly in African crisis9. What has been called the ‘Somalia Syndrome’ (Patman, 2015) pushed the United States to look for solutions that could come from local states: the U.S. would have given to African states the means, in order to find “African solutions to African problems”. This brought to a two level strategy: on the one side, the United States started looking for partner states, which could act as proxy warriors and guarantee the managing of local conflicts. Along this line, security governance in Africa was delegated not only to the stronger and more stable African states, but also to the European allies, such as France, more concerned with African affairs (Bagayoko-Penone, 2003; Olsen, 2014; Schraeder, 1994, 2001). On the other side, the U.S. sought to improve their military cooperation with African partners, with the aim to make them responsible of their own security.

Following a practice born during the Cold War, the different political crisis erupted in Chad showed that the United States accepted an informal division of labor with France, to whom it was recognized the will and the capacity to intervene and manage local crisis in its former colonial empire10 (Cohen, 1998; “Le secrétaire d’Etat adjoint américain à Paris ‘ Il ne faut pas avoir peur des revendications ethniques en Afrique’ affirme M. Herman Cohen,” 1992, “Tchad: Les Etats Unis félicitent la France pour son intervention,” 1992). In this sense, France was considered as the first ally in the area. For what concern the search for local proxy, none of the sahelian state was considered as a pivot state by the Department of Defense. In the 1995 DoD Strategy for Sub-Saharan Africa – confirmed without main changes also in 2001 – the Pentagon proposed a list of potential security partners in Africa. Considering their geographical position, the relative strength of their economies, the size of their armies and their good relationship with the United States, the DoD indicated Nigeria, Kenya – replaced by Ethiopia for a while – and South Africa as the three key actors on the continent. At the same time, the Department of Defense proposed also a second list of partner states: thanks to its political stability and its successful process of democratization, Mali was the only state in the Sahel, which was associated to the American security strategy in Africa (Bagayoko-Penone, 2003).

In the 1997 National Security Strategy it is stated that ‘[w]ith countries that are neither staunch friends nor known foes, military cooperation often serves as a positive means of engagement, building security relationships today in an effort to keep these countries from becoming adversaries tomorrow’ (The White House, 1997). DoD’s relation with Mali followed this strategic approach: the first American contingents – coming from the Tennessee and the Alabama National Guard –arrived in Mali in 1992. The first JCET - Joint Combined Exchange Training, a military training program run by Special Forces with the aim to give a specific formation to local elite units 9 In October 1993, 18 American soldiers died in Mogadishu trying to capture the warlord Farah Adid. After that episode, the United States recalled their contingent, determining the failure of the UN mission UNOSOM II. The Presidential Decision stated that American soldier would have participated to peacekeeping operation only if a vital national interest would have been at stake. 10 Since the intervention against Libyan invasion in 1986, France has three military bases and about 1000 soldiers in Chad.

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(Government Accountabilty Office, 1998) – was launched in 1993, while the first exercise Flintlock was organized in 1997, with the participation of troops and observers from Senegal, Guinea, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Benin and Guinea-Bissau11. Another program that has regularly been organized in Mali – but also in the three other sahelian countries – is the Expanded IMET: ‘[t]raining funded under the IMET program [has] the following four objectives: proper management of defense resources, improving military justice systems in accordance with internationally recognized human rights, understanding the principle of civilian control of the military, and contributing to the cooperation between police and military forces for counternarcotics law enforcement’ (see http://www.samm.dsca.mil/glossary/expanded-imet-e-imet, retrieved 05/09/2016). Moreover, Malian troops formed and logistically supported by the United States took part to peacekeeping operations in Liberia in 1997 (Abramovici, 2004). Thanks to military cooperation and DoD’s “good offices”, at the end of the decade Mali became an American ally and part of their local security strategy.

Anyway, the most innovative American security initiative in Africa has been the ACRI - African Crisis Response Initiative, renamed ACOTA African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance after 2002. The main idea behind this program was that local partners would not only guarantee the everyday security governance on the continent, spreading at the same time American influence, but they should also take the responsibility to manage regional crisis. ACRI started to be planned after the Rwanda’s genocide, and the aim was to give African countries the means to intervene in such extreme situations. ACRI was directly managed by EUCOM, the European Unified Combatant Command, who was responsible also for the biggest part of the African continent. Selected units of different African armies were equipped and trained to conduct peacekeeping operations under an international mandate, becoming a sort of multinational stand-by force. Once again, Mali was among the countries which participated to the American initiative: at the end of 2002, eight battalions formed by 9000 soldiers from Mali, Senegal, Uganda, Malawi, Ghana, Benin and Ivory Coast were ready to intervene in support of United Nations and African Union peacekeeping and peace-enforcement operations on the continent (Bagayoko-Penone, 2003).

ACRI was a program planned to respond to the challenges Africa was posing during the nineties. The Global War on Terror deeply changed American approach and priorities to the continent and in particular to some of its region such as the Sahel. But even if 9/11 changed the international environment, some of the rules behind American policy towards Africa did not fully change after 2002.

Fighting the War on Terror in the Sahel: between counterterrorism and institution-building, the attempt to create allies and warriors

11 Exercise Flintlock is a multinational simulation that can last several months with the aim to train local forces to collaborate and react to sudden crisis and possible critical scenarios.

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The 7th of November 2002, the Office of Counterterrorism of the Department of State released this announcement: ‘[i]n October, AF DAS Robert Perry and S/CT Deputy Coordinator Stephanie Kinney, along with other State representatives, visited Chad, Niger, Mauritania and Mali, briefing host nations on the Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI). PSI is a program designed to protect borders, track movement of people, combat terrorism, and enhance regional cooperation and stability. PSI is a State-led effort to assist Mali, Niger, Chad, and Mauritania in detecting and responding to suspicious movement of people and goods across and within their borders through training, equipment and cooperation. Its goals support two U.S. national security interests in Africa: waging the war on terrorism and enhancing regional peace and security’ (see http://2001-2009.state.gov/s/ct/rls/other/14987.htm, retrieved 05/09/2016).

This statement shows the biggest change that impacted on the American policy towards the Sahel: as part of their War against Terrorism, United States decided to tackle the threat posed by ungoverned spaces in Africa, launching regional initiative and putting security and counterterrorism at the very centre of their African agenda (David J Francis, 2010; Pham, 2010, 2014). Bringing stability to the region remained the first goal pursued by the United States: compared to the previous decade, this purpose was not only a tool to spread liberal order in the peripheries, but it became also a national security aim. Since its beginnings, the Global War on Terror should have mixed specific anti-terrorism actions with long-lasting counterterrorism solutions: 1) the Pan Sahel Initiative and its successors would have acted as immediate replies, while 2) democracy and development were now considered as the “second part” of the strategy, a structural response to the terrorism threat. The “3D approach” – based on Diplomacy, Defense and Development - promoted by George W. Bush administration (The White House, 2002, 2006b), and the following “Whole of Government approach” pursued by Obama administration (The White House, 2010), became the guide lines for the American foreign policy with most of the world instable peripheries after 9/11. All these factors influenced American foreign policy towards the Sahel.

According to the USAID database (U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 2014), American aid to Sub-Saharan Africa passed from about $2 billion in 2002, to $9 billion in 2009, a peak repeated also in 2012. The Sahel followed a similar path: excluding security and military cooperation, the general budget allocated for the region regularly increased since 2002, with Mali and Chad receiving the relative biggest amount of aid in the area – most of the aid received by Chad has been humanitarian and crisis-relief aid12. If Mali received as development aid $ 46 million dollars in 1999, in 2009 the U.S. doubled the sum, giving to Mali almost $ 100 million. As de-radicalization programs permanently entered into counterterrorism and security strategies, good governance became the new main focus of American development aid. Corruption and bad governance are seen as factors that nourish terrorism and “fragilize” states and giving better

12 Since 2003 Chad faced the arrival of hundred of thousands of refugees from Central African Republic and from Soudan and a low intensity war with Soudan (Hainzl & Feichtinger, 2009; International Crisis Group, 2010; Marchal, 2011; Massey, 2006; van Dijk, 2007).

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institution to African states emerged as a clear priority for the United States (J. Forest, 2007; Rotberg, 2009; U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 2011).

Among the different programs launched by the United States to improve good governance in the Sahel, the two most significant initiatives before 2012 have been the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and the Chad-Cameron pipeline. The MCC is an independent development agency created in 2004 with the aim to select and award those developing countries, able to promote and maintain good democratic and economic governance. MCC uses 17 indicators – elaborated by independent subjects such as Freedom House or the World Bank – to evaluate and decide which countries have to be awarded. Once a potential partner is identified, MCC signs an agreement with the country, concerning the amount of the aid and the kind of actions that will be implemented. Most notably, initiatives and solutions must be proposed by the local ruling class, and then evaluated by MCC (Tarnoff, 2016). Confirming a solid partnership and a clear American appreciation for its political system, Mali was the Sahelian country which received the biggest amount, obtaining $ 460 million in 2006, to plan and implement projects concerning the agricultural and the industrial sectors, while Niger received $ 23 million in 2007 (Dagne, 2011).

On the other side, since 2002 the United States supported a World Bank development initiative for Chad. The international organization proposed to create a pipeline connecting Chad’s oilfield with the Atlantic harbours in Cameron. A consortium formed by the governments of Chad and Cameron and by ExxonMobile, Chevron and Petronas should have exploited the oilfield, while a special agency composed by members of local civil society should have monitored how the governments would have spent oil revenues. Chad in particular should have created a specific fund, allocating most of its revenues to improve good governance initiatives in the country. The pipeline started operating in 2003, but already in 2007 the project could be considered as a failure: because of the evolution of internal struggles and the parallel indirect war with Soudan, Chadian president Déby refused to redistribute oil revenues, using them to reinforce its army (Fisher & Anderson, 2015; Guyer, 2002; S. Pegg, 2005; Scott Pegg, 2009; Taguem Fah, 2007).

Nevertheless, the biggest American efforts have been devoted to the security domain. With an initial budget comprised between $ 6,25 and $ 7,5 million for the years 2003-2004, the Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI) was a State-led program which aimed to develop border and territorial control capacities through the training of local armies and police forces (Archer & Popovic, 2007; Ellis, 2004). The PSI can be considered as the starting point for a new front of the War on Terror in the Sahel. At the beginning of the 2000s, the Sahel effectively presented some characteristics that attracted American attention: on the one side the GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour la Prière et le Combat), a terrorist group who was born during the Algerian civil war, was intensifying his contacts with al Qa’ida (rebranding its name in Aqim in 2007) and extending his activities over the Algerian southern borders, in particular in Mauritania and Northern Mali (ACAS Concerned African Scholars, 2010; Harmon, 2014; International Crisis Group, 2005; Thurston & Lebovich,

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2013). On the other side, radical Islamic organizations and missionaries – coming from the Middle East, the Arabic Peninsula and even from Pakistan - were settling in the region, proposing to the population an extremist interpretation of Islam. In particular, preachers and Islamic Madrasa inspired by the Jama’at al Al-Tabligh and the Wahhabiyya Islamic movements were perceived as extremely radical and dangerous (Gutelius, 2003, 2007; Keenan, 2009; Lecocq & Schrijver, 2007; McGovern, 2010).

The PSI was launched thanks to the particular conditions that the War against Terrorism created inside the American foreign policy decision-making community, and under the combined initiative of different actors. First, EUCOM – with the support of American officials on the ground – actively sustained the necessity to act in what was presented as an ungoverned and terrorist-prone region. As reported by Raffi Khatchadourian: ‘[I]n Washington… a number of people said that European Command had a bureaucratic imperative to cast militant Islam in the region as an impending danger. A retired CIA specialist in counterterrorism told me that European Command had its ‘nose out of joint’ because the main theaters of the war on terrorism fell under Central Command, the division responsible for American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. A former U.S. diplomat who worked closely with the Defense Department said, ‘I mean, for European Command, when they tore down the Berlin Wall, a lot of their missions evaporated—so it’s a matter of having resources [allocated by Congress] and then trying to find missions to justify them.’ A State Department official familiar with the military’s Saharan strategy called it “a hammer looking for a nail”’ (Katchadourian, 2006b).

On the other side, Algeria strongly claimed that the GSPC was a danger for the entire region. Thanks to its previous experience in fighting Islamic terrorism, since 2002 the Algerian regime had become one of the most important Norther African partners for the United States in their War against Terror, obtaining in exchange both international legitimation and military and development aid (Zoubir & Amirah-Fernández, 2008; Zoubir, 2009, 2010). Algeria supported EUCOM efforts towards the Sahel, determining a successful “securitization” of the region. As Colonel Nelson once declared: ‘Let’s face it. We will have trained six motorized infantry companies to monitor the borders in an area as large as the United States. So you could say, ‘give me a break. Is this a joke?’ But it opens the door, fosters cooperation, opens the door to future programs. If it goes well, the test case, well, let’s expand, let’s do it some more’ (Archer & Popovic, 2007).

The Pan Sahel Initiative was effectively developed and substituted by the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative (then Partnership, TSCTP) in 2005, in order to include also Burkina Faso, Algeria, Senegal, Morocco, Nigeria, Tunisia and Cameron inside the same framework. The decision was definitely taken after that in 2003-2004, the GSPC leader Amari Saifi aka Abderrazak El Para organized the kidnapping of 32 European tourists in Southern Algeria. The kidnappers operated on a territory comprised between Eastern Mauritania and Western Chad, and they were definitely arrested only in 2004, thanks to a joint action of Malian, Mauritanian, Nigerian and

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Chadian security forces, probably supported by American and French special forces (Katchadourian, 2006a; Keenan, 2009; Mellah & Rivoire, 2005). In this occasion the GSPC demonstrated to be able to exploit the “empty” spaces of the Sahel for its activities. In the following years different kidnappings and attacks committed by the group against local security forces and foreign citizens, and the declaration of allegiance made to al-Qa’ida in 2007, definitely convinced the United States about the dangerousness of the newly born Aqim.

Different norms and strategic beliefs lie behind the TSCTP, mixing rules elaborated during the nineties and new approaches specifically proposed to fight transnational terrorism.

1) First of all, the United States should not directly intervene against terrorist organizations – as they did not intervene in African crisis – but they have to influence local environment, in order to create favorable conditions for the development of a stable order and common security governance. The U.S. organized a system of special forces and drones bases covering the whole African continent (Kandel, 2014; Whitlock, 2012b, 2013, 2014), but their first task was to support and train African countries in fighting terrorism and eliminate roots causes of its development. Once again, this strategy has been built on two pillars: on the one side, United States must identify partner countries acting as proxy; in the case of the Sahel, Mali – the country that “hosted” the biggest part of the ungoverned space in its northern regions – appeared as the most stable and reliable state in the area, while Algeria owned the most efficient security apparatus. On the other side, military cooperation becomes essential to give to local states the means to be responsible for their own security. Operation Enduring Freedom – Trans Sahara was inserted into the TSCTP framework since 2005, in order to improve counterterrorism training and equipping in the area. Moreover, the Defense Department became responsible for different training program that concerned also the institutional functioning of local defense forces, while the State Department followed the education of civil functionaries13.

2) The American response must be regional. Terrorist threat is transnational by its nature: terrorists are able to exploit the fragility of local states and their lack of control over their borders, and their agenda is not limited to the territory of a single country. The GSPC-Aqim, along with the transnational criminal networks who augmented their activities at the beginning of the 2000s, transformed the Sahara-Sahel in a ‘regional security complex’ (Buzan & Waever, 2003; Lake & Morgan, 1997), i.e. a geopolitical space defined by the common security threat and by the operating capacities of destabilizing actors. Only a shared effort can defeat an enemy who does not recognize frontiers and defeats the territorial sovereignty of local countries. The regional

13 From 2005 to 2008, the TSCTI was financed with $ 353 million, distributed as follows: Chad, $ 32 million; Mali, 37; Niger, 44; Mauritania, 24; Algeria, 7; Morocco, 9; Tunisia 1; Senegal, 12; Nigeria, 8; regional programs, 32. Between 2009 and 2013, regional programs were financed with $ 81,8 millions, Mali with $ 40,6 million, Mauritania with $ 34,5 million, Niger with $ 30,7 million and Chad with $ 13 million, with the other participants receiving between $ 12,8 million (Nigeria) and $ 6,6 million (Burkina Faso) (Government Accountabilty Office, 2008, 2014; Swedberg & Smith, 2014; Warner, 2014). The increasing sums received by regional programs coincide with the second part of the approach

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approach completes and expands a strategy that accords a central role to states in the fight against instability and safe havens. As the United States have to deal with weak and fragile states, working with all countries which share frontiers with the ungoverned space should obtain different advantages: on the one side, it can reduce costs and burdens (on material, political and symbolic sides) for local allies; on the other, it allows to the United States to “diversify the risk”, as they can count on more than just one ally on the ground. Sahelian countries have been exhorted to create common security institutions, while since 2005 the United States organized a new form of Exercise Flintlock, which got involved special forces and battalions from all the countries of the region and could last several months (Fellows, 2005).

3) American initiatives must follow an integrated and comprehensive approach, both at organizational and implementation levels. The TSCTP is a State-led and State-funded program implemented by Defense and USAID functionaries. It is financed through different funding accounts, comprising the Peacekeeping Operation Account, the Nonproliferation, Antiterrorism, Demining, and Related Programs Account, the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement Account, the Economic Support Fund and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. The distribution of the roles inside the TSCTP anticipated the way the United States decided to organize AFRICOM, the Unified Combatant Command for Africa, created in 2008 – with the difference, that in this case the leading player is the Department of Defense (Berschinski, 2007; Subcommitte on National Security and Foreign Affairs - Committee on Oversight and Government Reform - House of Representatives, 2010; Volman & Benjamin, 2007; Walker & Seegers, 2012). The United States opted for an integrated approach, in order to assimilate de-radicalization and institution-building initiatives inside a same counterterrorism framework. As a consequence of this choice, TSCTP had to fulfill five main tasks: a) build law enforcement capacity; b) support efforts to counter terrorism financing; c) reinforce military capacity to counter terrorism; d) enhance regional capacity to secure borders; e) counter the spread of violent extremist ideology. The Department of State was responsible for the first two tasks, while State and Defense together had the responsibility to strengthen local security capacities. Countering violent extremism has been a task assigned to State, Defense and USAID: DoS and DoD promote public diplomacy, i.e. the diffusion of a positive image of the United States through public initiatives, while USAID is called to work with most vulnerable subjects14 contrasting the diffusion of the Islamist ideology. Not only the “classic” train and equip of local military forces was organized under TSCTP framework: DoS tried to become responsible for the education of local functionaries and attempted to engage local ruling class in the process of project-planning and spending, while USAID promoted a soft security approach, based on the spread of peace and anti-extremist messages that should win the battle for the hearts and minds of local population15. Anyway, if we consider how the money has been managed, we clearly see that the Pentagon took the

14 In particular youths, unemployed and people living in peripheral, underdeveloped areas of the country18

informal lead of the program since its beginnings: between 2005 and 2008 DoD directly spent and managed $ 256 million, leaving to the DoS and USAID $ 96 million together (Archer & Popovic, 2007; Government Accountabilty Office, 2008, 2014; Swedberg & Smith, 2014).

The American policy facing the Sahel, or the reasons of a failure

Considering the cognitive basis and the rules behind the American policy towards the Sahel, there are three main factors which determined the inefficiency of American action in the region: 1) a cognitive and a definitory problem concerning the nature of the governance in the Sahel; 2) the lack of capacity to create the right incentives for the selected actors or to adapt American behavior to local institutions; 3) the absence of a mechanism of sanction for non-cooperative or predatory behaviors.

The Sahel, not an ungoverned space

As we have seen before, the United States started to consider the strip comprised between Eastern Mauritania, Northern Mali, Southern Algeria, Northern Niger and Western Chad as an ungoverned space since the beginning of the 2000s. The four countries that formed the core of the American initiatives in the Sahel were all categorized as fragile or even failing states: excluding Mali, political instability and coup d’état – attempted or successful – characterized domestic politics in Mauritania, Niger and Chad since the nineties, while extreme poverty marked the Sahelian economic environment. Moreover, social and ethnic divisions weakened internal cohesion and gave birth to several rebellions, in particular by Tuareg people in Mali and Niger (Galy, 2013; Harmon, 2014; Lecocq, 2010; Lecocq et al., 2013; OCDE & CSAO, 2014; Perret, 2014; Raleigh & Dowd, 2013).

According to the American interpretation, in the part of the Sahara shared by the four states national armies and administrations have never been present, or they did not practice any form of control, and a political vacuum has finally been filled by criminal cartels and Jihadists.

In opposition to this vision, different observers have underlined how the central power has never been absent from these territories, but it used strategies other than governing in order to maintain a form of control over local governance. Traditional and religious leaders, preachers, local entrepreneurs and chiefs of local militias, they all participated to practically control the most peripheral territories of the Sahelian countries, occupying official positions in the administration, or employing an informal power over their communities. As local governments did not have the means to impose their direct control, they usually preferred to coopt, negotiate, make alliances or obstruct local actors, trying to pursue an informal equilibrium and avoid violent protests (Ba & Bøås, 2013; Benjaminsen & Ba, 2009; Bøås & Torheim, 2013b; Harmon, 2014; Moss, Pettersson, & Van de Walle, 2006; Seely, 2001; Van de Walle, 2012). This particular style of governance is also linked to the traditions of a territory where economic and social activities have always overstepped borders. 15 A famous example is given by the Radio for Peace Building, created in 2005 in the Northern Mali, and apparently appreciated by local inhabitants (Aldrich, 2014).

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In this area, even a good part of illegal economic activities (such as smuggling and trafficking) are an adaptive form of economic survival organized by local populations, which has been usually developed following historical commercial routes and contacts with the silent agreement of local governments (Galy, 2013; International Crisis Group, 2012). A similar strategy has been followed also with drug traffickers and jihadists groups once they installed in the region, causing a spectacular growth of the level of corruption among civil servants and politicians (Csete & Sanchez, 2013; Mazzitelli, 2007; Moulaye, 2014; Unodc, 2007, 2010). The Sahel “ungoverned space” is not an empty space as well. Commercial, smuggling and migration routes cross frontiers and connect far villages and communities, determining a form of control that depends more on human activities than on borders control (McDougall & Scheele, 2012; Scheele, 2012; Walther & Retaillé, 2010, 2014).

This distinction is important, as American security initiative contributed to alter local governance, breaking a fragile equilibrium. It is not to say that Sahelian governance was an efficient form of territorial and political management. The distribution of power, wealth and violence showed to be dysfunctional even before American arrival. Nevertheless, placing security and territorial and borders control at the top of the priorities for the region caused unexpected consequences that contributed to worsen the situation. The increasing control on the frontiers made more difficult for local population, to carry on their informal and theoretically illegal commerce across borders. Northern Mali and Northern Niger historically depends more on Southern Algeria and Southern Libya then on their countries’ economic system, even if there is a lack of commercial agreements between these countries – in particular between Algeria and Mali. Price differentials between Algeria and Mali and Libya and Niger alimented the trans-Saharan exchanges, becoming the most important “natural resources” in the peripheral and “ungoverned” regions of the Sahel (Lacher, 2012, 2013; Scheele, 2009, 2012). The costs linked to these activities augmented as a consequence of the renewed controls by local security forces, threatening to exclude small businessmen from this market. At the same time, this gave more power to transnational entrepreneurs who had the means and the resources to carry on their activities, corrupting or coopting security forces, employing local people and redistributing a (little) part of the profits. Since the middle of the 2000s drug traffickers, but also Aqim thanks to its “kidnapping industry”, took an increasing control over economic activities in the region, earning local legitimization and penetrating in the political and social system (Harmon, 2014; Moulaye, 2014).

Another case that shows the unexpected consequences of American action is given by the relation between the Malian state and its Tuareg citizens. This issue is linked to the second problem encountered by the United States in the Sahel, concerning the lack of common interests and the incapacity to create adequate incentives for the local ruling class.

Local and American interests, an impossible merging

American priorities concerned the fight against terrorism and the creation of a stable system that 20

could reject jihadist penetration and refuse extremist message. Development aid and military cooperation were two important tools used by the United States, to influence the local environment and obtain the cooperation of the ruling class. Mali in particular has been considered as the most reliable ally in the region, and the potential leader of a renewed regional security system. At the same time, the 2012 crisis made clear something that (not so) many observers had already remarked in the previous years: most of the American aid was diverted by Malian decision-makers in order to pursue local agenda and specific interests. In the same way, American call for a renewed security control over the Northern territories was used to re-impose state control over Tuareg lands, breaking a fragile pact with this population.

Especially under president Amadou Toumani Touré, Malian political system redefined its internal structure, becoming similar to a network based on clientelism, corruption, cooptation and an ‘economy of affection’ (Hydén & Bratton, 1992; Hydén, 2013). The presidency became one of the central nodal points of the system, even if important and autonomous roles in the political structure were associated also to other positions – in the administrative, political, economic or social domains. This form of political organization must not be considered only as an oligarchic system that aims to predate local resources, but it has to be seen also as the result of a negotiation process were the most powerful player, i.e. the government, did not have the means to fully impose its will. In many cases, development aid was not used to realize the planned initiatives, or it has been diverted by political or bureaucratic decision-makers; if a part of this money enriched local strong men, another part was re-distributed following informal power chains (Briscoe, 2014; Moss et al., 2006; Van de Walle, 2012; Whitehouse, 2012).

American and Malian expectations and interests about what to do with development aid showed to be strikingly different, but the U.S. officials have not been able to intervene. Considering above all Malian officials and decision-makers as their legitimate counterparts, the United States accepted not to modify their approach, indirectly fostering dysfunctional and fragile local governance. A similar case involved Tuareg people. In 1990-1996 and then again in 2006-2009 two Tuareg insurrections were launched in the regions of Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu, carrying on an ancient struggle between Northern regions and the central state. According to the peace agreements signed in 1996 and then again in 2006, Mali government accepted to recall its army from the North, leaving a certain autonomy to local administrations also in the security domain (Harmon, 2014; Raffray, 2013). Since 2009 Malian army started to occupy again Northern territories, presenting this choice as a consequence of American requests and the presidential commitment to intervene against Aqim. At the same time, president Touré openly declared that Malian priority was to manage Tuareg independentism, more than trying to expel Aqim from national territory16 (Chauzal & van Damme,

16 See for example WikiLeaks file ‘MALIAN PRESIDENT ADDRESSES DIPLOMATIC CORPS ON NORTHERN MALI’ 10BAMAKO11_a, dated 7/01/2010, or ‘AQIM SEEKING INTERMEDIARY IN MAURITANIA VIA MALIAN GOVERNMENT’, 10BAMAKO17_a, dated 12/01/2010. In the second one, American ambassador underlines some officers of the Malian army are establishing non-aggression and even collaboration pacts with Aqim leaders, in order to concentrate their attention on Tuareg rebels.

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2015; International Crisis Group, 2012). In the following years, Malian army actively persecuted former Tuareg rebels and re-occupied the North, perpetrating a policy of “soft discrimination” against this people (Ag Youssouf, Bouhlel, Marty, & Swift, 2011). These tensions definitely erupted in 2012 with the new rebellion that brought to the temporary collapse of Malian institutions.

‘We needed soldiers’: military cooperation and the lack of sanctions

The lack of a mechanism for sanctioning predatory and inefficient behaviors adopted by the ruling classes has been one of the reasons why American cooperation had not been able to change local institutional arrangements. This factor strongly affected military cooperation efficiency, leading to the failure of the whole security strategy in 2012.

As a response to Aqim increased activities in Northern Mali, starting from 2009 the United States decided to intensify their military effort in Mali; the U.S. had to ‘train and equip our warriors […] we needed an army who fought for us’17. In agreement with the Malian Defense Ministry, the United States launched a special military program that should train and equip elite units able to fight and bring counterterrorism actions in the desert. On the one side, they worked with the 33ème Régiment des Commandos Parachutistes, reorganized and divided to form smaller units called Compagnie des Forces Speciales (CTS) – an equivalent of American Special Forces. On the other side, American militaries focused their attention on the ETIA (Echelon Tactique Inter-Armée), 150-200 soldiers units trained and equipped to quickly operate on the whole Malian territory. The Malian Defense Ministry should have selected elite soldiers to participate to the program. What were supposed to be elite units came out to be soldiers without any formation; American instructors denounced the fact that almost half of the recruits were not able to shoot, while most of guns and rifles did not work because of a lack of maintenance (Powelson, 2013). Some ETIA groups did not received money enough to buy food or medicines, while others never saw their equipment during the training period. For example ETIA 6 counted less than 100 men, because at least 50 recruits were too sick and weak to participate to the training program; ETIA 4 received only a part of their jeeps and radios, and only at the closing ceremony of the training, while part of the equipment was distributed to some functionaries of the Ministry in Bamako18.

American officials on the ground were fully aware of the total lack of preparation of Malian soldiers, and they saw the diffused corruption among Malian civil and military officials. At the same time, they had neither the means nor the will to sanction those behaviors. The priority was to form local armies and implement local capacities to fight against terrorism, no matter how corrupt or inefficient they would have been. However, at the beginning of the 2012 uprising only the CTS showed to be able to fight; almost all ETIA groups refused to fight and abandoned their positions and their arms, while many soldiers decided to defect and follow the rebel advance. This last 17 As one of the interviewed told us18 See ‘AMBASSADOR ATTENDS CLOSING CEREMONY OF JCET TRAINING OF MALIAN ARMY ETIA 6’, 09BAMAKO813_a dated 16/12/2009 and ‘CLOSING CEREMONY OF JCET TRAINING OF MALIAN ARMY ETIA 4 IN GAO’ 09BAMAKO815_a dated 17/12/2009

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episode confirmed the failure of the American security approach to the region. Only the external French intervention in 2013 blocked Jihadists and re-established a fragile stability in the Sahara-Sahel.

Conclusions

United States approach to the Sahara-Sahel region has followed interests and ideas that evolved since the early nineties, even if 9/11 partly changed the priorities and put more attention on security issues. The fight against underdevelopment is now subordinate to the fight against terrorism, not only in the Sahel and in Africa. The question today is, if this kind of securitized approach does really help the U.S. to pursue their objectives, and if it really proposes a durable solution to the endemic local crises. The 2012 Malian crisis put dramatically in question the American strategy for the region; all the tactical and strategic interests pursued by the U.S. policy have clearly not been attempted. Local armies, starting from the Malian one, showed their total lack of cohesion and preparation in fighting against rebels and terrorists groups. After the first defeats in the North, Malian army preferred to react through a coup d’état instead of trying to stop rebels’ advance. For several and sometimes even contradictory reasons, Algeria refused to take the lead of a local response to the crisis. In the meanwhile, Aqim became a well settled actor who started to participate and get benefits from the different illegal traffics concentrated in the region. The Sahara-Sahel has probably never been as unstable and ‘ungoverned’ as today.

The United States are now trying to change their strategy, supporting programs that focus more on bottom-up conflict-resolution and social resilience, and try to merge security and good governance. At the same time, American reaction shows how ideas and strategic beliefs are resistant and influence policy’s organization. On the one side, in Mali today military cooperation follow a transformational approach that considers the reform of Defense institutions as its first aim. On the other side, military cooperation with Niger applies a “train and equip” approach in a situation very similar to the one of Mali before 2012. Moreover, the United States are now giving their logistic and financial support to France, the only actor who accepted to put boots on the ground in order to stabilize the region by the use of military force. Is France today the new ‘proxy warrior’ of the U.S. in the Sahel? Even if it sounds like a provocation, as a former French army Colonel and member of the secret services told us: ‘since France has launched Serval, Americans have found their new mercenaries in the region’.

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