US Troops in Mali Come Under Fire

Via Coming Anarchy comes news that a US military C-130 has been attacked in the country of Mali of all places:

Gunmen hit a United States military cargo plane flying food to Malian troops fighting rebels in the far north of the country, say officials. No one was injured in the attack and the plane, which had minor damage, landed safely.

US Major Pam Cook, a spokesperson for the American military command in Stuttgart, Germany, that covered Africa, said the C-130 plane was shot at late on Tuesday or early Wednesday over Tin-Zawatine, a desert village on Mali’s border with Algeria.

The US had provided military training and support to Mali and other African nations for years as part of its counterterrorism campaign.

Cook said the Malian troops were "pinned down" in Tin-Zawatine – but it was not clear if their movements were restricted by rebel fire or because the area was heavily mined.

She said the aircraft was struck by gunfire and suffered "minor damage", but landed safely. It did not return fire.

According to a senior Malian military official, the gunmen used Kalashnikov automatic rifles during the attack, which he said occurred just after the plane finished its final food drop early Wednesday. [News24]

Some of you reading this may be surprised that the US has military forces forward deployed in Mali, but the US has actually had forces engaged in the area since 2003 and is currently participating in a major training exercise with the countries in the region:

U.S. military officials are conducting an anti-terrorism training exercise called Flintlock in the Saharan desert with hundreds of military officers from mostly Africa. Some analysts say the U.S. Trans-Saharan Counter-terrorism Initiative is misguided and a waste of millions of dollars. Phuong Tran brings us this report from VOA’s Central and West Africa Bureau in Dakar.

American Colonel Mark Rosenguard has been leading what he calls military theatre exercises in Mali’s capital, Bamako. The participants decide on common problems they face, like drugs and weapons smuggling.

They then work out how they would deal with a regional blowup of those problems.

Colonel Rosenguard says it does not matter who the enemy is. What matters, he says, is that they learn how to work together to solve regional problems

The colonel has been with the counter-terrorism program since it began as the Pan Sahel Initiative in 2003 to prevent terrorism in West Africa’s desert regions, working first with Chad, Mali, Niger and Mauritania.

Two years ago, the program added Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, and Nigeria. [Phuong Tran, VOA]

Guess who isn’t happy about US involvement in the area?  Can you believe it, the French:

But French criminologist Xavier Raufer with the University of Paris says the program’s biggest problem is that Americans do not understand criminality in the Sahel desert stretching from Senegal to Sudan.

"You have guys arriving in an office and they have pages with questions and answers. They want answers that can fit into a computer," he said. "Such a thing as a 100-percent pure unadulterated bandit or terrorist does not exist in Africa."

Raufer says American attempts to single out potential terrorists from drug and weapons smugglers is ineffective, and potentially dangerous if it builds up to the point of retaliatory U.S. strikes.

"When a cousin is killed fighting for whatever reason, you have got two other cousins replacing him because the basis of a tribal society are the notions of honor and vengeance," he said.  [Phuong Tran, VOA]

No 100 percent terrorists in Africa?  I guess all those terrorists in Morrocco are just misunderstood "smugglers" then?  I guess the Algerian terrorist group which Al Qaida #2 man, Ayman al Zawahiri claimed has allied with Al Qaida are just misunderstood as well?

Other critics claim US involvment in the Sahara is of course all about the oil:

Washington appears to have based its notion on some unpublished sources and Algerian press reports on the banditry and smuggling activities of the outlaw Mokhtar ben Mokhtar. It also misconstrued the Tablighi Jama`at movement, whose 200 or so members in Mali are nicknamed “the Pakistanis” because the sect’s headquarters are in Pakistan. Finally, local government agents told U.S. officials what they wanted to hear.

Notwithstanding the lack of evidence, Washington saw a Saharan Front as the linchpin for the militarization of Africa, greater access to its oil resources (Africa will supply 25% of U.S. hydrocarbons by 2015), and the sustained involvement of Europe in America’s counterterrorism program. More significantly, a Saharan front reinforced the intelligence cherry-picked by top Pentagon brass to justify the invasion of Iraq by demonstrating that al-Qaida’s influence had spread to North Africa. [Jeremy Keenan, Malaysia Today] F

Just like Afghanistan was all about oil as well.  I’m still waiting for Michael Moore’s pipeline there.  The threat of terrorism in the Sahara is probably overstated but to suggest it doesn’t exist and it is all about the oil is ridiculous.