Western Sahara and the United States' geographical imaginings

Jacob Mundy Securitizing the Sahara
The fact that the main effect of the alleged activities
of the GSPC-AQMI has been the near annihilation
of Saharan tourism has helped engender counternarratives
of the recent securitization of the Sahara,
vocalized by both domestic actors and foreign observers.
Often dismissed as advancing conspiracy theories,
skeptics nonetheless believe that there are interests —
either large and/or small, global and/or local — who
would rather not have Europeans cavorting around in
their Landrovers, running into the underbelly of the
Saharan economy. According to such critics, the threat
posed by armed Islamist groups in the Sahara is either
a product of manipulation by regional state actors
(for local or national gain) or a synthetic phenomena
with no basis in reality, manufactured to provide a
basis for foreign intervention. Yet the purchase of the
counter-narrative of Saharan terror, like so many conspiracy
theories, comes not from bulletproof evidence
to the contrary, but rather from the inconsistencies
and lacunas of the dominant narrative advanced by
governments in the region, in Europe and in North
America.
No one in the US government, it seems, has stopped
to ask whether or not their intervention is welcomed
by the people it pretends to benefit. But such is the
nature of empire. Now that these civil-military project
have become wrapped in the vocabulary of ‘partnership’,
it is implied that the host governments warmly
welcome the new US footprint. These being the same
governments that regularly receive a good thrashing
in State Department democracy and human rights reports,
not to mention the ire of independent human
rights groups. They conveniently represent the people
when it suits us, when we need to find imperial ‘partners’.
And when they don’t, we leverage their Freedom
House score against them to win neoliberal economic
reforms that rarely, if ever, precipitate anything approximating
actual political democratic reform. As
Alex Thurston argues in this collection,
Concern about terrorist threats in the Sahel and
other parts of the continent is warranted. But as US
policymakers craft policies to meet this challenge,
they should acknowledge that the capacity of the
White House and the Pentagon to coerce political
transformations in African countries has real limits.
The choice between promoting democracy and
fighting terrorism through establishing stability,
therefore, may be a false and harmful one.
Another glaring absence in the debate is the lack of any
attempt to gauge the impact of US security policies in
the Sahara-Sahel. Apart from some notable exceptions
(e.g. Gutelius 2007), and scattered press accounts, no
one has yet looked at the effects of these initiatives
outside of their direct bearing upon the efficacy of
armed groups and state counter-terror practices in the
Sahara. That is to say, no one has asked, What are local
popular attitudes towards US security policy in the
Sahara? What does the local press say? What does civil
society think? What are the contributions of opposition
parties and figures to the debate? For example,
Thurston’s blog highlighted the words of Fatoumata
Maiga, an activist for women’s rights in Mali, who told
the Christian Science Monitor, ‘We are not against the
training of the Malian Army by the Americans [...] But
we don’t want the American Army to be present here.
We see that around the world, wherever the Americans
are, there is a temptation for Al Qaeda to be there’
(Baldauf 2009).
On the Margins of Empire
The visible shortcomings of the primary (actual threat)
and secondary justification (potential threat) for increased
US security presence in the Sahara-Sahel have
provoked speculation that an alternative rationale
must be operating. Given the geographical coincidence
between US security measures in the Sahara and some
of the world’s most important energy reserves, critics
have alleged that the deep logic behind the TSCTP is
geo-strategic or ‘imperial’. With Algeria and Libya to
the north, and Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea to the
south, the Sahara-Sahel rests between two spaces of
supreme strategic interest to the United States, Europe
and, increasingly, China. Indeed, Chinese encroachment
into Africa has been cited as another important
factor in the increased US security attention. A similar
critique has been launched at related US efforts to establish
a military command for Africa (Africom).
Perhaps the most well known skeptic of the Saharan
terrorism threat is British anthropologist Jeremy
Keenan, a social scientist whose four decades of on-theground
experience in the heart of the Sahara, coupled
with an impressive publication record, is unrivaled in
the Anglophone academy. For Keenan, the GSPC and,
now, AQMI, represent nothing short of a sophisticated
false-flag intelligence operation perpetrated by the Algerian
secret services to help advance the cause of US
imperialism in West Africa. For Keenan (2009 and his
CONCERNED AFRICA SCHOLARS BULLETIN N°85 - SPRING 2010 8