Western Sahara and the United States' geographical imaginings

Intervention
Counterterrorism and democracy promotion
in the Sahel under Presidents George W. Bush
and Barack Obama from September 11, 2001,
to the Nigerien Coup of February 2010
Alex Thurston
Introduction
The Sahel region of Africa, considered a ‘frontline in
the War on Terror’ as recently as President George
W. Bush’s first term, had become the zone of a less
dramatically described but more broadly construed
counterterrorism approach by the time President
Barack Obama took office. US counterterrorism policy
in sub-Saharan Africa is evolving, reflecting shifts
that started with Bush’s administration and have
been adopted by Obama’s team. Just as the rhetoric
of the ‘Global War on Terror’ has fallen out of favor
in Washington (Wilson & Kamen 2009), so too has
the rhetorical emphasis on democracy promotion in
the Muslim world that comprised a major portion of
Bush’s first-term agenda. In Africa, American policymakers
increasingly prioritize stability, as opposed to
electoral change. This emphasis is evident in the Sahel,
where Washington has dealt in a relatively mild fashion
with elites who tried to maintain or obtain power
through channels that circumvented democratic processes.
Despite official condemnation of coup leaders
and questionable electoral outcomes in Mauritania
and Niger, the Obama administration has appeared
Alex Thurston is a Ph.D. student in the Department of
Religious Studies at Northwestern University, where his
research focuses on Islamic intellectuals and politicians in
Northern Nigeria. He writes about Islamic and politics in
the Sahel and the Horn of Africa at Sahel Blog (sahelblog.
wordpress.com). His writing has also appeared in The
Guardian’s Comment Is Free and Foreign Policy’s Middle
East Channel.
tentatively willing to countenance a lack of full democracy
in these countries. Moreover, Washington reacted
quietly to a series of terrorist incidents perpetrated in
Mauritania, Mali, and Niger by Al Qaeda affiliates in
2009 and early 2010. Perceptions that the Sahel is
marginal in geopolitical terms may help explain the
lack of major US engagement in democracy promotion
and counterterrorism in the region, but the US
reaction to events there also owes partly to changing
notions of how the ‘War on Terror’ should be fought.
This article sets US responses to recent events in Niger,
Mauritania, and Mali in the context of changing
conversations among policymakers concerning terrorism
in the Sahel. After a discussion of how attitudes
and policies toward counterterrorism in Africa shifted
from 2001 to 2009, a second section discusses recent
political events in Mauritania and Niger before
examining kidnappings and other terrorist incidents
in Mauritania and the Mali-Niger borderlands. I ask
why US policymakers reacted differently to events in
2009 and early 2010 than they might have had the
same events occurred in the 2001-2005 period. President
Obama and other administration representatives
state that Africa is a top US priority and stress the importance
of effective governance on the continent. Yet
the evolution of counterterrorist rhetoric and policy
signals that the United States is retreating from an
agenda that seeks to transform political systems, and
is instead advancing a program of long-term military
involvement in areas, such as the Sahel, where perceived
US security interests are at stake.
CONCERNED AFRICA SCHOLARS BULLETIN N°85 - SPRING 2010 50