Western Sahara and the United States' geographical imaginings

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Jacob Mundy Securitizing the Sahara intervention during the Cold War and afterwards — Afghanistan and Somalia. In terms of the most basic geographic and demographic dimensions, any analogy between ‘Af-Pak’ and the Sahara-Sahel must contend with some stark realities. Together, Afghanistan and Pakistan cover roughly 593,00 square miles; the Pashtoon population, the dominant social milieu of the Taliban, number forty million. The Sahara desert, on the other hand, which includes six of Africa’s eleven largest countries (Algeria, Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger), covers 3.5 million square miles. Algeria, Africa’s second largest country, is nearly one million square miles, or one and a half times the size of Afghanistan and Pakistan combined. Afghanistan and Pakistan could likewise fit inside Libya with room to spare. The population of the Sahara — i.e., excluding Northwest Africa’s Sahel and Mediterranean rim — is, as many might expect, miniscule. The entire population of Mauritania, the most Saharan country in the region, is roughly 3.5 million, the majority inhabiting the cities of Nouakchott (the political capital) and Nouadhibou, (the economic capital). The contested territory of Western Sahara boasts one of the lowest population densities in the world. And like the muchvexed ‘tribal areas’ of northern Pakistan, the Sahara has its own special place of interest. Tuaregs call it the Azawagh/Azawak, an area of 31,000 square miles roughly bounded by the triangle of Algeria’s Hoggar mountains, Mali’s Adrar des Ifoghas and Niger’s Aïr massif. Even this confined theatre of interest in the US militarization of the Sahara boasts a population of less than five persons per square mile. Early maps of the GSPC threat in the Sahara, like those created to support the Pan-Sahel Initiative, show ‘Terrorist Organizations Operating Throughout the Sahel’ (Map 2) and ‘Area of GSPC operations’ (Map 3). What is interesting about this map is not only the apparently extensive reach of the ‘Terrorist Area’, but the very peculiar way in which it touches all the right countries. It neatly includes Morocco by distending into southeast Morocco’s Draa valley (where no terrorist activity has taken place and the border with Algeria is well patrolled). Even more astutely, this zone avoids either the Moroccan occupied Western Sahara (perhaps the most militarized region in the Sahara) or the section of Western Sahara under the nominal control of that territory’s Frente Polisario independence movement. CONCERNED AFRICA SCHOLARS BULLETIN N°85 - SPRING 2010 Western Sahara, of course, cannot be included in US counter terrorism practice because, as Yahia Zoubir’s contribution makes clear, it is illegally occupied by Morocco and no country in the world recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over the territory. 3 This raises the question: Is the policy mapping the threat or the threat is mapping the policy? A practice whereby ‘the imagiimagination of place creates political and spatial realities’ (Bialasiewicz et al. 2007). Or, as Konstantina Isidor- Isidor- Isidor- os suggests in her contribution here, the US impetus to ‘script-write a mythology of terror onto a Saharan landscape’. The View from Below Following the recent botched attempt to detonate a car bomb in Times Square by a putative Islamist terrorist, a recent New York Times article dared to ask the obvious: a new, and disturbing, question is being raised in Washington: Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan — notably the Predator drone strikes — actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on America than they prevent? (Sanger 2010) Only a year ago, a New York Times assessment of US counter-terrorism initiatives in Northwest Africa had asked the same question, noting that the trend in terrorist activity seemed to be going up rather than down since the PSI in 2003 (Schmidle 2009). While mainstream US journalists feign shock at the 3 I� I� m�� m�� Ap�� Ap�� 0 0, �� m��’ m��’ ��mm�� A�� 6 M��, � �� S�� y w�� b�� b�� p�� T�m��, A��, �� m �� S��. T�� by�, T��, B��k�� F��, M��, M��, N�� A��, �� p��v�� w T�m�� b��. C��p��y �b�� m �� m��, �� A�j�� Ap�� 0 0�� , �� US A�� C�mm�� AFRIC�M��, �� m�� y v��b�� p�� TSCTP, �� M��, � m��mb�� TSCTP. M��’�� x�� y �� W�� S�� , w�� A�� m�� pp�� W�� S�� p��. A��’�� m��m�� p��p�� AFRIC�M’�� F�� k 0 0 ��x�� k��w�� w�� y �� b��w�� A�� W�� q�� W�� S�� S�� y.
Jacob Mundy Securitizing the Sahara possibility that US policy could be counter-productive, scholars of terrorist studies have long noted the peculiar, co-constitutive relationship between the practice of terrorism and counter-terror discourse. Following 11 September 2001, anthropologist Joseba Zulaika wondered how it is that counter-terrorism (re)produces the very phenomena it claims to fight. Following questionable predictions in the 1980s that terrorism would become the most substantial security problem, Zulaika noted The more remarkable fact was, however, that during those four years with no single terrorism case [1988-1992], American libraries catalogued [...] 1322 new book titles under the rubric “terrorism” and 121 under “terrorist.” The obvious question at the time was: How could a discursive machine provide the ammunition necessary to sustain an entire industry based on a phenomenon that was both the ultimate threat to civilization and statistically almost absent? What amount of self-fulfilling prophecy was required for the real thing to make its appearance in the United States? (Zulaika 2003: 191) With respect to US counter-terror policies in the Sahara-Sahel, Greg Mills (2004:166), national director of the South African Institute of International Affairs, suggested, ‘There are, moreover, dangers that such security measures [as the PSI] may, at least in the short term, exacerbate the conditions that give rise to external and internal terrorism in the first place’. Related to this problem is one of the hot new key words in the study of terrorism: radicalization. As terrorist acts become increasingly orchestrated by smaller and smaller cells, down to lone individuals, the processes through which people and groups become ‘radicalized’ has now become central to the discourse on terrorism, particularly the issue of Islamic radicalization. For some observers, recent violent incidents in northern Nigeria with the Boko Haram sect provided further evidence of widespread radicalization in the Sahel zone, and so provided justification for measures to prevent the transformation of radicalism into terrorism. Taking a fine-grained ethnographic approach, Caroline Ifeka’s contribution to this collection deconstructs the basic notions of the radicalization discourse by untangling the global, regional, national and local networks that produce subaltern resistance. Ifeka challenges us to ask, Who are the real radicals? The frustrated youth BULLETIN N°85 - SPRING 2010 who resis injustice or the nested systems that produce them? As Ifeka notes, Donor governments and AFRICOM should consider, in the light of the Niger Delta’s militant struggle and its proven capacity to reduce oil output, whether militarization in partnership with kleptocratic ruling oligarchies will secure US-EU [Multi-National Corporations’] priority access to strategic natural resources to which communities have strong traditional claims. Or whether, as in the Niger Delta, the more force used by the State the more subaltern violence grows. Indeed, whatever one’s position on the ontological status of authentic Islamist terrorist organizations in the Sahara-Sahel, the local impact of US securitization initiatives is difficult to ignore. One of the more signif- signif- icant accomplishments of AQMI in the Sahara-Sahel has been the devastation of tourism, a vital economic lifeblood in a region where alternative modes of employment are severely limited and black market activity presents itself as an incentive-laden alternative (e.g., smuggling humans, counterfeit goods and illicit drugs). Following a spate of attacks in Mauritania, historian Ann McDougall, in her contribution to this collection, reflects upon the possible effect of isolation produced by Saharan terrorism: The impact on tourism was immediate. Air routes were cancelled or itineraries altered to piggyback on other countries’ priorities. Cash-cow charters to ‘ancient desert cities’ are as dry as the wadis they overlook; flights now leave and arrive at 2 and 3 a.m., underscoring Mauritania’s new marginalized position for all potential visitors, including businessmen. What kind of investment, especially much-needed development investment, is attracted to a high-risk, terrorist-active, ‘Islamic’ republic accessible to the world only in the wee hours of the morning? As a recent piece in the Christian Science Monitor likewise noted the impact on Niger: ‘A once-thriving tourism industry that sustained local businesses and artisans is now decimated in the Saharan caravan capital Agadez, reduced to little more than a stopover for African migrants and internal refugees heading north toward Libya and, for a lucky few, Europe’ (Armstrong 2010). CONCERNED AFRICA SCHOLARS
Page 1 and 2: Bulletin N°85 — Spring 2010 conc
Page 3 and 4: Editor’s Introduction Introductio
Page 5 and 6: Jacob Mundy Securitizing the Sahara
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Page 15 and 16: Stephen Harmon From GSPC to AQIM: T
Page 33 and 34: Caroline Ifeka War on ‘Terror’
Page 53 and 54: Alex Thurston Counterterrorism and
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Alex Thurston Counterterrorism and
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Intervention Western Sahara and the
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Konstantina Isidoros Western Sahara
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Yahia H. Zoubir The Western Sahara
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Vijay Prashad Sahelian Blowback: Wh
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Vijay Prashad Sahelian Blowback: Wh
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Anne E McDougall All Quiet on the W
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Daniel Volman and Jeremy Keenan The
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Western Sahara and the United States' geographical imaginings

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