Bomb, baby, bomb! ... another Western no-brainer

A Tuareg independantiste in Mali ... sidelined by the Salafi-jihadis.
Photo: Global Dispatches

Getting to know the imperial disaster in Mali: Apparently, it's a no-brainer [excerpt]

By Pepe Escobar, an independent Brazilian investigative journalist and commentator

ONE has to love the sound of a Frenchman's Mirage 2000 fighter jet in the morning. Smells like... a delicious neo-colonial breakfast in Hollandaise sauce. Make it quagmire sauce.

Apparently, it's a no-brainer. Mali holds 15.8 million people - with a per capita gross domestic product of only around US$1000 a year and average life expectancy of only 51 years - in a territory twice the size of France (per capita GDP $35,000 and upwards). Now almost two-thirds of this territory is occupied by heavily weaponised Islamist outfits.

What next? Bomb, baby, bomb.

So welcome to the latest African war; Chad-based French Mirages and Gazelle helicopters, plus a smatter of France-based Rafales bombing evil Islamist jihadis in northern Mali. Business is good; French president Francois Hollande spent time last month in Abu Dhabi clinching the sale of up to 60 Rafales to that Gulf paragon of democracy, the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Move over Taliban bogeymen, it's the turn of the Sahel's 'Afrighanistan'

FAR FROM STATE terrorism in the South Pacific, but the Sahel, a new Global war on Terror battleground now that the "Coalition of the Willing" has virtually lost the plot in Aghanistan, deserves reflection. Pontecorvo's 1966 The Battle of Algiers remains the classic counter-terrorism documentary and provides pointers to the contemporary Western mindset, such as displayed in Zero Dark Thirty about the decade-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Another excerpt from a "Roving Eye" column by Brazilian journalist and author Pepe Escobar in the Asian Times provides some insights. Café Pacific finds it extraordinary that Escobar's columns don't get a run anywhere in the Australian, NZ or Pacific media.

Zero Dark Mali [Excerpt]

By Pepe Escobar

Goooooooood morning, Vietnam! No, sorry, that was another quagmire.

The soundtrack then was Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Motown and Stax. Now it's Goooooooooood morning, Mali! Yet the soundtrack can't be something as transcendental as Rokia Traore's Dounia, or as delightfully psychedelic as Amadou and Mariam's Dimanche a Bamako. It's way more menacing. Something like - he's inescapable - Hendrix in Machine Gun.

Timing - as in the expansion of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) - is everything. Carefully choreographed Libyan blowback in the Sahel could not be a better replacement for NATO raising a monster white flag in Afghanistan. There's no Goooooood morning, Kabul! anymore; there's just the sorry countdown to see the last NATO helicopter leaving Bagram - Saigon 1975-style.

The Economist - the voice of the City of London - is even promoting "Afrighanistan". There are nuances, of course. NATO had its ass kicked in Afghanistan by all sorts of Pashtun factions bundled up as "Taliban". But NATO "won" in Libya.

With a certainly foreseen spin-off; the Islamist brigade which attacked the In Amenas gas field complex in the Algerian desert was using NATO-facilitated Kalashnikov AK-104s, F5 rockets, 60 mm gun-mortars and, in a nifty NATOGCC fashion touch, the "chocolate chip" camouflage Qatar handed out to the NATO rebels in Libya (yellow flak jackets with brown patches). What next, the cover of Uomo Vogue?

'Geronimo' Belmokhtar and the Algerian Global War on Terror chapter

'Geronimo' Belmokhtar is already rehearsing for his cameo
appearance in a Zero Dark Thirty sequel. Photo: France24

CAFÉ PACIFIC is slightly off its usual Pacific track over the Algerian hostage crisis but, given France's role in state terrorism in Oceania and nuclear testing (this began in the Sahara desert), it is interesting to follow Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar's "unwestern" articles in the Asian Times. His robust column, The Roving Eye, provides a devastating critique of self-serving Western policies - a refreshing contrast to the media spin in this part of the world. For example, in the wake of new warlord French President François Hollande's adventure in Mali and the jihadist raid on the vast In Amenas gas plant, where does Algeria fit in the overall scheme of things?

According to Escobar, the Algerian military's ultra-hardcore response to the Islamist raid was predictable - "this is how they did it during the 1990s in their internal war against the Islamic Salvation Front":

We don't negotiate with terrorists; we kill them (along with scores of hostages). We do it by ourselves, without nosy foreigners, and we go for total information blackout.

 THE ROVING EYE [an excerpt]

War on terror forever

By Pepe Escobar

And the winner of the Oscar for Best Sequel of 2013 goes to... The Global War on Terror (GWOT), a Pentagon production. Abandon all hope those who thought the whole thing was over with the cinematographic snuffing out of "Geronimo", aka Osama bin Laden, further reduced to a fleeting cameo in the torture-enabling flick Zero Dark Thirty.

It's now official - coming from the mouth of the lion, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, and duly posted at the AFRICOM site, the Pentagon's weaponised African branch.
Exit "historical" al-Qaeda, holed up somewhere in the Waziristans, in the Pakistani tribal areas; enter al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). In Dempsey's words, AQIM "is a threat not only to the country of Mali, but the region, and if... left unaddressed, could in fact become a global threat".

With Mali now elevated to the status of a "threat" to the whole world, GWOT is proven to be really open-ended. The Pentagon doesn't do irony; when, in the early 2000s, armchair warriors coined the expression "The Long War", they really meant it.

Even under President Obama 2.0's "leading from behind" doctrine, the Pentagon is unmistakably gunning for war in Mali - and not only of the shadow variety. General Carter Ham, AFRICOM's commander, already operates under the assumption Islamists in Mali will "attack American interests".