Lives have been startlingly and numbingly lost. Yet one cannot avoid reflecting on the wider international political significance of recent violent events in Algeria. Some aspects of the incident seemed puzzling from the beginning.
Despite all the murk and lack of information everyone seemed quite confident that the person behind it was Mokhtar Belmokhtar. Yet he appeared to be a man more concerned for his own fortunes than fundamentalist religious gestures.
His men turn up at the site and find a couple of buses conveniently loaded with potential hostages. We hear this is a major site with many armed guards but nothing is heard of them. Anyone might have suggested to Belmokhtar’s men that the wise thing to do would be to blow up the installation (if that was what they wanted – they were said to have semtex) and move out quickly into the desert with a large but manageable number of hostages for future ransom - apparently their source of very large funds in recent years. They didn’t seem to have any very well formulated or negotiable demands. They seemed just to settle down and wait for the predictable arrival of the Algerian army, which of course whacked them with its usual lack of over-much concern for the lives of hostages let alone opponents. A number of people have lost their lives, but we do not know – and probably never will – how serious this whacking was by Algerian army standards. Our Foreign Secretary, William Hague, appears to understand that those standards are rather high: "Whatever people think of them, whatever has been said about the Algerian military, they are experienced." Mr Hague is renowned for his turn of phrase.
However that may be, who has gained? The Algerian government, no doubt looking east and south at Islamist or supposed Islamist uprisings against repressive governments, as well as at the general instability and lawlessness of their desert regions, and now persuaded that their political future lies more and more with western economic and strategic interests (having recently received a cordial visit from the new French president, following close on the footsteps of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton), have demonstrated to their unruly subjects and neighbours that they will ruthlessly and effectively put down insurrection or incursion, and have shown western states that they are indispensible and reliable allies in the war on terror, and that international terror is what their troubles are all about (just like Mr Putin’s were). Western states can perhaps find it easier to suggest openly that west Africa needs the kind of treatment given to Yemen - or more.
However that may be, prompt to the cue, come today's remarks from Mr Cameron. First the acknowledgement of the Algerians' role:
"No one should underestimate the difficulties of responding to an attack on this scale with 30 terrorists absolutely determined to take lives, and we should recognise all the Algerians have done to work with us and to help and co-ordinate with us, and I'd like to thank them for that,"
Then the broader message:
"This is a global threat and it will require a global response. It will require a response that is about years, even decades, rather than months," he said.
"It requires a response that is patient and painstaking, that is tough but also intelligent, but above all has an absolutely iron resolve and that is what we will deliver over these coming years."
There are parallels between north Africa and Pakistan/Afghanistan, he said.
"It is different in scale but there are similarities. What we face is an extremist Islamist violent al-Qaida-linked terrorist group – just as we have to deal with that in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, so the world needs to come together to deal with this threat in north Africa. It is similar because it is linked to al-Qaida, it wants to destroy our way of life, it believes in killing as many people as it can."
'The world needs to come together...' - one can only hope that the inclusive message finds more resonance than our Prime Minister's earlier claim to his own nation that we were 'all in this together', but Cameron's idea of the globalised world (that's a selective rather than an inclusive qualifier - only the globalised can act globally) coming together to sort out forcefully (or do I mean forcibly?) the problems of a people 'with a per capita gross domestic product of only around US$1,000 a year and average life expectancy of only 51 years - in a territory twice the size of France (per capital GDP $35,000 and upwards)' is more than a little disturbing. However, Cameron's remarks follow much the same script as his remarks yesterday, but focuses attention specifically on Africa as the new theatre of our endless struggle:
"We face a large and existential terrorist threat from a group of extremists based in different parts of the world who want to do the biggest possible amount of damage to our interests and way of life," he said. "Those extremists thrive when they have ungoverned spaces in which they can exist, build and plan."
The idea of moving on to Africa after the highly dubious success in Afghanistan has freed up our military resources is interesting, as is the thought of the possible long-term conflicts between the different styles of western and Chinese involvement in a continent that is seen as so important in terms of natural resources. Apart from the natural gas in question here, uranium for French nuclear electricity generating plants is only one concern - though a nearby one. The US has long had its eye on this problem:
And in a presentation by Vice Admiral Moeller at an Africom conference held at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008 and subsequently posted on the web by the Pentagon, he declared that protecting "the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market" was one of Africom's "guiding principles" and specifically cited "oil disruption," "terrorism," and the "growing influence" of China as major "challenges" to U.S. interests in Africa.
Undoubtedly there are 'extremist Islamist' groups deeply hostile to our 'way of life' but, ironically, they are most conspicuous (and have the deepest pockets) amongst the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, as Thomas Mountain explains. Elsewhere such extremists are found in the territory of our other ally, Pakistan, and missionaries have been despatched to the Sahel from both quarters.
Our habit of referring to "Al Qaida 3", as if it were the latest release of a familiar computer program, or to "the Al Qaida franchise in north Africa" (Vicki Huddlestone, herself not always as discerning as some might wish as to which foreign governments to support) encourages us to think that by labelling a thing, and preferably labelling it as a new version of something we tell ourselves we have encountered and understood before, we have got to grips with it, without the wearisome necessity actually to understand the people through whose lives it is currently manifested. Similarly, I find little assurance in Sir Jeremy Greenstock's advice that what the west must do to eliminate the danger to our 'way of life', and to the individual lives of some of us, is to locate and fill 'ungoverned spaces', as if there were nothing there (apart from the well-known enemy) to understand, and just filling the 'space' with any working government is the solution - not the former Libyan government of course, or even the currently toppling Syrian one, but apparently Algeria's would do.
However that may be, perhaps Mr Cameron finds it convenient to be able to issue such stirring words when western military involvement in north Africa is apparently more advanced than is generally acknowledged. Why Mr Cameron should take centre stage in this scene is a little more puzzling but perhaps it is only another aspect of the US 'leading from behind'.
As the man said, those of us who liked Afghanistan are going to love Africa. Apart from anything else, it's so much larger. It all makes Suez look so innocent, a foreign military episode that destroyed a British Prime Minister and saw the United States strong-arm Britain, France and Israel, but Britain especially, into abandonning its military coercion of Egypt - autres temps, autres mœurs - not that it did the US the slightest good in the Arab world.
