One might think, from reading the breathless newspaper coverage, that the United States only discovered Mali after Islamist militants from Libya got there first; or, alternately, that the infusion and failure of US training for Mali's military is the proximate cause (or at least the failure that can be blamed) for the current sufferings of Mali's people and the aggressive military response led by France. In both cases, one would be wrong.
For a full decade, American and other western leaders have been trumpeting Mali's importance as a beacon of African democracy and a bulwark in regional security. Yet its economic growth trailed off to virtually nothing, and its civilian government collapsed – to complete western surprise. Is counterterrorism really to blame?
Mali's late civilian government, which first came to power in 1991 after three decades of military rule post-independence, was a beloved poster child for African democracy. As recently as last year, a German foundation could publish a report saying (pdf):
"Mali's transition to democracy is widely considered one of the most successful in sub-Saharan Africa."
Western democratization assistance is not lavish anymore, if it ever was, but Mali had been benefiting steadily since the 1990s. When I traveled there with then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the agenda included economic reform talks, scholarships for women and girls and – heartbreakingly now – reviewing troops training for regional peacekeeping. The Bush administration followed suit, admitting Mali to the nations it favored with a Millennium Challenge Compact (its initiative to link aid more closely to performance) in 2006.
Mali's civilian government struggled with corruption, desertification, impoverishment, and the inability to lure investment. It also struggled with a complex ethnic mixture: though 90% Muslim, the country is divided between northerners (Tuaregs, "Arabs", and "Moors") and southerners, by culture and environment and history. The civilian government successfully patched over a number of ethnic disputes, but violence in the north flared in 1996, 2006, and 2008.
Concerns over political Islam in Mali's north are also not new: expert commentators as well as members of Congress such as Jane Harman, from her position on the House intelligence committee, were warning about it six years ago. The group now known as al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, founded in Algeria as an extremist group with concerns more regional than global, had come over the border in 2003 and began to establish itself with kidnappings, recruiting and marrying into – as well as terrorizing – northern inhabitants.
In 2006, it was reported that an AQIM "support cell" had been "dismantled", but the group did not leave the country, and similar but distinct groups took root as well. The idea that the United States ought, as part of its effort to support and stabilize Mali's elected government, to be developing its security forces was uncontroversial.
The resurgence of fighting in the north coincided with a decline in Mali's economic growth, which had reached 5.6% in 2005 (pdf) but fell to 1.1% by 2011, in the wake of drought, regional conflict and the fighting in Libya. That year, UNDP's human development index ranked Mali lower than Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
In 2011, as has been widely reported, the Islamist movements in the north enjoyed a surge of battle-hardened recruits and heavy weapons from Libya. They formed an alliance with disgruntled northerners and attacked government forces in 2012, routing them decisively. Disgusted, junior officers in the (US-trained army) staged a coup. US law then obliged the US to terminate its training and economic support programs, leaving that to France and the EU, while turning its attention to training a regional peacekeeping force authorized by the UN.
Meanwhile, northern civilians quickly chafed under the rule of the al-Qaida affiliated groups, whose severity is alien to local tradition. But it was too late.
Now, the region and the west are faced with a set of unpalatable choices. Support a military engagement by the former colonial power, or turn down an explicit request for help from Mali's Muslim, civilian, transitional government? Try to speed up the deployment of a regional force that may not be ready; use western forces instead, leave Mali's civilians – and their neighbors – to their fate?
We will have weeks, if not months, to talk about what went wrong militarily in the last year, why US planners and advisers failed to anticipate and prepare for either the Islamist spillover from Libya, or the coup. Perhaps some will wonder whether, if the US hadn't contracted all its military assistance to outside advisers, while its active-duty advisers were overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, the results would have been better.
But even that conversation misses the point. Mali's civilian government, and its western supporters, had a decade to build institutions, civilian and military, that could counter both the appeal and the military might of the extremists. That task was hard enough, perhaps impossible. But it could have been tried much harder without loss of life, and without unraveling an entire region. It should have been tried harder for the dignity of the human beings involved; it could have been tried harder as effective counterterrorism, as well.
Through the 1990s and the 2000s, we heard a steady refrain that the United States could not afford foreign aid. The civilian assistance provided to Mali in the last five years before the coup was just about $400m – a serious amount of money to Americans facing the loss of teachers, firefighters, road repair, college scholarships. Yet, the Council on Foreign Relations' Micah Zenko estimates that the first six months of the Libya intervention cost the US $1.1bn.
Malians, and we, will be fortunate to see the extremists vanquished that quickly and "cheaply" – and with that few civilian and western lives lost. Then, Mali will still be one of the world's poorest and least developed countries.
Instead, with extremists dug in, and peacekeepers hard to find, that lost ounce of prevention looks likely to turn into years of painful – and not necessarily effective – cure.
