The order of magnitude is more modest. The human and military investment is not of the same order. But the pattern is similar, and the apparent failure of France in Mali resembles, all things considered, that of the United States in Afghanistan.
French President Emmanuel Macron announced last week the withdrawal of French soldiers from this country by the summer, led by a military junta increasingly hostile to their presence.
The terms used leave no doubt: this decision stems from a deep disagreement with the Malian putschists (in power since August 2020), today tempted by alliances or compromises which revolt Paris. “We cannot remain engaged militarily alongside authorities […] whose strategy or hidden objectives we do not share. »
Macron thinks of the Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group, linked to the Kremlin and active in several African countries. Mercenaries who, for the putschists in power in Bamako, have gradually become privileged interlocutors, if not associates…
As for the possible “hidden objectives”, the president also had in mind the possibility of negotiations with certain Islamist groups active in the Sahel, which could lead – who knows? — to a possible sharing of power.
On the contrary, the French army, present since January 2013 when it had prevented the jihadists from overthrowing power in Bamako, claimed to embody an uncompromising fight against violent Islam.
This announced departure illustrates the failure of the “mission” that France had given itself after 2013 in Mali and in the region, with Operation Serval, renamed Barkhane.
At a press conference on Thursday, the president nevertheless claimed the opposite: “I reject the idea of a defeat. We have had successes. […] What would have happened in 2013 if France had not chosen to intervene? He spoke of redeployment, not the final evacuation of all French forces in West Africa.
According to their joint statement of February 17, Paris and its junior partners in Operation Barkhane (a few European states, Canada) wish to “remain engaged in the region” and “extend their support to neighboring countries in the Gulf of Guinea and in Africa of the West”… Extensive programme.
As in Afghanistan in 2001, as in Libya in 2011, the intervention in Mali in 2013 began with a resounding success. The jihadists are stopped or driven out in a few weeks, even a few days. But it is in the months and years that follow that everything goes haywire.
A one-off, morally justified operation—to punish and dislodge the perpetrators of 9/11, to prevent Muammar Gaddafi’s troops from marching on Benghazi, or those of the Tuareg jihadists from taking Bamako—is transformed into a long-term commitment to “defend” or ” build” democracy, build a state and its security forces, wage war on jihad, secure huge countries with multiple, sometimes incomprehensible fronts.
And this, with always insufficient means and an increasingly tenuous “moral clarity”. While evoking the approximately 110,000 United States soldiers in Afghanistan (maximum number, at the height of the intervention in 2011), we must remember that Operation Barkhane was modest.
In strictly military terms, it mobilized a maximum of 5,100 soldiers… equipped with at most a few dozen planes and helicopters, to cover a territory almost as large as Quebec, which is teeming with dozens of groups and sub- combatant and hostile groups.
These groups wage war on the government, on foreign actors (Barkhane, UN mission), attack civilians (massacres of villages, forcibly displaced populations): since 2015, approximately 20,000 people have lost the lives of violent way in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.
Not to mention a fierce turf war between al-Qaeda-leaning and Islamic State-leaning factions. Plus the inter-ethnic conflicts (Dogons against Fulanis) which are superimposed on it.
So in total, an overwhelming picture, where any “victory” could only be punctual, temporary and reversible.
Today, France is leaving Mali on its own… before being kicked out. In the region, anti-French hostility is rising, in governments as well as in public opinion. One after another, fragile and powerless democracies are overthrown by coups (Mali 2020, Guinea 2021, Burkina Faso 2022). In West Africa, the French are now blamed for everything that goes wrong. Unfairly, with anti-colonialist slogans inherited from another era, but that’s the way it is. However, in 2013, the French army had been acclaimed in Bamako.
Today, the putschists in Bamako — and apparently those in Ouagadougou — are turning to Russian mercenaries, who number in the hundreds. What will they do better than the French soldiers?
As in Afghanistan, we see the extraordinary persistence of Islamic jihad wherever it is deployed… And as in Afghanistan, we see the failure of a great country with a great army, which claims to put down this jihad and go to war and peace, in Africa, Central Asia or elsewhere.
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]