Has France lost the war against terrorism in Mali? Voices are raised in this direction after the official announcement of the withdrawal “ordered” French troops in the Sahel, Thursday February 17. Nine years after the start of French operations in the region, the toll is heavy: 53 French soldiers have lost their lives in operations and jihadist and inter-community violence has caused thousands of civilian deaths.
During a press conference from the Elysée, just before leaving for Brussels (Belgium) and the EU-African Union summit, the head of state, Emmanuel Macron, challenged “completely” the idea of failure. “What would have happened in 2013 if France had not chosen to intervene? You would have certainly had a collapse of the Malian state”, he argued. However, Operation Barkhane has come up against many limits, even in the opinion of some French soldiers. Franceinfo explains why.
Because France got bogged down after the successful Operation Serval
On January 11, 2013, France launched Operation Serval in Mali at the request of the Malian State, to stem the progress of jihadists associated with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqmi), who took control of Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu, three cities in the north of the country. At the end of January, the French president at the time, François Hollande, was welcomed as a liberator by a jubilant crowd and declared that he knew “the best day of (his) political life”.
> Mali: from Serval to Barkhane, we summarize nine years of French military engagement in the Sahel in ten key dates
“If France had not intervened, today Mali would be under jihadist domination. We have won this fight”underlined in January with AFP Jean-Yves Le Drian, current Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Defense from 2012 to 2017. An excess of confidence in an area among the poorest on the planet, undermined by corruption and community tensions, point out many experts. “Serval responded to a good strategy, with clear objectives and adequate resources. The big mistake was to staysays military historian Michel Goya. We wanted to play police instead of remaining firefighters. But there were too many unmanageable structural problems.”
Because the training of the Malian armed forces is not finished
In 2014, the former colonial power chose to extend its military action with the anti-jihadist operation Barkhane, which took over from Serval and which will have up to 5,500 men. Objective: to continue the fight against terrorism and support Mali and its neighbors so that they are able to ensure their security in the region.
But as of 2015, attacks against Sahelian and foreign forces, as well as against places frequented by foreigners, began to multiply. Jihadist groups are gaining ground in Niger and are now hitting Burkina Faso. Nevertheless, “Mali did not fall into the hands of the jihadists”assures retired French colonel Raphaël Bernard, deployed three times in this country.
The author of the book In the heart of Barkhane (2021, ed. JPO) estimates that the effort to train the Malian armed forces (Fama) has borne fruit, with an increase from 7,000 to 40,000 men. But for the former senior officer, who left the Army in 2020, “We have not achieved the ultimate goal, which was to increase the power of the Fama so that they are able to take charge of the security of their country. We have not been at the end of the mission”.
Because this withdrawal risks encouraging the expansion of the jihadists
If Mali has not fallen into the hands of the jihadists, the latter have conquered ground beyond its borders. As Jean-Dominique Merchet analyzed on France Inter on Thursday, “the threat is now moving much further south or east, towards the major capitals of Africa”such as Abidjan (economic capital of the Ivory Coast) or Dakar (Senegal).
Despite the policy of “neutralization” of jihadist cadres, with the elimination of the emir of AQIM, the Algerian Abdelmalek Droukdel, in June 2020, the armed groups have not released their hold. And the Malian authorities, for lack of means or will, have not regained the ground and have installed neither services nor security forces in the neglected regions of the country.
The French army thus abandoned the field in the face of a protean enemy, capable of regenerating itself by renewing its workforce and proposing alternative solutions to a failing local administration.
Because France has persisted in the face of an increasingly hostile Malian power
Paris has made up with the immobility of the Malian president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta. But to the negligence of power was added political instability. In August 2020, then in May 2021, two successive coups shook Mali and put power in the hands of a junta that quickly played the anti-French sentiment card.
Bamako ended up resorting, according to Western accusations denied by Mali, to the services of the sulphurous private Russian company Wagner. The junta pushed back sine die the organization of elections and multiplied the declarations hostile to Paris. “When I was in Mali, we were there for the restoration of the integrity of the Malian state. Today, with a hostile Malian junta, the meaning is no longer there”, underlines Colonel Raphaël Bernard. According to the former soldier, “it may have been a strategic mistake to believe in an indivisible Mali”while“a historical and cultural abyss” separate “the Tuaregs of the North and the Bambaras of the South”.
Because relatives of soldiers who died in combat denounce “a mess”
The announcement of the withdrawal is particularly hard to swallow for the families of the 53 soldiers who died in combat. “Such a waste !”gets carried away in The world Dominique Protin, father of Warrant Officer Alexandre Protin, one of the thirteen soldiers killed in a collision between two helicopters of the French forces, in November 2019. After this accident, Emmanuel Macron had banged his fist on the table and summoned the Heads of State from the Sahel to the summit of Pau (south-west of France) to demand a collective leap.
“What would our children think of all this today?”continues Dominique Protin in the columns of the evening daily, considering nevertheless that the failure of France in the Sahel is first to be sought on the side of Malian political leaders. “I don’t understand why Mali hasn’t managed to reconstitute an army. If it had wanted to, it would have been possible. We sent our knowledge, our money… Where did all this go? Really , I do not understand.”
Because this decision marks the failure of the fight against terrorism outside the borders
Operation Barkhane was what is called an asymmetric war, in a semi-desert area as vast as Europe, against an enemy often anxious to avoid direct confrontation, mobile and capable of blending in with the population. The primacy of the military response to a notoriously deeper scourge, a strategy adopted by Westerners in other parts of the globe, in Afghanistan in particular, has shown its limits.
In Afghanistan as in Mali, Western attempts to set up legitimate and resilient local sovereign structures (army, administration, government) have met with bitter failure. In these areas, “the search and securing operations, very quickly considered as military successes, often hide the seeds of even more complex future conflicts”observes Bakary Sambé, director of the Timbuktu Institute in Dakar. “Classic counter-terrorism (…) proves powerless against the roots of this evil”specifies the researcher, citing in particular “poverty, poor development, poor governance, injustices”.
France has tried to share the burden with the European task force Takuba, supposed to accompany the Malian army in combat. This decision was largely based on the logic of the American President, Joe Biden, for Afghanistan, namely “an ‘over-the-horizon’ approach” (without presence on the ground, striking from the sky), analyzes Tore Hamming, researcher in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. But if this formula makes it possible to neutralize a jihadist leader, “It’s not a strategy to win the war against the jihadists”.