The standoff between Mali’s government and the armed Islamists who control two-thirds of the country is unlikely to resolve peacefully, and the prospects for a new war in the Sahel appear increasingly probable.
Though better armed, Tuareg fighters in Mali have been driven from the capital of their autonomous state of “Azawad.”
One of the most resonant details from The New York Times’ recent feature on the Obama administration’s targeted killing program is the president’s apparent fondness for the writings of Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo, two early Christian thinkers who attempted to reconcile the pacifist teachings of Christ with the compromises that leaders must make in their inherently violent line of work. The president, it is suggested, strives to wage a “just war” against militants abroad, exacting only as much violence as is necessary to protect the United States from harm.
China’s growing economic presence in sub-Saharan Africa is normally portrayed in one of two ways. Either it’s cast as engaging in rapacious resource extraction without local employment and financial gain, or it’s portrayed as a source of beneficent foreign investment, bringing much-needed capital and building infrastructure in the world’s poorest region. The resistance to Chinese timber exploitation in the West African republic of Mali provides a more nuanced look at the Sino-African relationship, which, under certain circumstances, could act as a catalyst for positive political change in Africa.
Since September 11, in spite of the rhetoric on how the world has been transformed, U.S. foreign policy has approached the Islamic world and the war on terrorism as little more than old wine in new wine skins. During the Cold War, U.S. scholars and policymakers asked why people become communists. Now they ask why people become religious terrorists, extremists, and fundamentalists. What is so striking is that the solutions scholars give to this national security problem today is similar to the ones they proposed a half-century ago – more foreign aid to promote liberal democracy and free market capitalism. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) has been bold enough to call this policy “funding virtue,” even though scholars and policymakers have largely ignored the role of virtue or religion in sustaining democracy and development. The closest the United States has come to recognizing the role of virtue and religion in foreign policy is to promote religious freedom through the Office of International Religious Freedom created in the State Department during the Clinton administration.
It started in 2002 with a few hesitant probes that were low on intelligence, high on imagination, and short a couple of helicopters reportedly lost in the desert wastelands of northern Mali. Then, in 2003, the U.S. launch of a second front in its Âwar on terror moved into top gear. In collaboration with its regional ally Algeria, the Bush administration identified a banana-shaped swath of territory across the Sahelian regions of the southern Sahara that presumably harbored Islamic militants and bin Laden sympathizers on the run from Afghanistan.