French Kissing Mali

Jan. 30:

With the news that French forces have retaken not only Gao but Timbuktu, a colleague asked me this morning if I was surprised by the speed of French success. Here, in essence, is what I answered.

No, I’m not at all surprised about the initial success of the past 18 days. The French force is the very best France has, and matched against a ragtag guerrilla group it is going to kick ass every time. The French are way down the throats of the enemy, and good for them. I am no more surprised by their success than I was with how fast U.S. forces got to Baghdad in the spring of 2003.

But this is not “victory”, and I hope no one in Paris is dumb enough to suggest putting up a self-congratulating sign on some French warship. In Mali the bad guys are simply retreating out of formation, to the extent they were in formation in the first place. After the initial air attacks, not all that many of them have been killed. They are in the bush, watching, waiting and ambushing the unlucky convoy here and there.

Tuareg are cultural, if not always these days literal, nomads. Their fighters know how to live without heavy logistical bases and mass military formations. Their understanding of military tactics is based on several thousand years of mobile raiding. If you want to understand the kinds of tactics they use, study the war between Libya and Chad back in the mid-1980s. The Chadians beat the crap out of a much larger and better-armed, Soviet-supplied Libyan force. They mounted machine guns on the back of Toyota pickup trucks, substituting those for camels, and did more or less the same kind of thing they had been doing for centuries. The Libyan soldiers sighed, died, and those that remained ultimately retreated. I wonder if anyone in the U.S. military has remembered and studied that war in the Malian context. I doubt it, frankly, since that would require knowing at least a little history and being sensitive to ethnographic factors in warfare. But that’s the model to look at.

Moreover, the rebel attack south was in the first place an attempt to discombobulate an expected effort to attack the Azawad north.  I don’t think the rebels wanted or expected to lose Timbuktu so soon, but they never expected to hold Gao or Konna. The problem is that the French have declared their military aim to be the complete reattachment of the northern part of the country to the government in Bamako—despite the fact that you cannot reattach something that was never really attached in the first place. The French think, or they are pretending to think, that an African force, along with the Malian army, can hold this area after the French leave. But it can’t. This is an area larger than Texas and with porous borders on every side. The idea that about 5,000–8,000 soldiers from half a dozen countries, nearly all of them ethnically alien in Tuareg-majority territory, could hold that large an area is risible. So going in and pushing the bad guys out of the cities is one thing; securing the area entirely and more or less permanently is something else again. The former is relatively easy; the latter is practically impossible with the numbers and under the conditions that currently obtain.

Finally, I’m not surprised by the swiftness of the advance, because lunatic Islamists, whether “guest” or native, always alienate the populations they abuse. It happened in Iraq, and now it’s happening in Mali.

But it’s a big mistake to conflate the Islamists with Tuareg nationalists. The former may wax or wane—probably wane.  But the nationalists, both activists and their supporters, are still there. They were there before the war in Libya, and they will be there after this episode resolves.

My view is that the U.S. government should not accommodate the Islamists one iota, which is why I think it was plainly shameful for the Obama Administration to try to extract money from the French in return for some airlift services. This is after all an operation with a strategic logic that encompasses American as well as European interests.  We are allies to the French, not green-eyeshade creditors.

But we do, I think, have a pragmatic interest in coming to terms with Tuareg nationalism. What we should be doing, therefore, aside from prudently but loyally helping our French ally, is quietly developing liaison with organized non-Islamist Tuareg nationalists.

Are we doing that? Perhaps, but I sincerely doubt it. We have lately been reduced to completely short-term and reactive behavior. Like the rest of the society, the military and intelligence wings of the U.S. government have fallen under the spell of the attention-segmenting technologies that are disorganizing our stock of knowledge about most things. By falsely equating information with knowledge, critical context is sacrificed to an obsession with collecting facts. But facts bereft of context are not only useless but organizationally paralyzing, if there are enough of them. Under such circumstances not only can we not think and plan ahead, we often cannot think or plan at all.

So we find ourselves on the proverbial bottom line: Study the Chad-Libyan War of the mid-1980s, help the French, and develop a plan to quietly liaise with non-Islamist Tuareg nationalists. Everybody clear on that?

Whoops, and More

In my last post I erred by identifying the FICA tax cut from 6.2% to 4.2% as part of the Bush-era tax cuts--it wasn't.  A loyal reader pointed out that this was a 2010 Obama Administration decision, part of the broader stimulus program.  I had forgotten that.  Everything else I said about it, however, stands. But while we're on the topic of this tax, we might as well use the opportunity to elucidate this particular matter.

The reduction of the FICA tax was always meant to be temporary, but then again so were the Bush-era cuts.  Most people, I guess, are assuming that the Administration decided to end the two percent reduction because of concern over the balance in the Social Security trust fund. Ah, this is where things get interesting.

Some weeks ago an old acquaintance pointed out that there was something very strange about the discussion over the deficit and the so-called fiscal cliff. Why, he asked, should politicians be making equilibrations between entitlements, again so-called, like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security when these programs all have separate revenue streams apart from the general Federal budget that pays for discretionary spending?  If these programs have separate revenue streams from the general budget, then what sense is there in talking about the sequestration of social spending and military spending, because the discretionary revenue pool has nothing to do with paying for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, right?

I thought this was a good question; I, at least, did not have a ready and persuasive answer to it, so I asked around of people who have been in this business for their day job. What I learned was quite interesting, and that is what I wish to share right now.

First of all, yes, there are separate revenue streams, and there are supposed to be separate revenue pots of money, to cover Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Technically, there are; in reality, it's all one big pot. The taxes that are supposed to pay for Medicare and Medicaid collect only a fraction of what those programs cost, and that fraction has gotten smaller and smaller over the years as these programs have become more expensive for a variety of reasons, some of them demographic and others politico-bureaucratic.

Social Security is a little different, but also somewhat the same. Of course there is supposed to be a special trust fund into which contributions go, and yes, as everyone knows, those who work and pay into the fund at any given time are really paying for those elders who are retired. These workers in turn will be paid back their contributions in retirement by subsequent generations of workers.  If this sounds like a Ponzi scheme, it's because it is, but there's nothing wrong with a Ponzi scheme that everyone recognizes as such, and that is not voluntary anyway, as long as the demographic realities support the scheme. Some observers have been pointing out now for more than twenty years that demographic change has put the Social Security trust fund balance in jeopardy. I am not exaggerating when I say that we have been warned now for at least twenty years about this--just look up Pete Peterson and you'll see. This makes it all the more amazing that our political class has failed repeatedly to heed these warnings and do anything to avoid the train wreck. I am also told, by the way, that the train wreck is actually here: that the Social Security trust fund is technically now in deficit.

I never understood until recently why our political class was so blasé about dealing with this problem. Now I get it: In reality, as opposed to law, there is no Social Security trust fund. And there is a good reason for that.

After the end of the Depression and World War II, the money began to pile up in the Social Security trust fund as the U.S. economy got back on its feet and began to excel. As it was explained to me, this put U.S. Treasury officials in a bind. They could do two things with all this money. First, they could just let it  sit there, but that would be a tremendous and irresponsible waste of capital, capital needed at a time when we were trying to build and broaden the American middle class through the G.I. Bill and a variety of other programs. Second, the Treasury could either invest the money in financial instruments or it could acquire real equity, by buying real estate, corporate stocks and the like. There were a few people who thought this was a good idea, but cooler heads prevailed. The idea that the government might own significant parts of the economy, even if only in trust for its retired citizens, raised all sorts of philosophical and practical warning flags, in particular the potential for corruption and insider dealing of several kinds.

Since it made no sense either to sit on this money or to buy things with it, the decision was made to merge the money "in effect" with the general revenue pot. You have probably heard accusations that from time to time the Congress has "raided" the Social Security trust fund.  Well it has, but it has more or less done so by mutual agreement. These "raiding" accusations tend to come from partisan quarters, or from those who do not like the purposes to which the money has been put. But this "one big pot" approach has become common practice in both Republican and Democratic administrations over many years.

And that is why our political class has not gotten all that exercised about the demographic-induced imbalance in the trust fund that is now upon us because of the Baby Boom generation. The basic idea is that, hey, if we, the Congress, took money out of the trust fund when that made sense, we can stick money back in it if we have to when that makes sense.  No big deal, really.

Well, that has not worked out so hot, because when it comes time to stick money back in, and that will be necessary, it is not at all clear where that money is going to come from. There are only four places it can come from. That money can be created anew, "printed."  It can be borrowed.  It can be acquired through higher taxes. Or it can be acquired at the same or lower tax rates if the economy grows rapidly. Those four options, or some combination of them, are I think the only ways to do this. Obviously, the fourth option is the most desirable, and in the end it may be our salvation––as, in the past, with no thanks to the government. The first option risks inflation. The second option risks deeper and more dangerous deficits, and it also rewards those who make money off money and thus exacerbates inequality. The third option risks recession, and is politically very difficult at the present. So this is the dilemma.

As far Social Security is concerned, this is really frustrating because there are at least three sensible ways to rebalance the system if we really felt like it, which is another way of saying "had the political will to do it."

We could go back to the original concept of Social Security as insurance for old-age, which means that we would means-test payments. Right now retired people who have skezads of money still get their benefits, even though they don't really need them. My father-in-law happens to be one of them, and he has said to me many times that it's ridiculous to pay rich people insurance money that they don't need, when so many other needs go unfulfilled. I think he's right. But we have distorted the original understanding of the program from an insurance pool to a kind of bank account that people have. I don't know exactly how or when this happened, but it was a huge mistake to let it happen.

Alternatively, and much easier to do politically, we could simply raise the cap on the Social Security tax. Right now there is a maximum amount that any individual has to pay into the pot. I see this every year when in November and December my take-home pay goes up by quite a bit because I've hit the ceiling. We could either eliminate the ceiling altogether, and tax all income, or we could raise the ceiling in order to make the program solvent over time. The latter would be probably easier to do politically, and it would solve the problem.

And yet another alternative, often discussed, is raising the retirement age. When Social Security was initiated, life expectancies were much lower. No one in 1933 or 1935 could have imagined so many people living so many years past age 60.  In many circles this seems to be the most popular option, but there are at least two problems with it. The first problem is how do you do this without reneging on promises solemnly made––in other words, how many people get grandfathered under the present system and how many younger people don't? The other reason this may not be such a great idea is that if we extend the retirement age, more older people will be working longer, and that is going to clog up the entry channels for younger workers. Ordinarily that would not be such a big deal, but we are in a time when globalization and automation are making job generation problematical, especially jobs that sustain a middle-class living standard.

In any event, some combination of these three ways to ensure the solvency other Social Security trust would definitely work. Everyone in Congress who has looked at the problem understands this, and so do their staffs, and so do the hundreds of academics and serious journalists who have looked at this problem over the years. And because we've done nothing to address this problem, not to speak of so many others, everyone's taxes went up two percent in 2013.

There, I think that's finally now got this about right. Sorry for the factual error.

Dear Abby, Dear Abby: On Death and Taxes, and More

These days the vast majority of posts here are pasted in from my blog at work at The American Interest.  Only from time to time do I have something I want to put down here that is not appropriate, possibly, for my (so-called) professional life. This one is probably going to end up somewhere in between, so I may do something a bit unusual: Write here and transfer some version of it over to the TAI site.

There have been some noteworthy deaths lately, two of them in baseball. Stan Musial died, and so did Earl Weaver. They were both real characters, but Musial was really special––a great player, a loyalist who played with only one team his entire career, and a man who was as outstanding off the field as he was on it. I have a  friend who is a devout Cardinals fan, and of course I wrote to him to console him about the passing of Stan the Man. He was deeply appreciative. I shared with them my own musings on the death of my own boyhood hero, Harmon Killebrew, who died a year or so ago.

Earl Weaver was of course known as a manager more than as a player, so it's hard to work up quite the same feelings for him, unless you happen to be a Baltimore Orioles fan––which I have never been. But when it comes to Stan Musial,  he was in his baseball prime when I was in my boyhood prime. So when someone like that dies a piece of my boyhood dies with him. I can't explain it but when I pondered the meaning of Musial last night during a bout of insomnia, into my head leapt Janice Joplin singing "Take it, take another little piece of my heart, now baby." You know you got it; that's how it feels.

Before I come to the other death I want to mention, I just have to get off my chest a brief remark about taxes. There is a connection. Somebody once asked this person, to be revealed just below, what motivated her to write. And she answered:  the Internal Revenue Service.

As everybody knows, pretty much, the White House and the Congress at the last minute at the end of 2012 decided to keep the Bush-era tax cuts except for families making more than $450,000.  The President and everybody else on Capitol Hill repeatedly told us that if you were below that threshold, your taxes would not rise.  Well, here we are near the end of January, and most people have by now seen one paycheck or more in 2013,  and guess what? That turned out to be a lie. What no one discussed that I ever heard, and I never saw a single newspaper article talk about it, was that the temporary Bush-era reduction of the FICA tax from 6.2% down to 4.2% was going to expire. And expire it did.  Now that tax is back up to 6.2%. (There may be other dimensions to the lie later on when people learn that some of the deductions they have grown used to depending on are no longer available to them, but that's another story).

Maybe it's a little strong to call it a lie, but what it shows is how completely detached our political class is from the lives of ordinary people. What these guys meant was that there would be no increase in Federal income tax if you happen to be below the threshold. But the average worker, the average person, doesn't give a damn where the tax comes from. All that person knows is that they either have less, the same, or more money on account of being taxed. So I wonder what most people thought when, after having been assured that their taxes would not rise, they rose 2 percent anyway.

Now, for our politicians two percent doesn't seem like much, but people trying to make ends meet feel that 2 percent keenly.  And as I say, as far as I am aware, nobody ever talked about this, nobody ever explained the logic of not allowing that tax cut to continue, nobody ever debated it in public that I know of, and nobody mentioned it during either the presidential or vice presidential debates.

I am not going to get into a long discourse here about whether United States is an overtaxed or an undertaxed country. Actually, it is both, but I don't want to take time to explain here why that is. To most people, I think it's fair to say, taxes are too high compared to the services they provide. It used to be in ancient days that a tithe was ten percent, and nobody ever imagined a government needing more than ten percent to do what it needed to do. Just the FICA tax alone, at 6.2%,  is a big chunk of ten percent––nearly two-thirds of ten percent.  And we haven't even gotten near all the other taxes people have to pay. Again the point: Our political class thought this 2 percent was too trivial to even mention, either that or they were afraid to do so. But it's not trivial at all to most people. So is it any wonder that the typical American ranks Congress about as popular as chickenpox.


Now I want to come to the death that has set me most to thinking. On January 16 Pauline Phillips passed away at the age of 94.  Ms. Phillips wrote under the name Abigail Van Buren, and is--or was-- of course the very, very famous Dear Abby. It must've been about twenty years ago, maybe longer, that I learned to my surprise that she was the identical twin sister of Ann Landers.  How odd, I thought. I was even more impressed, although not exactly surprised, to learn that these twin sisters were Jewish. I vaguely understood that between the two of them the Friedman twins had enormous social influence, but since I rarely read either one of them I really didn't give it much thought. Now with the passing of the second of the two sisters, I have given it at least some fleeting thought.

A catalyst for my doing so was the magisterial obituary in the New York Times written by Margalit Fox.  For many years I have been an aficionado of obituary writing. It is an art form all its own, little pocket biographies that, when done properly, convey emotion and information in almost equal proportion.  I so like them that I started a collection of obituaries, mostly from the New York Times but also from other places, of obscure but nevertheless interesting and important American Jews. I figured one day I might process all this material into a short book, because I believe firmly in what one of my mentors, Owen Harries, used to say: People are most eager to read about "flaps and chaps", by which he meant scandals and colorful personalities.

Anyway, Ms. Fox's effort on Dear Abby could hardly have been better. She introduced the subject by observing that had Damon Runyon and Groucho Marx combined talents to write an advice column, it would sound a lot like Dear Abby's. I'm not so sure about the Damon Runyon part, because I don't hear any Nathan Detroit intonations in Dear Abby, but I hear plenty of Marxism--of the Groucho wing, of course.

Anyway, to make a long story short, Pauline Esther Friedman,  nicknamed Popo, and her twin sister Esther Pauline Friedman,  nicknamed Essie, really did have enormous influence. As Ms. Fox points out, the two of them transformed advice columns from stuffy Victorian formalisms into sometimes quite avant-garde social commentary, personalized (usually) from woman to woman.  As much of the commentary pointed out, Ann Landers and  Abigail Van Buren paved the way for Dr. Ruth, Oprah and many others. They had effective control over what could and could not be said about sensitive and intimate matters in public. They established not only the contours of taste with regard to such matters, but the bounds of social authority pertaining to them.

As important, I think, in that regard is that both of them combined a somewhat conservative attitude when it came to marital and family life with a somewhat progressive tilt on politics. Especially toward the beginning of their careers, the twins frowned on easy divorce, licentious behavior and promiscuous teen habits. It is fair to say, I think, that they dragged their feet on those kinds of issues, trying to slow trends they saw as destructive. But at the same time they both advanced civil rights, rights and respect for immigrants and ethnic minorities of all kinds, and in due course legal equality for homosexuals. When it came to those issues, they did not drag their feet but pushed their envelopes, and with them those of the entire nation.

Some people may find this an odd combination––to be social conservatives in some respects but political progressives in others. I don't find it at all odd, because it pretty much describes my own point of view. Now I wish I'd read more of what the twins had to say back in the day.

I can't help, too, to reflect just a bit on the Jewcentric dimension of all this. I am reasonably confident that 99 percent of the readers who devoured Ann Landers and Dear Abby on a regular basis over the years did not know they were Jews. And they weren't just ho-hum Jews, either. Hailing from a very small Jewish community in Sioux City, Iowa, which, like most such Jewish communities tend to be tight-knit, they were avowed and proud, if not especially observant, Jews. In the obituary there is a vignette about the two sisters meeting Bishop Fulton Sheen. Both of them thought he was a great man, and learned a great deal from him. But Popo was quoted as saying that the Bishop would sooner become a Jew that she'd ever be a Catholic.

My guess is that it would've made no difference to their readers, most of them anyway, had they known they were Jewish. But it's hard not to find it striking that these two pre-eminent gatekeepers of American social mores, whose cumulative influence is hard to overestimate, were Jews. Indeed, if you look up the pop cultural references to Dear Abby, in particular, but also Ann Landers, they virtually never stop. My favorite is the song called "Dear Abby" written and recorded by John Prine, but everybody can get a piece of Dear Abby culture, so widely has she been integrated into the American Geist.

The twins were first-generation American Jews at that. The family's story is so typical in most respects that it seems to come right out of central casting. The twins' parents, Abraham and Rebecca Friedman, left the domain of the Czar in 1905,  the year of the Kishinev pogrom.  According to the newspaper accounts,  they came from Vladivostok, which of course is on the Pacific, in the Maritime provinces, about us far from the Ukraine as you can get and still be in the Russian Empire. I have no idea how Abraham and Rebecca ended up in Vladivostok, but my guess is they were in refugee transit there from much further west. Also a little odd, the obituaries mentioned that the parents never forgot their first sight of the Statue of Liberty, which means they entered the United States in New York, on the East Coast. That is not a very efficient way to get from Vladivostok to the United States, so this is kind of curious.

As to why they ended up in Sioux City, Iowa, well, that remains a mystery too--at least to me. But it's really not all that strange. My own maternal grandmother used to tell the story of how when she and her siblings came to America with their parents from Odessa they went to, as she, in her permanently affixed Yiddish accent, would say--and I will try to get this as close to the sound as written language will allow--Say-DEER ra-PEEDs e-OH-vah.  Of course, she was talking about Cedar Rapids, Iowa, not all that far from Sioux City. We grandchildren thought this was about the funniest thing we had ever heard. (It was maybe 1956, so give us a break.) So there were Jews out there, a lot of them ending up ultimately in Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Detroit and St. Louis.

As to the central casting, well, Abraham and Rebecca started out in Cedar Rapids peddling chickens from a cart.  Eventually they parlayed that activity into a grocery store. From the grocery store, Abraham, who evidently had a terrific sense of humor and loved the stage, bought a partial ownership in a burlesque house, right at the cusp of when movies swept the country. After a number of years he owned a chain of movie houses in and around Sioux City, and grew quite wealthy.

As for the twins (I don't know much about their two elder sisters), they got married on the same day in 1939 in the synagogue in Sioux City, and they both married wealthy––or soon to be wealthy––men. Essie married a guy who went on to found Budget Rent-a-Car. Popo married Morton Phillips, who was the heir to a large liquor business that had supposedly begun within twenty seconds after the end of Prohibition. They had plenty of money and didn't need to work. But, as Popo famously said, "It's not work unless you'd rather be doing something else."

Now this piece of information also alighted on my own family's history: My mother's father Adam, after whom I am named, did the very same thing. With one partner, I think, he founded Central Liquor in Washington, DC in 1933. Those from the Washington area may know that this was at one time, and to some extent still is, the largest and most lucrative liquor store in the city.

Unfortunately, my grandfather Adam didn't get along well with his partner (I believe he thought he was a crook, but I was not yet around and so cannot judge the matter one way or the other), and eventually sold out his share. Now how unfortunate is that? I don't know. What do I know, however, is that my grandfather did not exactly invent his business suddenly on one day in 1933. He had been making "sacramental cherry wine"--yes, folks, that's a euphemism--in the basement of the house on 16th Street for a long time.  He and some associates also apparently knew the route up to Halifax in Canada like the back of their hands. In short, I suspect he was a small-time bootlegger, and, from the sound of it, I suspect that Morton Phillips's dad was, too. They did not pay taxes on that stuff, take it from me.

Stan Musial, FICA, Dear Abby..... I'm sorry.  I guess I didn't get a great night's sleep.

What the Algeria Attack Was Really About: Algeria

Over the past week or so, I have had recourse to critique the American mainstream, elite press for not doing justice to the situation in the Sahel on behalf of their readers. Over the past few days, the Algerian angle of the evolving situation has come to the fore, and here the MSM has done even worse. To judge by what has gone into print, some of our journalists have failed to understand what the Algerian leadership is thinking and why. The reason for that failure seems clear enough: A horrendous and protracted civil war wracked Algeria from about 1992 to 1999 (2002 by some measures), a war that continues to haunt the Algerian leadership and to influence deeply how it behaves; yet in the first three-day’s worth of coverage of the In Amenas gas-plant hostage ordeal, this civil war was never even mentioned. This is a little like trying to explain the astrophysics of an eclipse without ever mentioning the moon.

Now why was this? Well, it’s possible, I suppose, that the reporters and their editors simply forgot about this civil war. The Western press never covered it well in the first place, and again the reason is clear: All sides, two and more Islamist factions and the military government, had a nasty habit of murdering nosy journalists, Algerian and foreign alike. More than 70 died during the course of the fighting. The sides hated each other and couldn’t agree on much, but they did tacitly share the view that foreigners had no business snooping around their war.

Then again, maybe the reporters didn’t forget; maybe they never knew about the Algerian civil war in the first place. Maybe they’re too young to remember it; it started twenty years ago, after all.

But I don’t think so. The reason has more to do with what cognitive psychologists call the evoked set. This is just another, fancier way of saying that we see what we expect to see, and we disattend (pardon the jargon) what does not fit with our framing of the situation.  Hence, when we go to the airport to meet someone, we often “see” that person in several faces before the authentic individual shows up.  Similarly, if we’re sure that our range of expectations excludes a particular outcome, we will not see evidence of it until too late—rather like what happened to Admiral Kimmel at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. 

Application here? The press has been strongly primed over the past week or so to see things framed by “Mali” and by “al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM)” and by a war being waged against it and other Islamist militias by France with ECOWAS troops. They are not expecting or looking for anything framed by “Algeria”, so it simply does not occur to them that a civil war that has been over since before even Facebook was invented—imagine that!—could possibly matter. It matters, and that’s not all that matters here.

Now, I don’t claim to be a world-class expert on Algeria, but you don’t have to be to get the gist. It’s enough to have paid professional attention to the MENA region as a whole for about the past forty years, which I think fairly describes my comparative advantage relative to the garden-variety newspaper reporter. So let me briefly go over the basics for those may be interested. To begin we need to get the frame right:

The In Amenas episode was not about Mali or even about terrorism per se. It was about Algeria. That doesn’t mean it has nothing to do with Mali or the Sahel or with AQIM, but it’s important to get the causal arrows straight.  So now let’s do exactly that.

The Algerian civil war was the first major blowback from the mujahedin war against the Red Army in Afghanistan. Returning Algerians from that fight, which ended in success in 1989, swelled the then-small cadre of Islamists in Algeria, and indeed at that time were often called “Afghan Arabs” after their veteran status. In 1991 the Algerian military, which ruled the country wearing street clothes and fronting a government political party (FLN), called an election, and, to their shock, lost it to the Islamic Salvation Front—the FIS. With support from France and the United States, the military annulled the election results and banned the FIS, jailing most of its leaders. By 1992, in response, the Islamists had formed an armed opposition and the shooting started. To make a formidably long and complicated story short, the Islamist side split into what turned out to be unstable factions that soon began fighting each other (the MIA and GIA versus the reformed FIS, now the AIS), to the government’s initial glee. But things soon got out of hand, with one of the Islamist factions (GIA) engaging in massacres of entire villages. This insane chiliastic violence gave the Algerian civil war its gruesome quality; at least 100,000 people, most of them complete innocents and all of them Muslims, died over the core 7-8 year period of the civil war. Some estimate that twice that number perished. This puts the only-nearly two-year total for Syria, so far, of 60,000 in some perspective.

Starting in around 1993, and through toward the most horrific years of the war (circa 1996-98), the French and U.S. governments concluded and remained convinced that the Algerian military could not win this war. After having had a hand in causing it by supporting the military’s annulment of the 1991 election, Paris and Washington now urged compromise. The senior Algerian generals, whose seminal experience had been the very bloody war for independence against France, believed otherwise. They doubled down, becoming utterly ruthless in an unshakable determination to win. They refused all compromise and they sustained as well as inflicted great pain—and they won. The main Islamist opposition group called it quits in 1999, but fringe groups, one called the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) continued fighting until by 2002 the military had either tracked and killed them, or they managed to flee the country.

And here, folks, in the GSPC is the origin of AQIM (born as such in 2007). AQIM started as a mainly Algerian affair with the bitter-enders of the Algerian civil war in exile. That is where Moukhtar Belmoukhtar, the supposed mastermind behind the In Amena raid, came from. He was a fighter in the mujahideen war in Afghanistan; he returned to his native country and fought in the Algerian civil war; and he escaped the country before the army could track him down and kill him, as it did so many of his compatriots. (I have been unable to determine for sure if he is an ethnic Arab or an ethnic Berber or a kindred but still distinct ethnic Tuareg, but his place of birth, in deep southern Algeria, suggests Tuareg. It’s noteworthy that none of the journalists who have written about him in recent days has bothered to establish this not-exactly-trivial fact.)

Over time AQIM became more than just a band of Algerian Islamist exiles with bases here and there, including one in northern Mali. But that is still largely its core, which explains why most of the attackers at In Amenas were Algerian nationals. Moreover, it was obvious from the moment the scale and sophistication of the attack became known that this was not a near-spontaneous response to the entry of French troops into combat in Mali, as the attackers’ spokesmen have claimed. This took a lot of planning, and it’s now clear that the attackers had good knowledge of the physical layout of the plant and the grievances of some of the Algerian workers in it.  Some claim that this attack’s source goes all the way back to al-Qaeda central, in Waziristan and Quetta, in which case it is a more serious matter than had it been a one-off effort from a more or less autonomous, small cell. Be that as it may, In Amenas is still far better seen as a continuation of the Algerian civil war in a post-Libyan War setting, where these exiled Algerian Islamists have more money, more and better weapons, and more allies than they could have dreamed possible back in 2002, or even in 2010.

Is that all? Not quite. Now we know something about the attackers, but we need to know a bit more about the Algerian government to complete the background necessary to make sense of what has happened.

To properly set the stage for what I am about to tell you, dear reader, let me point out that the Algerian leadership is a stark atavism. There was a time when “progressive”, “socialist” and avowedly secular military elites lorded over huge swaths of the Arab world. These elites were invariably friendly with the Soviet Union in the Cold War parallax that defined the region’s geopolitics, with the conservative monarchies and a few outliers (Tunisia, Lebanon) more or less associated—one should not say allied—with the West, and in most cases the United States by indirection. Egypt before mid-1972, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Algeria and, for a time, Southern Yemen all muscled up with a Soviet-supplied and trained order of battle. Of these “progressive” military governments, Algeria is the only one left aside from the Assad regime in Syria, which is reeling on its last legs.

The present Algerian leadership today consists of the very last remnants of the old guard that experienced the war of independence against France, and the generation right behind it experienced the civil war. Taken together, then, this leadership is as battle-hardened, ruthless and cold-blooded a group of guys as can be found anywhere. This is not a kind and gentle military that holds regular sensitivity-training sessions; it’s a military that uses eight bullets when two will do nicely, and that has no qualms about feeding still wriggling bodies through the wood chipper. They are also very proud and exquisitely sensitive to any slight coming from the general direction of foreigners. One former U.S. Air Force helicopter pilot (who of course will not be named) involved in a limited training mission has had this to say: “. . . the Algerians . . . . proved to be completely inflexible and almost hostile to the idea of working with us. Could it be their past experiences with the French or just garden-variety suspicion of the U.S. and our intentions?” Answer, friend: Both and neither. Yes, experience and suspicion figure in, but these people are just professional hard-asses and, as I say, they’re proud of it.

That said, they are also these days, I think, growing more fearful by the month. They are, as I say, the last of the breed of independence-era Arab military “progressives”, whose legitimacy formula has long since passed its sell-by date. If you look at a map of which parts of the country voted which way back in 1991, you can see that the government party won nowhere outside of the capital, and that the entire Tuareg south was disaffected both from the government and from the Arab Islamist opposition. Since 1991-92 the Amazigh—the Berbers—have also made their ticked-off presence very well known. And the general rise of Islamist energies with the so-called Arab Spring—particularly in neighboring Tunisia and in Egypt, but also in next-door Morocco—has probably got the Algerian leadership feeling not only somewhat antique but also increasingly isolated. My guess is that at least some of them fear that if there is a second coming of their civil war, they might lose this time. These guys are so proud that they would never show fear publicly. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t down there somewhere in their guts.

And that, it seems to me, goes far to explain why they reacted to the In Amenas attack the way they did: quickly, and with deadly force. As I said in my second Flogging Mali post: “What the Algerians are saying, in effect, is we’re not going to come after you if you leave us alone, but if you mess with us we will show no mercy.” Well, just the next day, on the front page of the January 18 New York Times, I found unmistakable evidence for my interpretation. The government spokesman, a fellow named Mohammed Said Oublaid, said as follows: “Those who think we will negotiate with terrorists are delusional.”  Just in case the Western journalists present did not get the point, Oublaid added: “Those who think we will surrender to their blackmail are delusional.”

It’s not hard to imagine the scene behind the curtain. The senior generals tell Oublaid to go out there and make one point, and one point only: We are focused on deterring more attacks against our country, period. And that had the merit of being true. The Algerian leadership did not give a flying fork about the hostages, Algerian or foreign. The way they see it, you play hard-ass and maybe a few dozen people die; you go soft and a new plague of civil war will kill tens of thousands. The bleating of some foreign governments about how the Algerians failed to employ standard counter-terrorist protocol—stun grenades and tear gas to help avoid needless bloodshed—completely missed the point. Maybe the Algerians know how to do that sort of thing and maybe they don’t, but it doesn’t matter because in this instance they wanted to shed blood. They wanted to look as unsentimental as a frozen brick, because that was the way to deliver the message they wished to send. And send it they did.

The Japanese government, in particular, seemed totally clueless on this point. Japan’s new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pleaded publicly and privately for the Algerians to put innocent life above all else. That included negotiations with the attackers, as necessary, and lots and lots of time passing so that cooler heads might prevail. Now this is revealing, and not merely for the sake of general knowledge. Mr. Abe is something of a hard-ass himself by Japanese standards. Just hours after his election he began jutting his finger at the Chinese over the islands’ dispute the two countries are having. But here he is, in the Algerian ordeal, showing the whole world how extremely risk-averse and humanitarian-sensitive Japanese society has become. If Abe means to bump chests with China and strut around the East Asian roost, his supine demeanor in the Algerian business amounts to a case of diplomatic malpractice. The Chinese leadership understands exactly what their counterparts in Algeria are all about, and they are now bound now to see Abe as an amateur bluffer. This is quite dangerous.

You will note that not all governments publicly criticized the Algerians. France and the United States held back compared to the Japanese and the British. Again, the reason is clear—and on this point we’ve actually been treated to some decent journalism: from Craig Whitlock in the Washington Post on January 19, and from Michael Gordon in today’s New York Times. The reason is that we have a lot of business with the Algerians and so do the French, whereas the Japanese and the Brits really do not.

What does that business look like?  Well, the U.S. government and the French government to some degree have managed to cooperate with the Algerians on the counter-terror agenda for some time now. We have some of the same enemies, and that accounts for the outcome. But the Algerian leadership is extremely wary of allowing any hint of that cooperation to go public because it contradicts its anti-colonialist image and it energizes Algerian Islamists eager to paint the government as infidel poodles of the Americans. So it’s not realistic for U.S. officials to expect the Algerian government to make nice with us in public, and it’s counterproductive to press the point.

Does that mean it has been foolish for U.S. officials since April, along with their French associates, to try to persuade the Algerians to cooperate in dealing with the problem in northern Mali. No. Don’t forget: While the Algerians will, in my view, never march along side the French and the French flag in a former French colony, the original plan, which has since fallen way behind the curve of the Islamist surge, called for a very low to vanishing French profile in favor of a Malian and ECOWAS effort. It was not unrealistic to reason that the Algerians might throw in with that, since it’s a problem for them, too. And it was something worth wanting because the Algerian military is serious, while the Malian and ECOWAS forces are not and were never going to be. But it turned out to be a bridge too far, in large part because the Algerians did not trust the Malian government’s intentions or capabilities, and for good reason. Now it’s beyond the pale of consideration.

But there’s more to it than that. Consider overflight rights. Both we and the French want to overfly Algeria. It’s important tactically to the French flying from France toward Mali, and it’s important to us for intelligence collection purposes. The Algerians refuse to give carte blanche in that regard; they insist that every request be considered on a case-by-case basis, and they usually demand that we share whatever intelligence we collect while loitering in their airspace. This is a problem, because Congress has obliged the U.S. military to deny such requests if there is any realistic possibility that a non-democratic government will use the information against its domestic political enemies. This is of a kind with Congressional insistence that we immediately cut off all military aid and liaison if a government experiences an anti-democratic coup, as happened in Mali not that long ago. These are unfortunate constraints. In the first instance they help to blind us, and in the second they force us to sever contact with others just when we often need it most.

These naïve insinuations into security policy dramatically underestimate the dynamic complexity of any significant bilateral relationship, our “business” with Algeria being only one of several dozen. Every one of these relationships has lots of moving parts, and the orchestration of words and deeds pertaining thereto should be left to professionals insofar as possible. That doesn’t mean the pros don’t make mistakes, don’t have their own blind spots, and don’t always play nicely in the interagency sandbox—no one will ever catch me making a claim like that. But a mélange of 535 Congressman and Senators variously holding forth on such matters, trying to make themselves look noble regardless of consequences, is no way to improve things.

After the September 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, I noted that the success of that operation (from the attackers’ perspective, of course) was worrisome because it illustrated how easy it was to attack symbolically potent but poorly defended targets with focused military assets of but modest capacity. Of course that applied to other consulates and embassies, and residences and so on; but it also applied to examples of non-governmental presence, and not just American non-governmental presence. So was the Benghazi attack a model for the In Amenas attack? Not exactly; in the Benghazi case there is no evidence that taking hostages was ever part of the plan. But we may learn—since some of the In Amenas attackers have apparently been captured alive—that it served as an inspiration if not as an exact model.

Finally for now, everyone seems to be content to call the In Amenas attack an example of terrorism. Is it?

The definition of terrorism, according to the State Department, the United Nations, and all standard texts on the subject, is—if I may paraphrase—the use of deadly force by non-state actors against random civilians for the purpose of generating terror, the better to trick the target government into doing counterproductive things in response. Was the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi full of random civilians? Is a gas-plant in southern Algeria full of random civilians?

It’s clear than when Islamists attack uniformed military personnel on foreign soil—as with the attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor, for example—that fits no one’s definition of terrorism. Targets of high symbolic profile, like a diplomatic mission or a major economic asset, are hardly random—it’s not like setting off a bomb in a movie theater or a suicide bomber driving an explosives-laden truck into a vegetable market. But they’re not legitimate military targets either, so these are ambiguous cases. Since we do ourselves no favors when our loose language enables others to nefariously counter-define a terrorist as just a freedom fight from another point of view, I would prefer to call these kinds of attacks examples of insurgency—in this case conducted by irregular, out-of-uniform assailants who therefore do not qualify for prisoner-of-war treatment under the Geneva Conventions (ah, but that’s another story). It will be interesting to see what the Algerians do with their captives. Not interesting for the captives, mind you……..

Flogging Mali II

Jan. 17

When I wrote about the situation in Mali a couple of days ago, little did I know just how much get-up-and-go this story would acquire. In just about fifty hours, from the time I left off writing on Tuesday to the present, at least five significant developments have widened the aperture of this episode—some of them because they occurred, some because certain earlier developments became public, and some because ongoing events have matured in a certain way.

Here are the five developments of the past two days that have changed the shape of what is happening in and around Mali:

1. Agreement on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) force to go into Mali.
2. The announcement of an increase in French ground forcescommitted to the theater, and their engagement in combat.
3. The revelation that the French government has requested U.S. military assistance, and the initial U.S. public reactions thereto.
4. The difficulty that the Malian army has achieving even modest military objectives.
5. The attack on a gas-processing plant in southern Algeria, and the taking of foreign-national hostages, a few of whom are U.S. nationals.

Let’s take these five items in turn.

The multinational ECOWAS force agreed to, after nearly a year of dithering, amounts to a mere 3,300 generally under-trained and varyingly organized soldiers. This number of troops cannot do the job, even with the help of the French Air Force and an estimated 2,500 French soldiers either already in place or on the way. While it may be politically useful to many parties to send ECOWAS troops north into combat, it is morally repugnant to put them in harm’s way under a circumstance we may summarize succinctly as follows: enough of them to die, but not enough to prevail.

It is true that all of Mali’s neighbors see a threat in the putative Tuareg/al-Qaeda menace digging in in the north of the country. But they do not have dogs of equal size in this fight. The Nigerians have a large dog, mainly because they see their own problems with Boko Haram as liable to get lots worse if northern Mali becomes an Islamist terrorism base. But the Ghanaians have no such compelling motive, which is why they agreed to send only engineers, not combat troops.

Of course, engineers do know how to die when they find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. The point, however, is that the asymmetry of the participants’ capabilities and interests, along with their different standard rules of engagement, is very liable to render the force ineffective—a lot like the ECOWAS Congo force and a little like the ISAF mess in Afghanistan. To Afghans, it was as though a kind of military theme park, festooned with colorful banners aplenty, fell out of the sky one day and landed in their country. One can only imagine what Tuareg villagers will make of assorted armed and mostly non-Muslim, black, sub-Saharan Africans wandering around their desert.

Before very long, then, the French will have to decide whether Mali is worth doing pretty much all by themselves, along with some probably very modest British and perhaps other allied help at the margins. Committing 2,500 French soldiers to the fight is not nothing, but it will take a lot more than that to prevail if ECOWAS and the Malian army both prove more or less useless.

What scale of problem are we talking about here anyway? Judging from publicly available news sources, the enemy looks small and manageable, certainly no larger in plain numbers than what the French faced, and faced down, in the Ivory Coast not that long ago. There are four groups making up what I will for the sake of simplicity call “the bad guys.” There are secular Tuareg units, two Islamist militias, and some non-Tuareg “guest fighters”, almost exclusively Arabic-speaking and associated with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The Arabic-speakers seem to hail mainly from Algeria, being the residual cadres of Algeria’s civil war (now in remission), and from Libya. The total adds to around 3,000, operating in an environment unusually kind to airpower. We’re reduced virtually to guesswork at this point as to how these four groups relate to and cooperate with one another.

I don’t trust these numbers. There are about 1.2 million Tuareg living in a contiguous area that drapes over several international borders, and these are but notional borders that for the most part don’t actually exist on the ground. Even if we subtract the women, the elderly and the very young, we still have a male fighting-age population of at least 250,000. Even if only 5 percent of that number were mobilized in some way, we’d be talking about 12,500 “bad guys.” But let’s assume an even smaller number. To subdue around 5,000 rebels it would take, by standard General Templar calculation at the ten-to-one counterinsurgency ratio, about 50,000 troops. Let’s assume further that the French are super-French, so that they need only half of that: 25,000 troops. Well, folks, 2,500 is not 25,000, and 25,000 is a very large number for the contemporary French order-of-battle.

Moreover, the very best way to stimulate the swelling of Tuareg and Islamist-guest-fighter ranks is to mount a noisy, European-led intervention. There may be only 3,000 bad guys right now, but that’s right now. In another fifty hours there could be 4,000, then 7,000, then…

As to the Malian army, it has struggled mightily to recapture the town of Konna, taken last week by a small rebel force. Konna is within southern Mali, meaning that its population of about 40,000 is mostly black African, not Tuareg. It is on a main road, by Malian standards. There are military camps able to provide a logistical tail not all that far from the town. The rebel force there probably totaled no more than 300, though no one seems to know for sure, since they wear no uniforms and do not muster in groups larger than six or seven. And its aims, most likely, were not to hold the town but merely to discombobulate and complicate an expected attack northward. And still the army struggled to retake the town, even with an assist from French airpower.

In short, from a strictly military point of view, what’s going on in Mali is going to keep going on in one form or another for a while. This will not end soon. It is also fairly likely to spread to Niger, possibly to Mauritania, Burkino Faso, Chad, Algeria and back into Libya, too, where the Tuareg live. And, as I have already suggested, a serious French-led intervention in Mali may help to spread it faster. There’s nothing like an “imperialist challenge” to stimulate resistance and high morale. On the other hand, an expansion of Tuareg activism might dilute the Islamist element within it, and might make the Arabic-speaking guest fighters unpopular and unwelcome, much as occurred in Iraq.

I suggested a few days ago that the French were likely to ask the United States for “specialized assistance.” That’s the term I used to not say what I am about to say now, since it has lately become more or less common knowledge. The French need help with airlift and logistics; they need to get themselves to the theater and they need to get the ECOWAS force lifted and delivered.

I remember once—back in August 2003 I think it was—sitting with Secretary of State Colin Powell in his inner office, just the two of us, discussing some speech or something, when he broke off to take an emergency call from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The UN urgently needed helicopters to ferry personnel into Liberia. Annan didn’t know how many helicopters he needed or what kind, so Powell succinctly explained the logistical facts of life to him (it can be useful to have an army general as Secretary of State) and made a few suggestions about whom he might want to call next.

Lesson? These things are not simple, easy or obvious, even once the political ducks get lined up. Details don’t take care of themselves. So fine, ECOWAS agrees to do such-and-such. Now what? Now the French call us and, in effect, say, “Umm, can we borrow some planes and helicopters and stuff?”

Now, you would think that, given the situation, we here in the relevant parts of the U.S. government—NSC, DoD, State, intell—would have anticipated this request (and one other I’ll get to in a moment). I don’t know if we did or not; lately we seem to be completely reactive. From the way Defense Secretary Leon Panetta responded in public yesterday, as if he had just walked out of the dentist’s office before the nitrous oxide had worn off, it’s hard to know.

Either way, the preternaturally low-keyed U.S. response has already gotten some people wondering just what we’re thinking, or better, ifwe’re thinking. Are we ticked that the French went off to the fight without us, when we had counseled more “watchful waiting”? Are we leery of being dragged into an endless mess? Are we even possibly thinking, hey, why not let the Tuareg have their independent Azawad, since reconstituting Mali is neither doable at reasonable cost nor all that significant one way or the other? Nobody knows.

Aside from airlift and logistics, no doubt the French are seeking some help with targeting. We have the requisite modest presence, and we have the technology to do that. Can what we supply match up with the French aircraft flying out of Chad and Ivory Coast and other platforms to make them effective? We are just not going to talk about that here, sorry. But that’s okay because, again, this is not really a technical issue. It turns on how the Obama Administration is judging this entire problem set, and we don’t know much about that yet. The body language so far suggests an extreme reticence to get too far out in front on our skis. That may be good. But it suggests as well that no one of any senior import has taken time to think any of this through. That’s not good.

For several hours, a budding hostage “crisis” in Algeria seemed primed to force some energy to attach to the subject. But as I write, there is apparently an Algerian military attack going on at the In Amenas gas-processing plant. So far there are conflicting accounts of what is going, or has gone, down.

What matters, first, is that Algerian authorities did the right thing by not letting the situation fester and by not negotiating with the attackers. What also matters is that Algeria is in a tight spot over Mali and the Tuareg. On the one hand, the Arabs who run the country have no interest in a Tuareg redoubt in northern Mali, especially one with an Islamist tinge. But on the other, they don’t want to piss off the Tuareg in Mali, lest they ignite a similar insurrection in Algeria—of which the attack on the gas plant is a very scary portent. What the Algerians are saying, in effect, is we’re not going to come after you if you leave us alone, but if you mess with us we will show no mercy. Certainly, too—just in case anyone is trying to think so far out of the box that he falls through the floor—the idea that Algerian soldiers would ever fight along side the French in a former French colony, notwithstanding some coincidence of interests, is, well, crazy.

But the most serious question concerns the extent to which the attackers were or were not a functional part of a larger al-Qaeda network. If they were, and if Ansar al-Dine and Boko Haram and other groups on the loose in the Sahel are in effect al-Qaeda, then that’s a problem, and U.S. policy needs to be shaped one way. If these are instead weak and essentially independent groups of fanatics, that’s something else again. My guess is that we’re dealing with the latter scenario, but my mind is open to reliable intelligence suggesting otherwise. Until we reach some kind of at least halfway sensible conclusion on this point, it will not be possible to do a reasonable analysis of how high a price we should be prepared to pay to help the French in Mali, and in the broader region. If that’s among the main reasons for the Administration’s reticent posture thus far, credit is due them. But we just don’t know yet.