Iyad Ag Ghali did not wait for the capture of Kabul to greet the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan. While he had not spoken since November 2019, the jihadist leader of the Support Group for Islam and Muslims (GSIM), the Sahelian branch of Al-Qaida, split on Tuesday, August 10, of an audio message in which he paid tribute to “Our” Islamic emirate of Afghanistan “on the occasion of the withdrawal of the invading American forces and their allies”. A reversal which, he added, “Is the result of two decades of patience”.
It is no coincidence that the irresistible Taliban offensive resonates, in the first person plural, to the far reaches of the Sahel. When GSIM was created in 2017, Iyad Ag Ghali pledged allegiance to Al-Qaida but also to Afghan Islamists. The Taliban, like the Sahelian fighters, are part of the same nebula. “They have a real common insurgency know-how, which is the product of the Al-Qaida matrix, underlines Yvan Guichaoua, researcher at the School of International Studies at the University of Kent, in Brussels. They also share a common goal: the application of Sharia law. “
The jihadists of the GSIM were not the only ones in the region to closely follow the tipping of Afghanistan into the Taliban fold. On August 16, many Malians discovered, dumbfounded, surreal images of Afghans clinging to military planes about to take off from Kabul. The Malians, for their part, have lived for ten years under the threat of jihadists, sometimes affiliated with Al-Qaida, sometimes with the Islamic State organization. And this, despite a French anti-terrorist intervention launched in January 2013 (“Serval” then “Barkhane” operations) at the request of the Malian government and under a UN mandate.
And if hostility towards French troops is gaining ground in public opinion, it does not exclude the fear of a void. “Like the Americans who fled Afghanistan without asking for their rest, the French and the peacekeepers who are in Mali will one day flee and leave us face to face with the terrorist ogre”, alarmed Cheick Oumar Konaré, a famous Malian lawyer, during a televised debate broadcast on Africable on August 15.
Announced end of the “Barkhane” mission
“Let us learn the lessons of this Afghan failure, while there is still time”, sum Tiébilé Dramé, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta known as “IBK” (overthrown by a coup of August 18, 2020). “What message do the images of the Kabul airport send us? For years, activists have regularly called for the departure of foreign troops, echoing the demands of warlords. You have to see reality in the face. Foreign troops are doing useful work. We should seriously consider the consequences of an uncoordinated hasty departure. “
Such a scenario is not on the agenda. Unlike the United States in Afghanistan, France is not about to withdraw from the Sahel. On June 10, Emmanuel Macron certainly announced the end of the “Barkhane” mission as an external operation, but a “Deep transformation” French military presence in the Sahel will begin, said the French president. The start of the withdrawal, at the end of 2021, will be gradual. If it is to concern at least 40% of the workforce, at least 40% of the workforce, some 3,000 to 2,500 soldiers should remain on the ground, as part of an internationalized fight against terrorism.
However, the closure of French military bases in northern Mali (Timbuktu, Kidal and Tessalit) by 2022 is worrying. At the start of the war in 2012, Malian soldiers were forced to surrender some of their positions to the enemy, a coalition made up of rebel jihadist and separatist groups. Ten years later, will these cities be taken over by the jihadists, once the French bases are closed? The question torments observers, because the Malian army, despite nine years spent under Western infusion (training, armaments, funding), still seems unable to compete with an enemy who continues to spread its influence south.
In his sermon on August 10, Iyad Ag Ghali was quick to point out “The bitter failure” of France, believing victory to be near. In reality, the game is far from over for the GSIM which “Does not have the experience of government like the Taliban (in power in Kabul from 1996 to 2001) and remains for the moment at the head of a jihadist insurrection with a very limited popular base ”, explains Rida Lyammouri, researcher at the Moroccan think tank Policy Center for the New South (PCNS). The GSIM also did not enjoy the full support of a neighboring state, like the Taliban with Pakistan.
Double-edged international aid
If the contexts and the evils differ, Western interventionism nevertheless seems to fall again and again in the same ways. “Lack of knowledge of companies or false interpretations: expertise produces a lack of lucidity, notes Gilles Dorronsoro, professor of political science at the University of Paris-I and specialist in Afghanistan who also carries out research on Malian institutions. The same organizations produce similar expertise in Afghanistan as in Mali. The circuit is closed, because the success of an expert is measured by his degree of introduction to decision-makers and his ability to obtain funding. Behind, local societies find themselves dispossessed of their politics, which accelerates the weakening of the state and can produce disorder. “
The economy of war developed by interventionism is just as destabilizing, as underlined by Elie Tenenbaum, researcher at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI): “International aid increased suddenly, when these countries did not have a state or governance strong enough to manage it. This created a windfall effect which resulted in an increase in corruption. “ A gangrene which has spread in particular within the armies. Billions of euros have been embezzled by Western-backed political regimes, further complicating the fight of regular troops against terrorists.
“We have looked away from their governance problems, contenting ourselves with frowning during major scandals or coups d’état. And yet these governments were widely discredited by their own people ”, deplores Yvan Guichaoua. To the point of making certain civilians fall into the camp of the Islamists, less by conviction than by lack of a credible political alternative.
“To counter these violent insurgencies, we must allow new political forces to emerge that correspond to the real aspirations of the people. This scares the Westerners because they will not necessarily be able to control them and their ideas could join, on certain levels, part of the discourse of the Islamists, but they will be the only ones to have the sufficient counterweight ”, Elie Tenenbaum analyzes, before drawing a lesson from the Afghan scenario that could be useful in the Sahel: “Be modest in your ambitions. It is necessary that the international actors who, legitimately, will protect their interests, try to have a perimeter reduced to a fair sufficiency. The rest must depend on local actors ”.