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| Africa North | |
| The Saharan Conundrum | |
| 2009-02-15 | |
IN THE MONTHS AFTER 9/11, American forces in Afghanistan bombed the Taliban and, in vain, hunted for Osama bin Laden, while in Washington counterterrorism experts worried about "the next Afghanistan," a safe haven where terrorists would train, test their weapons and organize attacks on the United States. These discussions produced a double-barreled national-security strategy that dominated President George W. Bush's tenure. The first element of the strategy was to identify and eliminate terrorist networks that already existed. The second was to prevent new networks from flourishing by promoting open, democratic societies that, the thinking went, would be less susceptible to Al Qaeda's message than closed ones. Hard and soft power would be brought to bear on all the potential Afghanistans, while Afghanistan itself would be kept from regressing. The list of candidates for the next Afghanistan was long. Just about every Muslim-majority country, or even those with sizable Muslim minorities, was considered suspect. Intelligence analysts fixed their attention on remote islands and jungles in the Philippines and Indonesia and on the rugged mountains of Pakistan's tribal areas. Africa emerged as one of the greatest areas of concern, and the Sahel, a scrubby band of ungoverned terrain straddling Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, proved especially troublesome. An Islamist government in Sudan was host to bin Laden for five years during the 1990s. In Algeria, an Islamist insurgency ultimately commanded by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, better known by its French acronym, G.S.P.C., was entering its second bloody decade. And in Mauritania only 3.5 million people occupied an area the size of Texas and New Mexico combined, making it -- despite decades of oppressive military rule -- one of the least-controlled parts of the world. | |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #2 Usual NYT premise: non-whites aren't ready for democracy. I didn't think the NYT thought whites were particularly ready for democracy either other than the Peoples Democratic type where a ruling elite took care of things for the little people. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2009-02-15 08:24 |
| #1 Let me solve it for you Mr SCHMIDLE. The place is full of Muslims. Any place that's full of Muslims is on its way to Hell. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2009-02-15 06:36 |