US Seeks To Secure Sahara Desert

by- Jason Motlagh
the Washington Times
November 17, 2005

Abidjan, Ivory Coast--The US government will spend $500 million over five years on an expanded program to secure a vast new front in its global war on terrorism: the Sahara Desert.

Critics say the region is not a terrorist zone as some senior US military officers assert. They add that heavy-handed military and financial support that reinforces authoritarian regimes in North and West Africa could fuel radicalism where it scarcely existed.

The Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI) was begun in June to provide military expertise, equipment and development aid to nine Saharan countries where lawless swaths of desert are considered fertile ground for militant muslim groups involved in smuggling and combat training.

"It's the wild west all over again," said Maj. Holly Silkman, a public affairs officer at US Special Operations Command Europe, which presides over US security and peacekeeping operations in Europe, former Soviet bloc countries and most of Africa.

Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Morocco, Nigeria and Tunisia take part in the TSCTI. During the first phase of the program, dubbed Operation Flintlock, US Special Forces led 3,000 ill-equipped Saharan troops in tactical exercises designed to better coordinate security along porous borders and beef up patrols in ungoverned territories.

The head of Special Operations Command Europe, Maj. Gen. Thomas R. Csnko, said he was concerned that the terrorist network Al Qaeda is assessing African groups for "franchising opportunities," notably the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (the Algerian-based GSPC), cited on the US State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations.

US ROLE MAY MISFIRE:

Some observers say terrorism in the Sahara is little more than a mirage and that a higher-profile US involvement could destabilize the region.

"If anything, the [TSCTI]...will generate terrorism, by which I mean resistance to the overall US presence and strategy," said Jeremy Keenan, a Sahara specialist at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

A report by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based Think Tank, said that although the Sahara is "not a terrorist hot bed," repressive governments in the region are using the Bush administrations "war on terror" to tap US largesse and deny civil freedoms.

The report said the regime of Mauritanian President Maaouiya Ould Sid' Ahmed Taya--a US ally in West Africa deposed August 3 in a bloodless coup--used the threat of terrorism to legitimize denial of human rights. The dictator jailed and harassed dozens of opposition politicians under the pretext that they were connected to the GSPC.

This has made the TSCTI unpopular among some Mauritanians, said Princeton Lyman, director of African Policy Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations. In June, hundreds of Mauritanians filled the streets of Nouackchott, the Capital, to protest the start of the TSCTI.

ALGERIA REPORTS DOUBTED:

Mr. Keenan said the government of Algeria--saddled with a history of state terrorism and disinformation campaigns--is an even worse offender, misleading Washington about the GSPC threat to acquire modern weapons and shed its pariah status.

He added that US Intelligence about the Saharan region is sparse, and that officials and Western reporters have been gullible in their near-wholesale acceptance of dubious Algerian claims about GSPC activities, rendering suspect Washington's main justification for the TSCTI.

OIL MAY BE A FACTOR:

US and Algerian authorities have failed to present "Indisputable Verification of a single act of alleged terrorism in the Sahara," Mr. Keenan said.

"Without the GSPC, the US has no legitimacy for its presence in the region," he added, noting that an escalating American strategic dependency on African Oil requires that the United States bolster its presence in the region.

A report by the National Energy Policy Development Group anticipates that by 2015, West Africa will provide a quarter of the Oil imported by the United States.

The Bush administration has called African Oil a "National Strategic Interest." Nigeria is the fifth-largest source of US imported Oil; Algeria's 9 billion barrel reserves has been revised upwards, and Mauritania has begun offshore pumping that could make it Africa's no. 4 Oil supplier by 2007.

http://washingtontimes.com/world/20051116-105812-2434r.htm