From the new World Media Watch up now at
http://www.zianet.com/insightanalyticalTomorrow at Buzzflash.com
More in my Journal...including an article on Morocco, their Islmaists, suppression, fears
1//Asia Times Online, Hong Kong Jun 14, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HF14Aa01.html US OPENS NEW WAR FRONT IN NORTH AFRICA
By Jason Motlagh
Despite a setback in Somalia, where anti-Islamist warlords recently lost control of the capital, Mogadishu, to a jihadist militia, the United States is plunging into a far vaster set of commitments, stretching across the "Wild West" of Saharan Africa.
Over the next five years, Washington is expected to spend US$500 million on an overt counter-terror program to secure what it has dubbed the latest front in its "global war on terror". Detractors insist the move could backfire and have the same unintended consequences as in the Horn of Africa, albeit on a much larger scale with even more at stake.
The Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI) kicked off last June to provide military expertise, equipment and development aid to nine Saharan nations whose vast, ungoverned reaches are considered fertile ground for militant Islamist groups looking to establish Afghanistan-style terror training camps and to engage in smuggling and other illicit activities.
The TSCTI represents a massive upgrade from the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a $7 million forerunner that was initiated in 2002 in what Theresa Whelan, US deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, called "just a drop in the bucket" compared with the region's security needs.
In its campaign to justify the increase, the US military has likened the Sahara to the "Wild West", and the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat, or GSPC) is its most wanted enemy. On the US State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations and estimated to have a few hundred remaining members based in Algeria, the group was formed in the late 1990s to overthrow the government in Algiers and create a hardline Islamic state. Its founders broke ranks with the notorious Armed Islamic Group over its policy of killing civilians indiscriminately during Algeria's 1992-99 civil war that left more than 100,000 dead. The GSPC was accused of kidnapping European tourists in 2003 and claimed responsibility for a spate of strikes around the Sahara last year that reportedly killed a total of 40 soldiers from Algeria and Mauritania. But some observers say terrorism in the Sahara is little more than a mirage and that protracted, high-profile US involvement could destabilize the region.
"If anything, the
... 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 Britain.
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