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Africa North
Is Mali the next Afghanistan?
2013-01-20
The war rages about cities with names such as Goa and Timbuktu, in a sparsely populated, mostly flat, dusty and landlocked country in northwest Africa.

The combatants include a nomadic Berber people known as Tuareg, the French Foreign Legion and a coalition of al-Qaida affiliates who identify themselves with the Maghreb, the desert region of Northwestern Africa.

It sounds as if it could be the plot for a new Indiana Jones adventure. But those who study international terrorism say it would be a mistake for Americans to think of this conflict as anything but deadly serious. The war in Mali is the new front in the war on international terrorism.

Some U.S. officials have downplayed the threat, noting in congressional testimony that those involved in Mali don't appear capable of striking outside West and North Africa.

But in some ways, what's happening in Mali reminds experts of events in another little-known, faraway land in the latter half of the 1990s: Afghanistan. Back then, a fledgling al-Qaida, though already a known threat, was using remote terrain to train a generation of elite terrorist fighters. The threat of those fighters was that once trained, they were disappearing to await plans and opportunities to strike at the hated West.
Posted by:tipper

#5  Not with a democrat in office!
/hattip

The latest tv news update on the gas raid and mali war was that the jokes at the movie awards about everyone being sick, were in fact funny and not rude or elitist, and that I am a racist of some sort.
Posted by: swksvolFF   2013-01-20 16:13  

#4  Most of the IED's and complex attacks in Afghanistan occur in, or within 5-7km of a village or urban area.

Burn the place down, and that's the end of the attacks. Ultimately, Sherman's policy in Atlanta needs to be repeated over and over as part of a guerrilla pacification campaign.
Posted by: Zhang Fei   2013-01-20 12:18  

#3  Most of the IED's and complex attacks in Afghanistan occur in, or within 5-7km of a village or urban area. It's basically a globally financed, regionally planned, and locally initiated warfare dynamic. I suspect the French may go about this one a bit differently that ISAF.
Posted by: Besoeker   2013-01-20 11:03  

#2  The terrain appears to be more suitable than Afghanistan for rooting out terrorists. Mali has recently been declared the independent state of Asswad Azawad.
Posted by: JohnQC   2013-01-20 10:55  

#1  Logistically a far better place for the west to fight a war.
Posted by: Rjschwarz   2013-01-20 10:04  

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