Is Africa the new center of jihadi effort after the victory of the Taliban in Biden's Afghanistan skedaddle debacle?
I can't say I agree with that framing of the violent Islamist problem, but Africa is certainly a front in the global war on jihadis:
Just as Kabul was about to fall this month, Iyad ag Ghaly, the grizzled Malian leader of al-Qaeda affiliate Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, took to the airwaves. Congratulating the Taliban on the imminent expulsion of foreign infidels, he foresaw victory too in the Sahel, a vast stretch of semi-arid land that fringes the Sahara desert.
Here, a mishmash of armed groups loosely affiliated with al-Qaeda and Islamic State have carried out increasingly frequent and deadly attacks on military and civilian targets in an expanding arc from Mali to Burkina Faso and Niger. Other Islamist groups, including Boko Haram and Islamic State in West Africa Province, are active in Nigeria and Chad.
Sadly, both France and America have reduced the already small assets in Africa to help fight jihadis.
While Africa is certainly an economy-of-force front for America, it is a front that we need to win:
We need to be careful in allocating combat resources to our unified commands. With the small numbers involved, will reductions in AFRICOM in favor of EUCOM or INDOPACOM provide significant reinforcements to the latter two regions?
Or will those transfers simply cripple AFRICOM's ability to defend our interests and prevent big problems from emerging in Africa?
Nation or even state building is hard to do. But some form has to be done to help local governments kill jihadis and reduce the factors that lead young Moslems to turn to jihad. As that initially linked article concludes:
The bad news is that a functioning government cannot be imposed from outside. The good news is that it doesn’t need to be a paragon of western democracy. Any government that provides basic services to all, regardless of religion or ethnicity or whether they live in the countryside or the cities, stands a fighting chance.
But while we scale down our aspirations for what local governments can look like, maybe we need to emphasize old ways of dealing with jihadis:
Killing jihadis is job one in defeating the jihadis. This shields our homelands from the collateral damage of the Islamic civil war that is raging over the soul of their religion, while protecting Moslems abroad who will be safer to win that Islamic civil war.
Some people just need to be killed for our own safety. It really is that simple. Jihadis fall in that category.
