C‘is understood. Mali is not Afghanistan. It has not served as a sanctuary for international terrorism; his government, unlike the regime overthrown in mid-August in Kabul, was not imposed by foreign intervention; and, above all, its traditional, dominant Islam does not advocate jihad.
Certainly. However, the scale of the American debacle can only question a French military intervention in Mali already shaken by a series of shocks: two military coups d’état in Bamako in less than a year; a prime minister accusing France of“Abandonment in mid-flight” from Mali; a country which, in 2013, called on France to drive out the jihadists and is now negotiating with them behind the back of Paris ; a junta which threatens to finance Russian mercenaries under the pretext of compensating for the withdrawal of the French force “Barkhane”, but above all seeks protection to remain in power without elections.
Faced with the upheavals of Mali, the lesson of Afghanistan refers to the vanity of aid to a corrupt regime and army, and to the illusory claim to rebuild from the outside a failed state. The jihadists who control part of Mali did not cause the collapse of the state, prior to their emergence in 2012, they are a symptom of it.
Progressive divorce
The French official speech has long justified the aid of Paris by the need to restore the authority of the Malian state in the north of the country of which it has lost control in the face of the Tuareg rebellion and, therefore, to allow intervention development NGOs. Today, the failure of the French military to prevent the extension of the zone controlled by the jihadists, no longer allows any of these ambitions to be displayed, a fortiori since the progressive divorce between Bamako and Paris and the growing propensity more manifest of the Malian power to hide its own imperfection under a demagogic discourse accrediting the idea of a “conspiracy” of France.
It is as if the triple impasse in which Paris finds itself – disintegration of the Malian state, expansion of jihadism, paralysis of development – illustrated, as for the Americans in Afghanistan, the vicious circle by which cooperation and financial aid can reinforce dependency and fuel corruption. “Watering a corrupt army and an illegitimate regime with money only legitimizes and perpetuates them”, remarks Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan. This 80-year-old anthropologist, who has spent his life studying Sahelian societies, draws a parallel between military failure and the collapse of development. The common point ? “Strategies built by very competent experts to build models, who believe that their technical and managerial perfection will solve the problems, but ignore everything. “
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