Sunday 20 January 2013

The Most Predictable Surprise Attack

A true conservative from all the way back to the Yugoslav Wars, Mark Almond writes:

In many ways, BP’s state-of-the-art gas facility in the middle of Algerian nowhere was a symbol of Western Europe’s idyllic isolation from the growing chaos just across the Mediterranean. This hyper-modern plant with excellent facilities for its expat workers operated like a moon-base with no connection to life in the desert – until the terrorists swept inside like alien invaders.

What no one told the expats was that all around them – for thousands of miles – the Sahara was seething with rebels, terrorists and gun-slinging nomads on the lookout for valuable loot. Reports that the MoD had mothballed its unit keeping an eye on North Africa in 2010 because ‘nothing happens there’ shows that Nelson’s blind eye to danger had been replaced by bureaucratic short-sightedness.

For the last two years, the West has looked at the region through the rose-tinted lens of the ‘Arab Spring’. Democracy was supposed to be transforming the Arab world. But last Wednesday’s assault on the In Amenas gas production facility was a ‘surprise’ attack which everyone should have been expecting. Without the hard currency earned by oil and gas in the case of Algeria, or uranium in the case of some of its neighbours, the local governments would collapse.

The big surprise is that the terrorists have not targeted energy plants until now. And while the post-mortems currently underway will attempt to explain why the BP complex was so easily taken, this narrow focus on security is a simplistic view. The broader threat to local governments in the area and to the West in general from the Islamic fundamentalist groups across the vast Sahara region needs to be urgently assessed.

Algeria is only three hours flying time from London. Millions of people with Algerian and North African origins live in the EU, especially in France. Radicalisation of them threatens us too. Any instability in North Africa has big implications for Europe. Algeria and Libya provide 20 per cent of its gas imports and ten per cent of its oil. Anything which disrupts the flow of fuel will soon have knock-on effects in Britain.

The continuing flow of Libyan oil was one reason why David Cameron and his Nato partners were happy to take credit for their part in Colonel Gaddafi’s downfall. But it went almost unnoticed that Algeria greeted the celebratory gunfire of Gaddafi’s lynching with a deafening silence. To them, Gaddafi was a useful neighbour because he shared the same enemies – the Islamist rebels who want to take over the entire region.

Unlike Gaddafi, the rulers of Algeria are not a flamboyant lot. They are mainly generals in and out of uniform. They regarded the Arab Spring as a threat to their regime. To them democracy is a bad idea not just because people might vote them out of power, but because it could mean chaos. In 1990, when fundamentalist candidates looked set to win, the generals stepped in to stop the elections. A decade of horribly brutal civil war followed. This explains why there was such a disconnect between Whitehall and Algiers over how to handle the hostage crisis. Our Government was bewildered by the Algerian decision to open fire without consulting us or other foreign leaders.

But the Algerian army had – and still has – three simple reasons for cracking down at once: it wanted to stifle the crisis quickly and to destroy the terrorists; they wanted to show their own people that the regime is still firmly in charge and they were also desperate to avoid any chance of Western special forces getting to play a role on their territory. North African governments may share a common Islamic fundamentalist enemy, but sharing a common enemy doesn’t mean they share the same values. From Afghanistan via Iraq to Libya, the West has shown it can knock down tyrannical Humpty-Dumpties, but putting the societies back together again has eluded us which is why Algeria sees the Arab Spring as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

In the wake of the BP attack, security at oil and gas plants across North Africa will already have been stepped up. Pacifying half a continent is quite another thing. Ordinary people across the Sahara have seen little or no benefit from the region’s natural wealth. Until more than politicians, secret policemen and soldiers benefit no stability will be possible. In some ways it is surprising how few people have been radicalised. But we cannot let ourselves rely on their moderation for ever. Unless ordinary life can be made better Islamic radicals will offer a brutally simple solution to too many people.

As the Libyan example shows, exporting democracy at gunpoint is not enough. Without governments genuinely concerned for the well-being of the people in the lands south of the Mediterranean, hopes for a peaceful future for North Africa – and Europe – will be no more than a mirage.

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