Mali, Afghanistan – Conflicts Worlds Apart? Parallels and
Lessons to be Learnt
Author : Thomas Ruttig
Published: 28 July 2013
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When jihadist groups took over the northern half of Mali last year and French troops
intervened in January this year, a discussion ensued in the media and among analysts
about whether Mali was, or would become, a ‘second’ or ‘African’ Afghanistan. Most
found a comparison ludicrous. With Mali’s presidential election coming up on today, 28
July 2013, AAN’s Co-Director Thomas Ruttig gave the issue another look and found that
both countries indeed have structural problems in common and, in both countries,
Western intervention is characterised by short-termism and a focus on terrorism, neither
of which tackle the deeper causes of conflict.
“Comparisons with Afghanistan are inevitable when any Western country sends its military to
war in a Muslim country where al-Qaeda has set up shop,” Time magazine wrote this January
when French troops started their intervention in Mali, code named Opération Serval. The al-
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Qaeda or terrorism focus that often dominated the discussion about the conflicts in both
countries is very narrow, though. Beyond it, a number of surprising parallels spring up between
these two countries, two half-continents away from each other, despite the many obvious
differences. Some of those parallels are grounded in colonial, post- and neo-colonial history.(1)
Both Mali and Afghanistan are multi-ethnic, landlocked countries shaped by colonially drawn,
artificial borders. These borders cut through areas populated by large and originally nomadic
peoples. The Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Pakistan (most are no longer nomads) are divided
by the controversial Durand Line (on latest developments, see this previous AAN dispatch). The
Tuareg – who prefer to be called Imushagh – roam the vast Saharan space divided among at
least six states by border lines that look like they were drawn with a ruler on a large table in
some far away European capital. Besides Mali, those are Niger, Chad, Algeria, Libya and
Burkina Faso. In today’s Mali, however, the Tuareg constitute only two per cent of the
country’s population (read here); other northern minorities are also involved in the jihadist
insurgency.(2)
The Pashtuns, over decades, harboured irredentist aspirations of (re-)creating a cross-Durand
Line ‘Pashtunistan’, planting the fear among Pakistan’s elites of a possible break-up of their
relatively young country. While this movement seems to be less strong nowadays, with its last
peak in the 1970s, its place has been taken by Islamist militancy. In Saharan West Africa, the
Tuareg repeatedly rose up for self-determination in different countries. Their last – and botched
– attempt happened when the Mouvement National pour la Libération de l'Azawad (MNLA)
seized the opportunity – provided by a military coup d’ètat in Mali’s capital Bamako that
created a power vacuum – to unilaterally proclaim the independence of Mali’s northern half as
‘Azawad’ in April 2012. But the dream was over within a few months. By June last year, jihadist
groups – Ansar Dine and Mujao, supported by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), initially
allied with the armed Tuareg movement – had taken control of Azawad. These jihadists were
less interested in independence and more in making the whole of Mali a sharia-based Islamic
state. Some of the Tuareg leaders who joined the jihadists, for example, Ansar Dine leader Iyad
ag Ghaly, have ideas that sound like the pipe dreams of those in Pakistan who still hope the
Taleban will crush the idea of Pashtun reunification for good: Tuareg leaders see their
movement as “an alternative to both the Malian nation-state, riddled with corruption and
nepotism, and the political ideal of Tuareg independence”. And Ghaly’s supporters “are of the
conviction that only their Salafist ideology can unify the various Tuareg clans, the different
ethnic groups in the region, and even the whole of Mali” (source here).
The Tuareg rebellion had been powered by fighters and arms flown out of Libya after the
overthrow of the Ghadhafi regime. Ghadhafi had backed Tuareg and other minorities in Libya’s
neighbouring countries to the south;(3) in return, indigenous and external Tuareg fighters
backed his regime but had to leave the country after their patron was toppled. Here, we have
another key parallel: both Afghanistan and Mali are affected by and contribute to the conflicts in
their regions and their overspills. To regulate these issues permanently, a regional solution is
necessary, but the multitude of actors involved makes this an extremely difficult task.
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In contrast to Mali, Afghanistan has never been a full-scale colony. During the twentieth century,
it went through a number of mostly top-down modernisation attempts and conservative
backlashes but was internally relatively stable up to the 1970s, trying to safeguard its neutrality
between the two major post-World War II blocs. It became a founding member of the NonAligned Movement, to which Mali also acceded after its independence from France in June
1960. Nevertheless, both countries became entangled in the Cold War, culminating in more
than 30 years of extremely violent internal conflict in Afghanistan, compounded by two foreign,
armed interventions. The first made the country a major battlefield in the last phase of the Cold
War, the only one where Soviet troops were directly involved. The second, already in the postCold War era and led by US troops, made it the focus of the ill-conceived ‘War on Terror’, the
echoes of which also can be sensed in the on-going French-led intervention in Mali.(4)
Mali, after decolonisation, had been spared Afghanistan’s experience with foreign interventions
until this year. It did not remain entirely stable over the intervening decades, though. It went
through a ‘socialist’ one-party system followed by a long military regime, starting with a coup in
1968, and repeated but relatively small-scale Tuareg rebellions which were crushed brutally.(5)
Other coups followed, one in 1991 and two in 2012. The one in 1991, called the March
Revolution because it led to the transition to a democratic system followed by free elections held
in 1992, was triggered by a broad popular pro-democracy movement against the last military
dictator, Moussa Traoré. With this, Mali stood at the forefront of the so-called “third wave” of
democratisation in Africa and was hailed as a ‘model democracy’ in the continent.
Soon after independence, as the “Mali Federation”,(6) the country lost its access to the sea,
when its partner in that construct, Senegal, departed on its own only two months later.
Afghanistan lost its coast, in today’s Baluchistan, as a result of British colonial advance in the
nineteenth century. Thus both countries’ exports depend on good relations with their
neighbours, and Afghanistan in particular suffered under repeated phases of bad relations with
Pakistan (some caused by itself) during which borders were closed and the economy suffered
(more background on this here).
For Afghanistan, the door to possible democratisation opened much later, in 2001, but was
crushed in the ‘War on Terror’, when fighting the insurgents became a priority over
democratisation and the rule of law (more on this in my contribution to AAN’s 2012 e-book
Snapshots of an Intervention here).
Both countries’ development over past decades was further influenced by a combination of
ecological and economic factors. For decades, both have been hit by climate change, that led to
water shortages and loss of agricultural land and nomads’ livestock. Mali has been at the core
of several Sahel famines between 1968 and 1974 that killed up to 250,000 people. Afghanistan
suffered from the same phenomenon in the same period, to a lesser extent – but with farreaching consequences (read my AAN paper) and with less media coverage. Sinking groundwater levels all over Afghanistan as well as on-going desertification indicate that these trends
are continuing.
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The droughts affected one of the major export products of both countries: cotton. In the 1950s
and 1960s, cotton contributed between 13.3 and 18.3 per cent to Afghanistan’s exports. In
Mali, it is the second most important export commodity after gold, whose value constitutes over
70 per cent of exports. One quarter of the population depends on cotton for its livelihood; the
crop contributes 15 per cent to total government revenues and around 8 per cent to the
country’s gross domestic product.(7) However, the re-occurring phases of drought in both
countries were accompanied by a collapse in world market prices (read here) and indirect
import restrictions by the EU (in Mali’s case) and the US (for post-2001 Afghanistan) that hit the
cotton farmers of both countries hard.(8) In his book Little America,(9) Washington Post
journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran describes vividly how a whole series of US-financed
development projects in the country’s major cotton region, Helmand, not only failed to raise
production and exports and exacerbated social problems but, after 2001, blocked a revival of
Afghanistan’s export cotton production for the sake of protecting the US market.
In Mali, the ecological problems and failed international aid led to an unequal development of its
regions. While the north is one of the least-developed regions in all of Africa, a deep divide
exists even in the south, creating what is also known from Afghanistan as “local grievances”.
The region of Kayes has been particularly negatively affected, becoming Mali’s “key emigration
region” according to German Mali analyst Sabine Eckart. She adds that this trend was
exacerbated by displacement as a result of expanding mining operations. In general, Malians
contribute a significant number to those working-age African males taking boats across the
Mediterranean to Europe. Similar complaints of neglect – including about the un-even
distribution of Western aid money – are known from different regions in Afghanistan, and
Afghans, too, contribute majorly to international migrants’ movements (read here).
Also, the praise for Mali’s democracy seems to have come too early. The Observer’s Peter
Beaumont writes that the West had been “at fault” over its “blithe acceptance of the
‘procedural’ version of democracy adopted by the country’s upper and middle classes in
Bamako” from which large parts of the population feel excluded (read more here and here).
Over the past decade, under President Amadou Toumani Touré, the country drifted back
towards authoritarian rule. The government became “increasingly dysfunctional”(red here), and
“relations between the centre of power in Bamako and the periphery rested on a loose network
of personal, clientelistic, even mafia-style alliances” (read here). According to French analysts
quoted in Le Monde diplomatique, those alliances included ministers, army and intelligence
officers “close to ex-President Touré” and members of parliament. Beaumont calls the 2012/13
Mali events “the culmination of half a century of tensions among different groups . . .
exacerbated by a . . . government playing competing interests off against each other”.
A development gap and conflicting interests did not only exist between Mali’s Black African
south and the Tuareg/Arab north – there are mutual resentments with racist undertones, too –
but “between the elites of the [multi-faceted] north” as well (read here). Instead of including them
in a genuine search for solutions, Beaumont says, Mali’s post-dictatorial governments have
followed what he calls a “militiatary” policy “that meant that different groups [were] armed to
neutralise each other”. A similar approach has been taken by the US-led NATO troops in
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Afghanistan who, while attempting to strengthen and reform the regular armed forces, have
constantly created semi-regular forces, like the Afghan Local Police, to short-cut the official
forces’ shortcomings, only contributing to a militarisation of the society (read two AAN reports
on this subject here and here).
At the same time, Mali’s “economic growth trailed off to virtually nothing . . . UNDP's human
development index ranked Mali lower than Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen”. At least one
third of the foreign aid money disappeared “into dark channels” (read here). Similar problems
prevail in Afghanistan. As AAN has reported in 2011, the “siphoning?off of resources by current
economic and political power?holders . . . has profound effects on the stability and economic
development of the country”. Aid effectiveness remains a concern, caused not only by
“coordination and communication problems among the donors themselves and between the
donors and the Afghan government” but also by over-proportional backflows of aid money into
the donor countries. Last but not least, the international community itself was “fuelling
corruption” by faulty contracting policies and lax oversight. (Find other reports on this problem
here, here and here).
While Afghanistan continues to be the world’s major producer and exporter of opiates (and now
again of hashish, see here), a situation that has remained unchanged and even escalated after
the international intervention in 2001 (see an AAN report here), the international drug trade
discovered the West African region, including Mali, comparatively late. “Since 2004, West Africa
has become a major hub for cocaine trafficking, storage and distribution”, the monthly Le Monde
diplomatique wrote early this year, and continues:
Drug trafficking brought major benefits: it helped with elections and real estate deals were
financed through money laundering operations. . . . Many politicians came to arrangements with
the traffickers. If an over-eager soldier stopped a convoy, he’d get a call from someone higher
up telling him to let it through.
Also, as in Afghanistan, jihadist groups “exact tolls from [drug] convoys that cross their territory
and, for a price, supply protection”; in Mali, it is mainly cocaine (read here).
In Mali, finally, mass protests triggered regime change by another military coup in 2012 which,
in turn, set off a new Tuareg rebellion that caused the temporary partition of the country and,
finally, the French-led military intervention. French troops continue to be involved in fighting in
Mali (see here).
Today, both countries – Mali and Afghanistan – are weak, but not ‘failed’ or ‘collapsed’ states.
Their governments’ implementation of the law is weak. At times they are not able and at other
times not interested in doing so. In the latter case, the blurred state of the rule of law leaves
spaces open in which governments themselves, or their local representatives and allies, can
exert patronage over economically motivated networks.(10) Yvan Guichaoua, a Mali expert from
the University of East Anglia argues that “northern Mali has in fact been a heavily governed
space, yet not by the standards of a rational legal system” under the post-1991 governments.
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The Guardian’s Ian Birrell further criticises that “the US and France invested too much faith into
an ineffective democracy riddled with corruption” in Mali. This definitely can be said about many
‘democratisation’ processes in ‘post-conflict’ countries.
Apart from these geographic, historical and development parallels, another similarity lies, as
Rita Abrahamsen from University of Ottawa wrote early in the year, “in the danger of outside
actors misunderstanding and ignoring local situations and struggles”. Many in the West,
governments, analysts and media, predominantly looked at the new conflict in Mali through the
prism of al-Qaeda linked terrorism, and the jihadists getting an upper hand in Northern Mali was
what triggered the armed intervention. Reports from Mali indicate, however, that large parts of
the country’s population, including its civil society, saw the main problem as the threat of a
break-up of the country and, in this context, did not distinguish between the jihadist and the
Tuareg groups (examples in this analysis). According to journalist Andrea Böhm, that France
forced the Malian government to negotiate peace with the MNLA while fighting the jihadists
upset many Malians (read here).
For many long-time Mali observers, holding the forthcoming presidential elections on 28 July
(with a second round on 11 August, if necessary) comes too early. Charlotte Wiedemann,
another long-time Mali watcher, lists the many problems: the lack of reliable voters lists, an
unstable security situation in the north with continuing terrorist attacks and armed clashes,
hundreds of thousands of returnees still on the move, doubt about whether the refugees abroad
(mainly Tuaregs) will be able to cast their votes properly and that the date has been set during
the start of the rainy season when the farmers in this drought-stricken country cannot afford to
miss a single drop. Many of them will miss the vote. She adds that the continuation of the state
of emergency until shortly before the 20-day election campaign was an attempt to silence those
in the political opposition who criticised the early elections. Much of this sounds like the lists of
shortcomings of the last Afghan election cycle (read two reports by AAN on the subject here
and here), which have influenced the recent discussions around two key electoral laws but not
fully addressed them (read AAN dispatch here).
Only a last-minute peace deal between the central government and Tuareg rebels opened the
way for elections to be held in the north in the first place (read here). Fighting (a report about
the most recent ones here) and attempts to sabotage the elections (read here) are continuing,
however, while the elections preparations are already marred by fraud claims.
Wiedemann attributes Mali’s election timing to pressure from the EU. Brussels had stated it
would unblock aid money, which constitutes one third of Mali’s budget, only after elections were
held. She also points out that Western countries need a ‘legitimate government’ as a partner
for their anti-terror policies; an argument known from current debates about the US-Afghan
Bilateral Security and Defence Agreement (more in this AAN dispatch). Under these
circumstances, she fears, the re-establishment “of that façade democracy looms that has led to
the crisis in the first place”.
Wiedemann pleads instead for starting a “reconciliation policy in which no ethnic groups gets a
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favoured status: this time no army posts as reward for the rebels, no exclusive negotiations
between the state and the armed groups, but a societal dialogue. . . . The Tuareg will be part of
it but better not represented by the MNLA.” Others argue that the inclusion of the MNLA is
crucial for the stabilization of some of the northern areas and ‘preconditions that the MNLA
disarm before dialogue are dangerous’. Also problematic is the West’s cooperation with an
unreformed government army that is accused of “serious . . . retaliatory violence [that] appear[s]
to be targeting members of various ethnic groups perceived to be supportive of the armed
groups”. Reforming security forces while they are fighting a war is difficult, though, as the
Afghan example shows (see an AAN report about this issue here).
The contours of a few lessons to be learnt start becoming visible. As the examples of Mali and
Afghanistan show, it seems impossible to end conflicts that have multi-facetted causes and
have been dragging on over decades with the currently available tool-box of outside
interventions. This is even more the case as the use of these tools is often restricted by shorttermism, the domination of donors’ domestic agendas and the insufficient and untimely (read:
too late) allocation of resources. However, main actors in both conflicts continue to have trouble
identifying lessons and learning from them, since this would require fully recognising and
acknowledging mistakes made.(11)
Both Mali and Afghanistan show that the amount of resources invested (the ‘input’) is not the
yardstick to measure success and that ‘classic’ output criteria like GDP and export growth are
insufficient because they mask social gaps. Those gaps, as the example of Mali shows, can
become causes for conflict. Balanced development among a country’s regions is necessary,
but the internal actors need to agree on which form it takes, and not the elites (however they are
defined or constituted). In the same way, merely holding (more or less) successful elections is
insufficient to guarantee stability and development. This way, just façade, or ‘procedural’,
democracies might be established.(12) Political institutions, however, need to represent the
diversity of a country, in ethno-lingual, political but also social aspects. Both societies, Mali and
Afghanistan, have instruments at their disposal to achieve societal consensus – the Afghan
(Loya) Jirgas and the Malians inter-ethnic conflict regulating mechanisms and their post-1991
national dialogues -, but overuse and manipulation as well as a mere reproduction of elite rule
undermine their legitimacy and effectiveness.
More generally, progress in political inclusiveness, for example, could be a good measure for
whether internal solutions and external contributions to them are successful or not – taking into
consideration that established democracies are not built in a few years. Not in Switzerland, or
Mali or Afghanistan.
This text was inspired by a podium discussion organised by the German aid organisation
Medico International on 22 March 2013 in Frankfurt/Main in which the author participated (full
video here, in German). I base my points on Mali on texts by various experts on that country;
any wrong conclusion is exclusively my fault.
(1) One similarity is that both countries were famous destinations for special kinds of cultural,
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non-mass tourism. Western tourists visited Timbuktu, the centre of Islamic learning in West
Africa, also for its architectonic treasures and later for the famous “Desert Blues” world music
festival. At the same time, Kabul was a destination for European hippies on the way to India or
Nepal, looking for freedom and cheap drugs. When Afghanistan was discovered as a
destination in itself, there was a regular bus connection between Munich and Kabul (return trip
cost of 95 dollars; see here). Less known but more importantly, Kabul also was the dream
weekend trip destination for Pakistanis during the 1950s and 1960s, with its entertainment
opportunities, like (a few) discos and movie theatres, then unthinkable in the Islamic Republic of
Pakistan founded in 1947 after the partition of India.
(2) A relatively new jihadist group on the scene, Mujao (Movement for Unity and Jihad in West
Africa), recruits ‘its core membership from the Lamhar tribe [in Algeria], supplemented by
Sahrawis [from the Moroccan-annexed Western Sahara], Songhai and Peuls’, the latter two
being minorities in Northern Mali (read here).
(3) This support started in the 1970s when Ghadhafi financed the rebellion of the Tubu in Chad.
The Tubu leader, Hissène Habre, later became that country’s dictatorial president (1982–90)
and has recently been arrested in his exile in Senegal for human rights crimes committed during
his rule.
(4) The French troops are currently in a process of handing over to Malian troops and UN bluehelmets; their number will be down from recently 4,000 to 2,000 by September and 1,000 by the
end of the year; the latter 1,000 will “remain . . . on Malian territory for an undetermined period
of time to carry out counter-terrorism operations if necessary” according to the French defence
minister Jean-Yves Le Drian (see here and here).
(5) “Martial law was imposed, wells were poisoned, flocks shot – and the women of fled rebels
forcefully married to officers from the south. . . . Among the Tuareg, this bloody subjugation
causes a collective trauma which was inherited by the coming generation and alienated many
permanently from the [Malian] state”, writes Charlotte Wiedemann (here).
(6) In this federation, the Tuaregs were to have autonomy, including a judicial system based on
Islamic law (see here).
(7) Figures for Afghanistan from Eberhard Rhein and A. Ghanie Ghaussy, Die wirtschaftliche
Entwicklung Afghanistans 1880–1965, Opladen 1966; Willy Kraus (ed), Steigerung der
landwirtschaftlichen Produktion und ihre Weiterverarbeitung in Afghanistan, Meisenheim am
Glan 1972; figures for Mali, here and here.
(8) Both the US and EU subsidise their own cotton producers, thereby creating hurdles for nonUS and non-EU cotton exporters. As a result, cotton producers in the countries of the South
lose 9.5 billion dollars of income annually, according to the World Bank and the ICAC
(International Cotton Advisory Committee) (source here).
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(9) Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America, Random House 2012.
(10) In the Spectator, guest author Aaron Ellis added another interesting thought:
Failed states are the worst places for terrorists to set up a safe haven. There is no infrastructure
that they can use, the security situation is just as dangerous for them as it is for anyone else,
and they are usually drawn into murderous local politics. Instead of plotting world domination,
groups like al-Qaeda find themselves wasting valuable time and resources dealing with these
problems. They dropped plans to base themselves in Somalia in the 1990s because they found
it was just too chaotic. Many criticised the move to Afghanistan for the same reason.
Too often, those who warn about the dangers of failed states and a repeat of 9/11 forget that
the country was not Bin Laden’s preferred choice, but a last resort. It was not its failure that
made it an option, but the protection offered to him by the powerful warlords he had built up
relationships with during the 1980s.
(11) Matt Waldman has recently attempted to list the mistakes committed by the US in
Afghanistan, which can be read here.
(12) One of the details the planners of the first post-Taleban election could have learnt from
post-1991 Mali was that those politicians who ruled the country in the interim period after the
dictatorship was toppled were not allowed to run in the elections they were preparing, in order to
avoid that they have an incumbent’s advantage. Find two paper of this author about the
mistakes committed during the post-2001 political process in Afghanistan here and here.
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