Little Battles in a Bigger War

It’s no secret that the macro-world view shows economic, social and military conflicts reflecting a clash of civilizations. Asian Tigers rising at the expense of the old-world developed cartels. Russia fighting to rekindle rigid social conservatism, state over individual rights, as a counter to what Vladimir Putin perceives as ineffective and insipid Western liberalism. Evangelical Christianity – from Nigerian fundamentalists to anti-gay rights movements in our own conservative Bible belt – against rising social tolerance of what were once perceived to be deviant lifestyles. And fundamentalist Islamists – including conservative Shiites from Iran and her cronies or the much larger assemblage of Sunnis in most of the rest of the Islamic world – hell-bent on imposing Islamic domination and Sharia law on the entire planet… as their mandate from God. This latter group seems committed to using violence at any level. Struggles to control commodity production and natural resources get into this mix, often in the most violent areas on earth.

Some of these battles need to be fought with weapons like better educational performance and increased communication and diplomatic dialog. Some are just the inevitable result of good old fashioned competition, and we need to get used to it. Other conflicts may have to be resolved by some form of geopolitical partition, seemingly inevitable where extreme opposite views can are easily geographically identified and then separated.

But where the battles are real, where bullets fly, bombs explode and throats are slit, the remedies are often military. The question in budget impaired times, where Congressional districts support local jobs (and generate votes) only on big, sophisticated high-tech weapons systems, is how to address small insurgencies, de-centralized and stateless zealots without either clearly uniformed troops or centralized command and control structures. What do American policy makers do to counter a global Islamist insurgency with a hard target of anything American or Israeli? And is there another way?

Take the little West African nation of Niger, sitting amid a hotbed of Islamist violence. “Across Africa, affiliates of Al Qaeda and other Islamist militants are proving resilient and in some cases expanding their influence, from Nigeria to Libya to Somalia, Western and African counterterrorism officials say… So it is not surprising that the authorities in this poor West African desert nation, which has emerged as a staunch ally of France and the United States in the fight against Islamist militancy, are nervously watching Boko Haram [pictured above], a sect in neighboring Nigeria suspected of killing well over 400 civilians in the last five weeks alone, including children watching a soccer match over the weekend.

“The group’s fighters have made a habit of quietly slipping across the border into Niger to rest, rearm and refit, officials say — a pipeline the nation is eager to shut down with the Pentagon’s help. But instead of launching American airstrikes or commando raids on militants, the latest joint mission between the nations involves something else entirely: American boxes of donated vitamins, prenatal medicines and mosquito netting to combat malaria.

“With more than a decade of land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drawing to an end, the American military’s involvement in Niger illustrates how the Pentagon is trying to juggle two competing missions in Africa: contain the spread of Islamist militancy without having to pour a lot of soldiers or money into the region.

“American officials and their partners call it enabling, a way of shifting from being a major combatant in war zones to a supporting role to local and other international forces. In Central African Republic, American transport planes recently ferried 1,700 peacekeepers from Burundi and Rwanda to the strife-torn nation, but refrained from putting American boots on the ground. The United States is flying unarmed reconnaissance drones from a base here in Niger to support French and African troops in Mali, but conspicuously stayed out of the war there, even after the conflict helped spur a terrorist attack in Algeria in which Americans were taken hostage.” New York Times, March 4^th. I seem to remember the notion of “winning their hearts and minds” during past American wars… it just seems to be so much more effective if there aren’t American guns blasting in the background.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and in a world of thousands of little skirmishes in the middle of the clash of civilizations, we can either learn how to do more with less or enjoy what the Chinese call “death by a thousand cuts.”