Election in Mali: On the Road to Peace or a Pathway to Crises?

President Dioncounda Traore, Mali's interim leader has met with members of two northern Tuareg separatist groups apparently for the first time in a build-up for peace to secure the elections scheduled to be held on Sunday. This move provoked anger among many in the country's south due to the rising ethnic tensions.

The aim of the election is to unify the nation after a March 2012 coup allowed Tuareg rebels and their al Qaeda-linked Islamist allies to seize the West African nation's desert north. France intervened earlier in the year, displacing the militants who have continued with brittle sporadic attacks.

The Tuareg rebels last month agreed to take their fighters off the streets in exchange for a promise of negotiations with the new government after the elections. This allowed the Malian army gained entrance into their controlled-territory. The rebels after the French-led intervention had simmered down captured some of the Islamists who outsmarted them in a 10-month long attacks.

Representatives of the MNLA and its ally, the High Council for the Unity of Azawad, was to meet with military officials to review progress in implementing the preliminary peace deal signed in neighbouring Burkina Faso. "We spoke of peace and reconciliation," Ibrahim Ag Mohamed Assale, head of external relations for the Tuareg MNLA rebels, said following the closed-door meeting at the presidential residence late on Sunday.

But many in the capital Bamako viewed the unannounced visit with the president, during which Traore broke the Muslim holy month of Ramadan's traditional daytime fast with the Tuareg leaders, as an affront. "Dioncounda may forgive them, but the people will not," said Bamako resident Youssouf Toure. This statement makes the peace after election in doubt especially if the candidate that emerges the winner is not accepted by an aggrieved party.

Light-skinned Tuaregs like the Sudanese-Arabs have been blamed for attacks on black Malians in the northern city of Kidal and for the abduction of four election workers and a deputy mayor in another northern town last week. Two of the Tuareg delegation are named in arrest warrants for alleged crimes committed during the occupation of the north. The Tuaregs had also vowed to expel all blacks from their vicinities before the peace deal; signalling a fear of another South-Sudan-Sudan-Darfur encounter.

U.S Military Trains Coup Plotters

Gen. Carter Ham, the head of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has admitted bluntly the failure of U.S. military training to instill respect for human rights in a Malian army now accused of massacring Arabs and Tuaregs as it fights its way north into rebel-held territory. "We didn't spend probably the requisite time focusing on values, ethics, and a military ethos," Ham acknowledged, saying that most U.S. training for the Malians focused on tactics, strategy, and "technical matters."

Since 1985, the United States has sponsored approximately 156 Malian military officers and non-commissioned officers at U.S. professional military schools and given them training focused on professionalizing the military forces. Over the past three years, this funding has reached at least roughly $400,000 annually, and it is possible U.S. intelligence agencies have also funneled in support as well. Sadly, Mali is hardly an isolated case of U.S. military assistance programmes operating with dangerously little oversight and lacking a compelling central rationale.

Though good examples of successful U.S. military training programmes exist but lots of headline cases have gone badly wrong over the years -- from training Indonesian troops that carried out atrocities in East Timor to the billions poured into the Egyptian military to the scores of tainted graduates from the School of the Americas that ran riot in Central America during the 1980s.

In looking at the patterns of U.S. military assistance, the question is not who gets American military aid, but who doesn't. In 2012, the United States delivered bilateral security assistance to 134 countries -- meaning that every country on Earth had about a 75 percent chance of receiving U.S. military aid. Once you weed out places like North Korea and Vatican City, you are pretty much assured of receiving military aid no matter how large or small your country, no matter how democratic or despotic your regime, no matter how lofty or minimal your GDP.

There has been almost zero discussion of how to better focus U.S. military assistance around clear objectives and direct it to countries where it can make a lasting difference. And these aren't insignificant sums when taken together. The administration requested $9.8 billion in security assistance funding for fiscal year 2013.

Much of this military assistance -- through programmes like Foreign Military Financing; International Military Education and Training; Non-proliferation, Anti-terrorism, Demining, and Related Programmes; International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement; Peacekeeping Operations; and the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund -- is supposed to be overseen by the State Department with the Defense Department doing the heavy lifting of actually delivering aid and training.

The rationale on paper for such assistance is straightforward and usually receives uncritical congressional support. U.S. military aid helps train security forces, finance the purchase of military equipment, bolster the ability of law enforcement to tackle the illegal narcotics trade, and shape cooperation on non-proliferation issues.

But more than anything, the Pentagon has always insisted that spreading military assistance so broadly is all about building relationships with fellow militaries -- a cost effective way of establishing contacts who will pick up the phone in a ministry of defence when needed. For many, U.S. dollars propped up an autocratic military in Egypt, other argue that it was the senior flag relationships between the Pentagon and Cairo that kept the military from opening fire on democratic protesters during the Arab Spring.

But U.S. military aid looks much better on paper than in practice, in large part because it is often delivered as if on autopilot without a reasoned discussion of its merits. The State Department largely offers rubber-stamp approvals, and the Foreign Service currently lacks personnel with the expertise needed to engage in a rigorous debate with the Pentagon about who deserves aid and why.

As Gordon Adams of the Stimson Center has argued, the State Department's "internal capacity to plan, budget, and manage these programmes needs to be seriously strengthened." This, combined with the general tendency of Congress to treat military spending requests as something just short of a papal writ, has meant that U.S. security assistance programmes receive very little oversight.

Equally troubling, military and economic assistance are treated as quite different creatures. For economic assistance, the United States has increasingly insisted that aid recipients at least demonstrate some marginal commitment to democracy and open markets. Not so on the military side, where concerns about corruption, the rule of law, and human rights are treated as something we are too polite to ask about.

Indeed, we probably would offer military training to everyone if it were not for the minor restrictions imposed by Senate Democrats like the Leahy Law, which prohibits U.S. military assistance to known thugs and war criminals that violate human rights with impunity. Yes, having military-to-military contacts through U.S. military training and aid is often useful and can build important relations and lasting trust.

But it is equally true that the list of U.S.-trained officers that have led coups against their sitting governments is a lengthy one in countries ranging from Honduras to Haiti to the Gambia. Contrary to what Ham's remark suggested, a few months spent studying tactics and logistics in Kansas or Georgia rarely seems to slow down a power-hungry colonel when he is hell bent on toppling the elected government that just threatened to cut his budget.

Underwriting security assistance to countries with autocratic leadership or nations that are of little strategic significance doesn't make much sense. U.S. military aid and training should be concentrated in a far fewer countries rather than being sprinkled all around the globe like fairy dust in hopes that good relations result.

Nations should be chosen to receive such military aid and training based on their commitment to reform -- both within the military and within the broader structures of democratic governance, free markets, and respect for human rights. Such aid should be a reward for high-performing countries, not a party favour dispensed at the door.

General Ham sounded genuinely surprised that American-trained officers were up to nefarious deeds. Apparently Ham is not much of a history buff -- a U.S. trained captain led a coup against the government of Mali just last March.

Courtesy: Foreign Policy Analysis