Should Chuck Hagel become the next U.S. secretary of defense, one of his priorities will be ensuring France’s 3-week-old campaign in Mali doesn’t become the next American shadow war.
In prepared questions to the Senate Armed Services Committee ahead of his Thursday morning confirmation hearing, the former Nebraska Republican senator said he’d back the French campaign against Islamist forces in the Malian north “without deploying U.S. combat forces on the ground.” Hagel backs training a United Nations-authorized African force to take over from the French, but the U.S. military is staying out of that effort, currently overseen by the State Department.
Outside of propping up the African forces, Hagel told the panel he supports “assisting the movement of French and African forces [and] providing intelligence and planning support” to the French. Midair refueling, something the French have sought and which a U.S. KC-135 tanker began providing on Sunday, wasn’t part of Hagel’s list.
Hagel also sounded a more sanguine note about the threat to the U.S. posed by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the al-Qaida affiliate in north Africa and the Sahel, than some in the Obama administration and the military have been willing to go. While he told the panel AQIM poses a “growing threat” to U.S. interests in the region and wants to deny the group a safe haven in Mali, “My understanding is that at this time, there is no credible evidence that AQIM is a direct threat to the U.S. homeland,” Hagel said. (.pdf)
That’s a position supported by some who follow AQIM and the region closely. AQIM appears flush with cash from its drug-smuggling and kidnapping operations. And defense observers have wondered if AQIM has a bull’s-eye on its back in the U.S.’ proliferating campaign of drone-and-commando-heavy shadow wars.
But unlike al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the group’s branch in Yemen, AQIM has not prioritized the U.S. as a target. “I see no evidence they have the expeditionary capabilities to stage attacks on the United States or have ever tried to develop that capability,” says Andrew Lebovich, a politics and security researcher with the Open Society Institute in Senegal.
Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rudy Atallah, the Pentagon’s former top Africa counterterrorism officer, adds that while AQIM has been willing to hit U.S. targets of opportunity in north Africa — as with its suspected role in the Algerian oil field attack earlier this month — it cares more about spreading extremist Islam and attacking the Algerian and French governments than it does assaulting U.S. interests. “The short answer is they are regionally focused for now,” Atallah says.
Asked about the threat from AQIM to the U.S. homeland at a Tuesday Pentagon briefing, spokesman George Little said, “I’m unaware of any specific or credible information at this time that points to an AQIM threat against the homeland, but, again, I’m not ruling it out.”
France itself is trying to scale back its Mali commitment, for fear of getting sucked into a quagmire. And while Hagel is no peacenik, his reluctance to draw the U.S. deeper in Mali matches his broader advocacy of “think[ing] very carefully before we commit our Armed Forces to battlefields abroad,” which he cited to the panel as a principle lesson of the Iraq war. Hagel says he doubts “providing lethal support to the armed opposition at this time will alleviate the horrible situation we see in Syria,” and committed himself to “steady” troop reductions from Afghanistan.
Hagel’s comments about Iran and Israel are going to get all the attention during the Thursday hearing. But he said nothing controversial in his advanced questions on either subject: “all options are on the table” against the Iranian nuclear program, and pledged to “maintain our unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security.” Hagel appears more willing to halt the post-9/11 drift to military intervention on the margins of U.S. national security.
Next Pentagon Chief Doesn't Want to Get Sucked Into France's Mali War
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Next Pentagon Chief Doesn't Want to Get Sucked Into France's Mali War
