The Sahel region of Africa, considered a ‘frontline in the War on Terror’ as recently as President George W. Bush’s first term, had become the zone of a less dramatically described but more broadly construed counterterrorism approach by the time President Barack Obama took office. US counterterrorism policy in sub-Saharan Africa is evolving, reflecting shifts that started with Bush’s administration and have been adopted by Obama’s team. Just as the rhetoric of the ‘Global War on Terror’ has fallen out of favor in Washington (Wilson & Kamen 2009), so too has the rhetorical emphasis on democracy promotion in the Muslim world that comprised a major portion of Bush’s first-term agenda. In Africa, American policymakers increasingly prioritize stability, as opposed to electoral change. This emphasis is evident in the Sahel, where Washington has dealt in a relatively mild fashion with elites who tried to maintain or obtain power through channels that circumvented democratic processes. Despite official condemnation of coup leaders and questionable electoral outcomes in Mauritania and Niger, the Obama administration has appeared tentatively willing to countenance a lack of full democracy in these countries. Moreover, Washington reacted quietly to a series of terrorist incidents perpetrated in Mauritania, Mali, and Niger by Al Qaeda affiliates in 2009 and early 2010. Perceptions that the Sahel is marginal in geopolitical terms may help explain the lack of major US engagement in democracy promotion and counterterrorism in the region, but the US reaction to events there also owes partly to changing notions of how the ‘War on Terror’ should be fought.

This article sets US responses to recent events in Niger, Mauritania, and Mali in the context of changing conversations among policymakers concerning terrorism in the Sahel. After a discussion of how attitudes and policies toward counterterrorism in Africa shifted from 2001 to 2009, a second section discusses recent political events in Mauritania and Niger before examining kidnappings and other terrorist incidents in Mauritania and the Mali-Niger borderlands. I ask why US policymakers reacted differently to events in 2009 and early 2010 than they might have had the same events occurred in the 2001-2005 period. President Obama and other administration representatives state that Africa is a top US priority and stress the importance of effective governance on the continent. Yet the evolution of counterterrorist rhetoric and policy signals that the United States is retreating from an agenda that seeks to transform political systems, and is instead advancing a program of long-term military involvement in areas, such as the Sahel, where perceived US security interests are at stake.

Read the complete PDF here:
http://concernedafricascholars.org/docs/bulletin85thurston.pdf