America Reveals Its Two Minds On Algeria

By James Badcock 
This commentary was published in The Daily Star on 17/01/2011 

The State Department cables on Algeria released by WikiLeaks late last year suggest that when it comes to security in North Africa and the Sahel region, the United States regards Algiers as the key actor. However, the cables also reveal serious doubts over the future political direction of the Maghreb’s biggest nation, and the deadly rioting recently in cities across Algeria bear out such concerns.

Rising food prices are ostensibly the cause of the unrest. Perhaps, too, they were inspired by Tunisian rioting across the eastern border. But any Algerian observer knows that localized flare-ups are common, due to a political system seemingly incapable of effecting significant change for the country’s largely young population. Algiers’ expertise and determination when it comes to fighting Al-Qaeda’s regional franchise is not in question, but corruption and political paralysis in which few benefits of the country’s massive fossil-fuel wealth filter down to the poor give rise to concerns that internal stability cannot be guaranteed.

Having been at war with rebel Islamist forces since 1991, the Algerian security forces are the region’s most experienced in counterterrorism operations. In the 1990s a full-scale civil war raged in the country after canceled elections foiled an Islamist party’s bid for democratic power. During the conflict, the army also resorted to terrorist tactics.

In the last decade, the only remaining Islamist group merged with Al-Qaeda to form Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (A.Q.I.M.). It focused increasingly on sporadic and sometimes spectacular attacks against prominent targets in Algeria and, more recently, in the Sahel region to the south. Now Algeria is eager to lead an international operation against A.Q.I.M., which maintains a several-hundred-strong force made up mainly of Algerians and Mauritanians in remote areas, especially the virtually unadministered lands of northern Mali. From there A.Q.I.M. has launched occasional ambush attacks against military targets, taps lucrative smuggling markets, and is earning extra funds and the attendant publicity by kidnapping Westerners. Indeed, last week two French citizens were killed by their captors close to the Mali-Niger border. A.Q.I.M. still holds five French hostages and two Africans.

In response to Algeria’s organization of a four-nation organization to cooperate against A.Q.I.M., pooling intelligence and surveillance results, a U.S. official, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Vicki Huddleston, told the following to her Algerian counterpart in October 2009, according to a leaked cable: Washington “recognized Algeria’s leadership in Africa [and] acknowledged Algeria’s own experience in combating terrorism and underscored [the U.S. government’s] appreciation for Algeria’s lead on efforts to secure the Sahel region and prevent terrorism from taking root in neighboring countries.”

In Huddleston’s appraisal of Algeria’s attempt to enlist Mali, Mauritania and Niger in the joint anti-terrorism operation, there was no apparent attempt to bend the initiative to Washington’s will. Rather, her focus was on offering words of praise bordering on downright gratitude.

Specifically, there was no apparent pressure to include U.S. forces in the Tamanrasset command (the name is taken from the Algerian desert outpost where the major talks with representatives of the Sahel governments have been held). Instead, there was an offer to discuss a resumption of surveillance overflights and a commitment to helping ensure active participation on the part of other regional governments. Nor was there reproach for Algiers’ exclusion of Morocco from the initiative. Cold water poured by Algerian security officials on her suggestion that European governments might be partners in an anti-A.Q.I.M. alliance was also accepted without a murmur by Huddleston.

In a further demonstration of U.S. acceptance of Algerian primacy in the region, another diplomatic cable from 2008, sent by the American representative in Bamako, Mali, mentions the need to reassure Algeria about the objectives of U.S. military assistance to the Malian army. The intention, the cable reads, is “to build capacity to address the range of security threats in the north, and not to launch the Malian military in some quixotic anti-Tuareg campaign.” As in matters of Islamist terrorism, in the on-off conflict between the Malian government in Bamako and Tuareg rebels in the arid north of the country, U.S. officials are adamant that the Algerian approach be respected above all others.

But in internal Algerian affairs, all sense of certainty melts away. Neither American diplomats nor any of their local interlocutors seems to know what is in store for the country after President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika either stands aside or is impeded from continuing at the helm due to poor health or death. We learn that not even Bouteflika, who has been elected three times, can loosen the military’s grip over the country’s institutions. Sources told the U.S. Embassy in Algiers that the army distrusted the president, and that the corruption of the clique ruling under Bouteflika (nicknamed the “Tikrit gang” by one opposition figure, in reference to Saddam Hussein’s former ruling clan in Iraq) has led to a conflict over private economic interests with high-ranking officers.

“Many embassy contacts think President Bouteflika himself is not particularly corrupt,” reads a 2007 U.S. dispatch, “but they readily finger the president's brothers, Said and Abdallah, as being particularly rapacious.”

The overall picture of Algeria is one of political stagnation. Under the surface of rule by a corrupt elite, dissatisfaction simmers with periodical eruptions in the streets. Desperate attempts to emigrate by way of perilous sea voyages remain frequent despite the country’s abundant resources. But the importance of Algeria in strategic terms for regional security (not to mention European energy requirements) means that external pressure aimed at boosting the quality of Algerian democratic performance is virtually nonexistent.

James Badcock is editor of the English edition of the Spanish daily El Pais. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.