Irregular Warfare Podcast - After Mali: Learning from the French Experience of Irregular Warfare in the Sahel

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

Subscribe to the IWI monthly newsletter by going to www.irregularwarfare.org! This episode explores the French experience with irregular warfare in the Sahel region of Africa since 2013 and features two guests. Brigadier General François-Marie Gougeon is a career officer in the French army who served as chief of staff for the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali from 2019 to 2020. Professor Will Reno is the chair of the Political Science Department at Northwestern University, the author of three books on African politics and warfare, and currently conducting research on foreign military assistance in weak states. They begin by explaining why the French were involved in combat operations in the Sahel and how their forces were organized against several armed insurgencies. They go on to explore the effectiveness, and shortfalls, of the light-footprint approach utilized by the French in Africa, to include in the area of building partner-force capacity, before emphasizing the essential role that local political dynamics play in irregular warfare success. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Thank you for listening to Episode 63 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm Kyle Atwell, the Chair of the Irregular Warfare Initiative Board, and I'm joined today by Don Gomez, the Deputy Director for the IWI Communications Team. We are about to get to today's conversation, but first we want to take this opportunity to inform you of another resource for the community, the Irregular Warfare Initiative Newsletter. The Irregular Warfare Initiative sends out a monthly newsletter that compiles all articles, podcasts, information about our fellows program, and upcoming opportunities and events.

The newsletter is a convenient way to catch up on all IWI content from the previous month. We invite you to sign up for the newsletter at www.irregularwarfare.org. Like the podcast, the newsletter is built by a team of volunteers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. You can find additional information on how to sign up in the show notes. We want to thank you for listening to the podcast and for being part of this community. Without further delay, here is episode 63 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. It's the constant struggle to align political efforts with military results on the ground.

From the onset, it was clear that Bahkan was only destined to be a limited military action and that political efforts would be taken or carried by other actors. And the main problem was precisely to reconcile what we were doing militarily on the grounds and the pressure that other actors could put on the Malian government. Part of the problem that French forces face is that they need African partners, but it's right at that time, because of this breakdown of a system of politics in that place, that you get the drop in the capacity and the political will of those partners to be good partners, at least from the point of view of intervention forces. Welcome to Episode 63 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast.

I'm your host, Laura Jones, and my co-host today is Kyle Atwell. Today's episode explores the French experience with irregular warfare in the Sahel since 2013. Our guests begin by explaining why the French were involved in combat operations in the Sahel region of Africa and how their forces were organized against several armed insurgencies. They go on to explore the effectiveness and shortfalls of the light footprint approach utilized by the French in Africa, to include in the area of building partner force capacity. They conclude by emphasizing the essential role that local political dynamics play

in a regular warfare success and argue that French operations in Africa provide a valuable case study and light footprint intervention as compared to the U.S.-led large footprint intervention in Afghanistan. Brigadier General François-Marie Goujon is a career officer in the French Army, having served in the Troupe de Marine and commanded the 1st Marine Regiment. He has deployed numerous times to Bosnia and Kosovo and multiple locations in Africa, including to Mali as Chief of Staff for MINUSMA. He is a graduate of the Marine Corps University, where he received a master's degree in military studies. His current assignment is serving as a French National Military Representative at SHAPE. Professor Will Reno is the Chair of the

Political Science Department at Northwestern University. The author of three books on African politics and warfare, he has conducted extensive research on the politics of violence and state collapse in sub-Saharan Africa. You are listening to the Regular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of regular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with Brigadier General François-Marie Goujon and Professor Will Reno. Brigadier General François-Marie Goujon, Professor Will Reno, thank you so much for

being with the Irregular Warfare podcast today. We're thrilled to have you and learn from your experience. Yes, Lauren Kyle, thank you very much. Good morning to your listeners. And thank you so much for having me today and for this opportunity to exchange views on the different theater of operations and different experience, at least sort of French flavor of experience in counterinsurgency and irregular warfare.

All right, well, thank you so much for having me. And I'm really happy to be here and delighted to talk about this topic. And hopefully I'll be able to add an academic perspective, but not too much, just enough. Thanks, gentlemen. We'll hop right in to start setting the scene for the French experience in the Sahel. If you could, General, we'll start with you. Could you tell us the stage, it's worth noting that France had been involved in the area, in Sahel, for more than a decade when the crisis broke out in 2012. In essence, and very shortly since the mid-2000s, the whole region was being destabilised

by Islamist groups taking Western countries' interests as a target. So France was not the only one in the region operating at a regional scale because we were already alongside our US partners under the auspices of the US-Trans-Saharan counter-terrorism partnership in the region also. Now what concretely triggered the crisis originally is the graft of jihadist ideology on a fundamentally political problem, which was the Touareg questioned in the north. That had been left unresolved for decades, and that was accelerated by the effects of the fall of Gaddafi in Libya. Now, as far as Serval is specifically concerned, it's also worth remembering the sequence of events that triggered the Operation Serval, because it

explains much of the mandate. It's the end of Qadhafi's rule in 2011 in Libya that freed some Tuareg groups that had been fighting for him as auxiliary units. And those groups had returned to Mali, and they formed MNLA, an opportunistic alliance between two RA groups, which launched an offensive against Malian government troops in northern Mali. They sided with a jihadist group of al-Qaeda in that effort. And it turned out that very quickly, Malian government forces were ousted from northern Mali. And as a consequence, the president of Mali was overthrown by a coup in early 2012. It's worth remembering that President Hollande had just been elected in May 2012. And in terms of foreign policy, under the motto of no more France-Afrique,

so no more connections or no more French influence in Africa. So the government by then was hostile to any direct involvement on the ground and was clear that no French boots would be sent to Mali. In January 2013, there was a dramatic turn of events that precipitates the involvement of France. Yedig Kali and his Ansardine group launches an offensive in January 2013, and this offensive is likely to threaten Bamako, to threaten the very existence of the government of Mali. So the head of the provisional authorities of Mali formally requests a French intervention. So Operation Serval is launched very quickly with a limited mandate in time and space, the purpose being to stop the offensive of terrorist armed groups in Mali,

restore Malian sovereignty, and destroy those armed groups involved in the offensive. And the objectives are more or less achieved at the summer of 2013, after an operation that's lasted between five and six months. So that's, in essence, what Cval was about. So quick, limited intervention at the request of Malian authorities designed to restore their authority over the territory against a terrorist offensive. is that the fall of the Gaddafi regime in Libya is directly tied to kind of an increase in violence, essentially very far away in Mali. And then the second thing is, could you characterize a little bit what the nature of this threat was? Was it fragmented terrorist groups? Was it a cohesive insurgency? Was it popular or not popular among the population? I mean, I think the general's got it just right in that it's 2011, 2012, there's a critical juncture in the area. And the events in Libya are part of sort of what creates this disruption. And I would characterize it in the period before where there's conflict, the rebellions of Tuareg groups and whatnot. So that's not new in the area.

But what is new is the breakdown of an old informal system of politics. Because before 2011, 2012, oftentimes when groups would fight against the government, it was a form of negotiation. They would have the separatist demand or some other beef against the government. But what was going on was this was the renegotiation of an elite pact. When Libya breaks down and these groups begin migrating outside of Libya and weapons flows and so forth take place, this is outside of that type of system, that informal system. So I think this is where the big disruption comes. And part of the problem that French forces face is that they need African partners because of domestic politics in France and so forth and limited political will, but also a real

national interest in addressing these problems in West Africa. in addressing these problems in West Africa. But it's right at that time, because of this breakdown of a system of politics in that place, that you get the drop in the capacity and the political will of those partners to be good partners, at least from the point of view of intervention forces. So I think that's a contradiction that develops in 2011, 2012. And that becomes a big problem in terms of planning and operations. Because what do you do when the partner's own system of governments begin to fall apart and you get all of those contrasting interests?

Did France perceive this change as a direct threat to itself or to the West? Or was the intervention more inspired by kind of the need to either support friends or a former colonial entity or more based on humanitarian concerns? Was this a direct threat or kind of an indirect threat from France's perspective? I think that it was recognized both by France and by all regional partners in the area, that the creation of a safe haven for a terrorist group or armed groups with jihadist inspiration, leading to the creation of a safe haven at the very heart of Sahel, would be a danger for the whole region, and not only for French interests. Granted, there are French interests in the region, but there are more political and economic ones. But I remember very clearly talking to my Senegalese partners that they were very conscious that the cascading

effect of Mali falling to the hands of jihadist-inspired movements or groups would be catastrophic for the entire region. So there was a consensus, I think, by then already that there had to be converging or coordinating action to stem that growth and prevent Mali from falling to the hands of those groups. We have this intervention, we have Operation Serval, we understand why it went in. And then can you please kind of take us into the formation of Barkan and then the continuation of presence? Yes, I hope I'm not going to be too long. But I think it's important to understand the difference between Salva and Barkhane, because in the end, when the peace agreement is struck in the summer of 2013, it is clear that none of the problems, none of all, a clear recognition that everything that has yet to be resolved in terms of political backgrounds, but also social and economic reform in Mali. There's

also a recognition that a regional approach remains necessary because other countries in Sahel are under similar threat. And finally, there is a recognition that France cannot afford doing it alone and should not be seen at the forefront of the efforts for historical reasons, obviously. So the main characteristics of Operation Barkhane is first that it is designed initially to operate alongside other actors and each complementing others' efforts. So Barkhane is only designed to bring one piece of the solution, others' efforts. So Barkan is only designed to bring one piece of the solution, the mid-tree piece of the solution, as a precondition, but for other efforts to be able to develop. If you look at the security field, and there is a sort of distribution of responsibilities between

different players on the ground, which I was a first-hand witness when I was Chief of Staff of Minusma Force in 2019. First of all, there were training efforts to help build, well, some would say rebuild, but clearly Malian armed forces had to be built from the ground up. So that was the EU mission, EU training mission. There was also the need to generate and support and help build police and justice sectors, as those were in a very difficult and really dire situation. There was also MINUSMA, so the UN mission with 13,000 troops, so probably one of the biggest missions that the UN had sent. And MINUSMA was in charge of monitoring the execution of the peace accord in the north north and also protect civilians, especially in the

central region. So that was yet another actor. Then there was the G5 Sahel that was designed to coordinate efforts of the Sahel countries to control all the areas where terrorist armed groups were taking advantage of the lack of control. So the main characteristics of Barkhane were precisely to be a facilitator, bring the security bit of the whole equation, but certainly not to embrace all the different lines of effort that were needed to tackle the security situation, not to mention the political background that was in the hands of primarily the UN, what Barkhan looked like was very much a light footprints operation. And the whole area of operation for Barkhan spans the whole Sahel region. So that's roughly the size of Western Europe, with somewhere between 3,500 to 5,000 troops total to carry out

that limited mission. One question for you, Will. Francois-Marie mentioned that there was an initial tactical military success where it sounds like essentially the French military was able to clear insurgent fighters from major population areas, but the real challenge became the political transformation. And so there was kind of a justification there that, hey, we need to change from this Operation Serval to this new operation that has an enduring presence to address the underlying drivers of insecurity. In my mind, that almost kind of rhymes with the experience that the United States had in Afghanistan.

I'm wondering if you could expound upon that. Well, I don't want to paint Sahel Africa as Sahelistan, but I think that there are a lot of features that are similar, at least the comparison's useful. And, you know, I think that the bottom line is that as you see the transition of operations, it's that the aspiration becomes much bigger, becomes much more political. It's not a tactical question of, okay, go find the jihadists, let's beat the jihadists, but rather, how do you put a political and a military framework that is local, that these governments can sustain, and that's going to operate in that interest? And that gets harder and harder over time. You know, what's different, I think, about Sahel from Afghanistan is that this is something that's being done with far fewer troops from

outside of the region with a lot less resources, which is maybe a good thing. And it's also a situation that I think is much more central to national interests of France and to other European countries. Because to have a jihadist safe zone, that would be a really big problem. I mean, France has had its own domestic politics affected by attacks on French soil. And I think that the general said something that's very important about the region, and that's the concern of these big coastal states, which are much more stable, because that region is their hinterland. And there's a lot of cycling back and forth of populations, people going to the big cities

on the coast for jobs and so forth. So these are the places that for outsiders, if you want to partner, those are the governments that are much more capable and have the political will to move in the same direction. So it's a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, because it's getting harder and harder in these affected areas to be able to do something. But I think unlike the Americans in Afghanistan, particularly in the later period, there's real reason to be there. And in political terms, this is a serious contradiction. prediction. It seems like kind of a rough comparison, but a lot of people have looked at the Afghan intervention and said, hey, if we had just done a light footprint and sustained that, then we wouldn't have kind of ended up where we were, where we had to withdraw due to kind of domestic political pressures. Is Operation Barkhan kind of the counterfactual example of here is what

a light footprint looks like? That's a very good question. I think it's important to remember the momentum that was generated by the victory or tactical success of Operation Serval. There's also a realisation that a long-term solution has to be found lest we find ourselves in a repetition of the January scenario where Bamako was about to fall to the hands of a terrorist armed groups. So I think it's an interesting example that the light footprint approach in Mauritania proved quite successful. And it's maybe that this success set an example that we hoped the new leadership in Mali, but also in neighbouring countries would follow. In essence, within two years time, Mauritania, with the help of French special forces, we managed to set up mobile long-range units that were very effective in repelling the terrorist group threat to the borders of Mali. And interestingly enough, also, Mauritanian authorities were by that time extremely critical of the lack of mobilization by Malian authorities against their own hinterland. So it's probably a combination of all those factors that

led to the idea that Bahkan was necessary because we had new institutions, we had a mobilization of the international community, there was an opportunity to tackle the issue for good in the Sahara region. And we're talking about this light footprint, how then did France tackle the incredible distance and complete lack of infrastructure throughout the region that's been mentioned as the size of Western Europe? And then to tack on to that, did the footprint and force posture have to change after the 2015 attacks on the Bataclan of the Stade de France due to competing security requirements? Sahel was regarded under Operation Barkhane as a single-theater operation for Western Africa and Sub-Sahara.

So Barkan's AOR was pretty much the five Sahel countries under unified command. The size of the area of operation was clearly a challenge from the onset, because with two to three battle groups, being able to contain mobile armed groups on a country the size of Western Europe, is clearly something that takes a lot of resources, especially lots of air resources, to support a collection of intel and to move intervention forces from one side to the other. So that was a challenge, but that was a challenge of distance that French forces were not completely equipped for, but were well prepared for and well trained for, because in essence, that was the expeditionary model that we had built across the 80s and the 90s.

We could not have done what we did without the support of several countries, including US support in terms of intel, strat lift, air refueling, for instance, and with the support of other European partners. But clearly that was something we were designed to do, we were prepared to do, and we had to fight technical problems, but not a problem of design of our own armed forces. Now, if you look at what happens in 2015, clearly it has an impact on what we do in Sahel, not really in terms of posture or in terms of troops on the ground or number of troops on the ground. The troop levels remain pretty much the same,

but it really puts additional strain around forces as a whole because new missions are now given to our forces, namely reinforcement of our domestic posture. And so you've got 10,000 troops now deployed in the streets of France to prevent further terrorist attacks. And you have also a refocus on national and domestic issues. At the same time, it brings also further justification to what France is doing in Sahel because there is a clear connection between the spread of jihad 5,000 kilometers away from Paris and the impact of the situation in France and terrorist attacks the population has suffered in 2015. So it does put additional strain on our armed forces and on our ability to reinforce our capabilities in Sahel. It makes it more complicated, but at the same time, it brings more justification to what we're doing and, in essence, the goal of

Operation Bahkan. I think looking at the French expeditionary model as a whole, it's stretched very thin in comparison to, say, the Americans in Afghanistan. But I think that it's a particularly good model, looking country by country in the Sahel, digging into the politics of these types of operations. Because when it's small and stretched thin, it means that the force has to work with the local political context. And in some places like Mali, I think that gets more and more difficult. And ultimately, not having the capability to build a huge army for Mali, which is probably a good thing, because we can see what happens when you do that in a place like Afghanistan, but the political context can't sustain that. Mauritania was mentioned earlier. I think that this is an example potentially of, well, it's certainly a more successful case. And that's a, it's a bunch of guys that negotiate with each other and talk to the families of jihadists and have the capacity to actually be able to intervene in the jihadist politics.

That's a real tricky thing, because I think from outside, we tend to see it as black or white. You know, it's a sort of binary. It's the friend or the enemy. That's a system that at very low cost outsiders and a system that they have in their own political realm that's much more sustainable. The real problem is things like G5, as a researcher on the ground and living and working in places like Mali or elsewhere in the region, I mean, and living and working in places like Mali or elsewhere in the region.

I mean, these things are, they sort of exist, but they exist more on paper than they did on the ground. I mean, yeah, there's some cooperation and so forth. UTEM training, these guys, they had rules of operation that really wouldn't let them outside of their compounds, or at least not very much. So it's that test. Can the local political system be able to address this problem with outside help? Or is it caught in a cycle where the outsider has to do more and more, more that's committed, the more detached it becomes from the local politics? So you have kind of a conundrum because when you put too much resources,

you kind of try to impose an external political system that just isn't locally viable. But when you do too little, you essentially can't influence the outcomes you're hoping to get. Yeah, it's a moral hazard problem because in some political systems, you put resources in to solve a problem. And the people who you have to work with in that political system are responsible for these problems. I mean, not maybe totally responsible, but they're doing their own thing behind the scenes that's making that problem worse. enabling them. I mean, not to characterize all of Mali's political system that way, but you saw that divergence of interest. I think in Mauritania, while the convergence of interest wasn't perfect, there was much more to work with. And there are other places like Chad. I mean, Chad's got a very, I think from an outside perspective, it has a very exotic political system. It's very complex behind the scenes. But there's certain things that that elite, that the different local power holders in that country do with each other, that it's not a paragon of stability, but it does get stuff done. outsider, I think maybe it forces a little more focus on how these systems work and then what

sorts of things are you willing to do without sort of going against your own values and so forth. But a lot of these places in between, I mean, Mali, that's a real tough one. And Burkina just became tougher, I think, in recent days with the most recent coup. And these are developments that I think are very worrisome from the point of view of jihadism, but it's also very worrisome in terms of stability of the region as a whole. We've touched on partnerships already, and Francois-Marie, you laid out really well for us all the complex international presence in the region. How then did France build and maintain relationships with the multitude of actors on the ground? And how did building relationships have to shift from working with an entity like G5 Sahel to interfacing with a local militia group or building local forces? to the overall concept of Operation Barkan, again, due to the light footprint type of operation that was both the outcome of our limited means and also our determination not to be at the forefront

of the solution. So there was an underlying intention from the very beginning to support Sahelization and internationalization and Europeanization of efforts in Mali specifically and in the whole region. So the point was to support other security actors and help them get capable quickly of delivering their own contribution to security efforts. Well, namely MINUSMA. So MINUSMA again was responsible for monitoring the implementation of the peace accord in the north, in northern Mali, but also in charge of security in the whole central region, which Barkhan would not set foot. And it's clear that MINUSMA was ill-equipped, ill-adapted for its mission. It was a peace operation mission, a classical type of peace operation mission, with limited mobility and some lack of motivation in some of the troops that were deployed there. So MINUSMA was not

really effective. And it's only after a quite important transformation that was carried out around 18 and 19, it proved capable of expanding the size of its operations beyond the few Blue Hamid bases that were just close to the population. Not to give a big history of MINUSMA, but just to be clear for the listeners, this is a UN peacekeeping operation made up of kind of multinational forces compared to the French-led operation, right? Right. And so the number of troops was 13,000, so it was a rather big operation. And again, the two main missions were first the monitoring in the north of the Peace Accord, but clearly the different signatory groups of the Peace Accord were rather trying to play around the rules and around the terms of the agreement and around the

MINUSMA then play by what they had signed up for. And the second mission of MINUSMA was security of civilians, especially in the central region, which was being torn apart by inter-ethnic tensions. And again, MINUSMA being poorly equipped and having very limited mobile means was faced with a situation it was not capable of handling, to put it mildly, and which ended up with inter-ethnic violence and massacres in 2019. One, I think, being well remembered in Ogo Sago, where I think around 150 civilians were killed. Second player, G5 Sahel, but G5 Sahel joined forces only set up in 2017 and only materialises concretely on the ground in 2019.

The Malian Armed Forces, another brick, but it is, as I said before, hampered by the magnitude of the challenge at hand, which is to reconstruct really completely from the ground up. So the downside of the small footprint, clearly, is that you are reliant on the performance of other actors, which may take time to materialise on the ground. And I would say that at the end of 2019 only do we find a situation on the ground that gives way to optimism. Bahkan is just sufficient to contain the growth of jihadist

armed groups, to disrupt their lines of communication, to attack their logistical depots and to prevent them from settling and growing roots in specific areas. Hence the reason why Bahkan, for the military part, the operational part of its campaign plan, focuses on the tri-border area of Liptako, which is regarded as being the main hub of instability in the region. So Liptako is that region that sits at the borders of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso to the east, so pretty far away from the capital, but that's the main hub of the growth of the Islamic state in Greater Sahara. So the main point of Barkhan is, at the same time they are fighting terrorist armed groups and preventing them from growing. The point is to support the growth of Malian armed forces. So at the same

time Barkhane is conducting operations, we are drawing or injecting Malian armed forces into operations until such time as they are capable of taking the lead in operations, which is pretty much what's happening at the end of 19. I mean, 2019 might have been a high point of capacity, but I think the record since then is not so great. There were protests in 2020 in Mali, and I guess, what, the middle of the year, about corruption in government, ineffectiveness of military operations in the north and the center, a coup later in the year, and then you have the coup in 2021. And right now, a government that says that it prefers the Wagner Group as its external

partner. So I'd say the record's not so great, but I think interpreting French political decisions that what's going on before 2020 is that French officials are looking at politics in Mali, I think, according to the old rules, which is that there'd been a series of uprisings in the North, I mean, since independence in 1960, really, and that these were invitations to political negotiations. That's also the way that the government in Bamako used to deal with these sorts of problems. And I think ultimately that's the sustainable solution because Mali's government's never had the capacity militarily or administratively to just impose itself

on the region. See, here I think is the moral hazard problem, is that outsiders, particularly French, are providing a capability to Mali's forces in order to do one thing, which is restore order, deal with jihadism. With the political establishment and Bamako's thinking, ah, now I have this really powerful partner, I'm going to use that to change the rules of the game. They want to impose themselves directly. That's unsustainable, and that's a fundamental clash of interests. So in the domestic politics of Mali, politicians start beating up on the French and other intervention forces saying that they're holding the government back. So you get the bad relationship where the outsider is essential to sustaining that domestic force. But a lot of people in that government are now accusing the outsiders upon whom they're dependent for the problems that they face. So if you think about domestic life in a household, that is a bad relationship.

And after 2019, this is what you see happening. And it also happens to some extent in Burkina. It becomes a very convenient political tool, I think, for some domestic politicians to be able to beat up on the foreigners who are providing the support that basically keeps them in business. But that's a political model. As Barkan and his partners became established in the region, there seemed to be an increase of violence from 2016 on. And now we saw peaks and troughs in the cycle of violence in Iraq and in Afghanistan. So would you consider this as a normal peak of violence, where if Barkhan had been given a longer time horizon, could have corrected? Or was this indicative of more

structural failures inherent in the operation, or indicative of the unsustainable political situation? Well, that's a very interesting question, and one upon which we spent quite a lot of time reflecting when I was serving at the MINUSMA. And I think what struck us by then, that was again back in 19 to 20, was that violence was not only flaring up, but also moving in terms of geographical location. What was striking is that in the Liptako area, so again, this tri-border area that sits in the far east of Mali, violence actually in numbers decreased between 19 and 20 after a peak in 17 or 19. But once operations were concentrated in that area, violence diminished. At the same time, the majority of incidents and the majority of attacks

against civilians was soaring up. But in central Mali, where Bach-Kanagan was not operating, and not due primarily to jihadist groups, but jihadist-inspired groups that was taking advantage of inter-ethnic tensions between farmers and herders, you know, those historical tensions between the local populations and PURL nomad groups that were siding or being recruited by one of the al-Qaeda subsidiaries in the region. So this is where violence was the most important because there was a complete lack of security forces, be they international or national Malian armed forces in the complete absence of government and police forces. So inter-ethnic violence erupted, was compounded or aggravated by jihadist armed groups

in that region, and it was pretty much left without control. So I think the question of the linkage between violence and counter-terrorism operations has to be taken with a bit more granularity if you want to look at the real causes and the effects of what you're doing on the ground. It is true at some point that if you are dislocating terrorist armed groups from one place, they will of course settle where it is more convenient. They are less under threat, so they can relocate to, well, the other side of the border, or to another area which is less controlled, granted. But also, it was an effect of the internal domestic situation of Mali, where you had an absolute void of security in the central region, which is the Niger River interior delta, and where you have those eternal historical conflicts

between populations are being aggravated by inter-ethnic dividing lines. Yeah, I think that looking at this in the bigger picture, we'd started with the discussion about jihadist violence in the north and after the collapse of Libya's government, of Gaddafi's government. And I think that one way to look at this complex situation on the ground is to consider that first phase of the conflict, the northern phase, as one war, and then think about areas of central Mali and that tri-border area. That's another conflict. And that is a conflict that's partly a social movement of a political awakening and a mobilization of pastoralists, of people who identify as Fulani.

And they're identifying more and more as Fulani as other people are beating up on them. So that's an ethnic conflict that's, I think, quite distinct and is a bigger political problem. And this is where jihadists come in. bigger political problem. And this is where jihadists come in. It's sort of the classical development where the ideological group comes in, talks to the people who have that local problem, that ethnic conflict, and say, hey, here's a framework to understand your problems. What you need is you need a new type of government. You need to be empowered by Sharia law or whatever. And here's a formula that we have to solve your problem. It's the David Kilcullen accidental

guerrilla model of how do you create that bigger political movement? So that's a much more challenging problem, I think, than that period in 2012. And this is the larger political context of trying to build capable security forces in a situation where the conflict has changed and the governments that are your local partners are becoming less and less capable and have less and less political will to work in the direction that you want. Keep in mind, Mali's had two recent coups. Burkina Faso just the other day saw the second coup this year. That's a bad sign. You get too many coups, it kind of wears out your local political order. It tells you that something big is going on inside these political systems where they're fragmenting more and more. And

this is something that I think is related to this new conflict and as local political elites struggle and figure out what to do with it. Yeah, you bring up an interesting phenomenon, which is there's an argument within academic literature that external presence, such as the French, can actually drive nationalism and resistance through the formation of narratives and accidental guerrillas and whatnot. And it seems like the anti-colonial sentiment has been weaponized through disinformation and turned into anti-French sentiment in Mali especially. I'd like to ask Francois-Marie, did this surprise French forces on the ground and have there been efforts to reshape the narrative?

I think there's two sides or there's two phases in the answer to that question. The first one was before we started witnessing Russian influence operations in Mali. And so the challenge for that first phase was to convince populations on the grounds, and I think we were quite effective, outside Bamako and Bamako's capital city, that French forces were, in essence, again, being one part of the solution, were helping others, and especially Malian armed forces, take over the fight against terrorist armed groups. And we never really felt active resentment

or hostility, spontaneous hostility in the local populations in the Lipsako area, for instance, where the Bolkevo forces were operating. So that effort was part of our lines of operation. And with, I think, acceptable success, or no real hostility, again, outside Bamako. But as you just mentioned, Bamako was rigged with domestic political tensions that were, in essence, using the French presence to support the Maldon government. The second phase, I think, started back in 2019-2020, when we started noticing, again again the presence of either Russian troops or Russian advisors or Wagner-type presence on the ground. And at the same time, we witnessed very aggressive information campaigns against our presence in Mali. To us, there was a clear connection between

those two. So we had to restate and adapt our communication campaign. And I think we were quite effective in exposing and countering the lies that were spread in the news and to the local population. And I think it culminated with the Gossy case. If you remember that case where we released video footage of Wagner-type operators planting corpses to make people think that we had killed people while we were leaving Gossi. So we clearly exposed the lie that was created. So we had to take a much more offensive way of countering the Russian narrative that was against our interests. But of course, that's something that we have to continue on because we're not certainly done with the presence of Russian hostile actions in the area.

Following that, I was in Chicago at the time, and I thought that that was very well done. My concern is whether the average Malian has access to that particular part of the story. And there's an underlying problem here, which I think anybody who was in Helmand or Kandahar, say in the early 2010s, sort of that local narrative that the violence, the insecurity, it's really that outsider who came in to help the government deal with the situation that's actually responsible for that insecurity, or at least that's what the narrative says. It's actually responsible for that insecurity, or at least that's what the narrative says. And part of this is the weaponizing of French relationships with Tuareg groups that were part of, I think, a very sensible political strategy after 2012 that get weaponized by

politicians who are running on a populist platform and are telling people that, look, we could be stronger. Our military that the French and others are helping to build should be able to deal with these problems. But there's some sort of devious backstory and they're holding us back. Or populist politicians would say, oh, the French are here to steal gold, uranium, whatever. But these types of stories resonate with people because it's that little sliver of plausibility that gets constructed then into this whole narrative that becomes toxic for the outside presence. I mean, even governments that are much friendlier, I think, to outside presence, you do see politicians that are playing on these types of narratives. So in some, it is partly about countering Russian disinformation,

but I think that Russian disinformation, it's also surfing on this local regional political context and how it uses information. As we begin the conclusion of this conversation, there seems to be a lot of parallels between the French experience in the Sahel and the American experience in the global war on terror. And although both France and the United States remain active in the Sahel, what are the implications of the withdrawal from Mali? And are there other lessons that can be applied to future regular warfare? An easy question. I think we're still reflecting on it because as I'm sure your

listeners know, we are currently completely reshuffling our military involvement in the Sahara region after the departure of Mali in August. So we are rethinking our presence and our support to regional coordination efforts. So this is clearly at the very heart of what we are trying to achieve in the long term. But what I would say, I mean, from hindsight and looking at what's happened over the past five or six years, it's clearly that it's the constant struggle to align political efforts with military results on the ground. From the onset, it was clear that Bahkan was only destined to be a limited military action and that political efforts would be taken or carried by other actors, namely the United Nations, the SRSG for the UN, and that we would pretty much stay out of the

political issues. And the main problem was precisely to reconcile what we were doing militarily on the ground and the pressure that other actors could put on the Malian government to deliver according to its own commitments. I would say the first lesson it's been a tough journey to keep the alignment between those different lines. The second I would say is that certainly there is no fixed recipe for success, but the light footprint is not an easy solution but has to reinvent itself constantly and find or strike the right balance between supporting the enablement of local armed forces at the same time as you are containing the growth of terrorist armed groups without alienating local populations and supporting the global narrative, because very quickly objectives between different actors will tend to diverge over time. So it's a constant fight for realignment and make sure that there are convergent efforts from all different actors, especially if you want to be just one of them, and maybe not say number one amongst them. Okay, here's some lessons I think that maybe you can

take from this discussion too, is that the military effort is fundamentally a political effort. I can see operationally why it's important to try to separate the two. However, I think ultimately they can't be separated. It may be possible to get other actors to deal with the politics, but usually those who are involved in the military effort, they have a really big interest in it and inevitably they're going to be involved. And I think that you can see this throughout the process of intervention in Sahel, Africa, particularly after 2012, because there's this constant effort to try to fix the political problem, because you can't do the military unless you got the politics aligned. Who else is going to do that? Now, I think other lessons that

you get looking at the present day situation is that if the host doesn't want you, that's going to be a bad relationship. And also, if you detect that the host is weaponizing your presence against you, that's a bad relationship too. So you don't have a whole lot of options. One is you can try to change that government, in which case you're deeper into the politics. Or the other one is that you leave, you can do some things in between, which is to make the footprint even lighter. And I think this is what's happening. And maybe the US also realizes that places like Niger, that you can't design interventions in places like this, like you're doing counterinsurgency.

You can't reform all of those security institutions. You can't build an army for them, all of those security institutions. You can't build an army for them, all of these sorts of things, if the local political context can't sustain that. So what you have to do is you got to retreat to something that looks more like counterterrorism. Maybe there's small units that you can work with that essentially become adjuncts of your own military, and the local political system will tolerate it. It's not super visible. They don't have to worry about those folks doing a coup because they're working with you, or you just do it yourself and try to confine it to areas that are really outside of the public eye. At that point, smaller operations, it's easier to find congruent interests with the local

political system because you're helping to keep them in power and deal with their security situation. There has been learning through this whole process. And it's important to look at the French experience because the French have managed to do with fewer resources than big establishment like the United States. I think there's more value added in terms of what the French have managed to do in these places. And also, maybe it's a little self-serving speaking as a political scientist, but I think the French forces and French planners have taken domestic politics, the political context more seriously because they have to. And that's a good thing

because that's the only way to really identify what can be done and to try to figure out what the scope of that should be. So we should all study it. And I have a new slogan, learn from the French. Well, I would just recommend not looking at it as from a historical point of view. I mean, it's not behind. And so we are clearly reorganizing, but it's not the end of our involvement in the region. I mean, we are clearly redirecting it or reorienting it, finding new ways of supporting local governments as long as they want us in. But it's not history. It's a process of learning. You know, I wanted to ask this question directly.

Was this a success or not? Because if you listen to this episode, you go in between, well, yeah, this worked well. Then we had trouble with these local dynamics. And I guess, you know, really the question is in the context of, you know, dealing with non-state violent actors, which will probably continue to be a problem into the foreseeable future. Do we kind of have to get satisfied with the idea that we might need to be okay with imperfect solutions and kind of messy answers to problems? Or should we expect that there is an end state to

an intervention like this or any similar intervention we might see in the future? You got to take what you can get. And I think this is one of the big lessons of the last 10 years in Sahel, Africa. It's a very imperfect process. Constructing political orders in places like this, it's only going to be done by local actors. And those local actors have to have the capability and the will to do it. Outsiders can help them, but they have to do it. And that's, I think, a big historical lesson that we've seen in other parts of the world. There are all sorts of ways in which learning from the last 10 years, it may be possible to find points of influence, be able to identify the right kinds of actors.

But again, it's got to be a local process. I mean, there's big stuff that's going on that really is a critical juncture in the region. You have a political awakening of a group that's defining itself now as a nation of Fulani people. You've got huge population growth, migration to those big coastal cities, a climate issue. There's a bunch of big states across that region of Africa that sort of functioned okay for 30 or 40 years after independence. But the way that they used to run the types of experiments now or situations they're trying to build isn't sustainable. So we have a problem. We have interests in these areas, but these are the people that are dealing with this really big transformation in their area. And that's going to take a while. And that's beyond our capabilities to be able to design for them.

Yeah, I can't agree more. And the limits to the conclusions that you can draw is that, well, the problems in Sahel are something that we can't really distance ourselves from. It's something that we will have to live with in the long term. Just because it's close to our borders, there's a population movement from Sahel to Europe, and there's a significant portion of French nationals from Sahelian origin. So there's a lot of connections between our two areas. And so drawing conclusions is what we have to do regularly,

and I think that's what we're doing for the moment. We will have to adapt to the curve of events. And obviously, what's happening in Burkina Faso, unfortunately, is probably yet another episode. But we will have to continue our efforts and, again, find the right balance between what we do for collective security, but remember, in Europe, at the same time, being ready to address or to follow what's happening and adjust our deployment in sub-Saharan Africa and in Northern Africa. Clearly, we're not done with it, and we always

find ourselves short of resources to do everything, so find the optimum in terms of military and political implication. Here's a metaphor for it. It's sort of like political psoriasis. It's a long-term condition. It's probably not going to go away, but you have to deal for it. It's sort of like political psoriasis. It's a long-term condition. It's probably not going to go away, but you have to deal with it. Otherwise, it's going to get worse. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being with the Irregular Warfare podcast today. It was a pleasure having you. I know Kyle and I both learned a lot, and I think our audience will really benefit from this conversation. Laurie, can I thank you again very much for this really insightful conversation. I very much enjoyed it.

And it's important, I think, we take some time to reflect on what we've done and what's happened over the past years to understand the future. So I think this podcast is clearly a contribution to it. And again, thank you very much for having me. Laurel and Kyle, it was a delight to be able to participate in this conversation. Thank you very much for having me. to be able to participate in this conversation. Thank you very much for having me.

Thank you again for joining us for episode 63 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, we talk with John Spencer about the role of urban warfare in modern and future conflict. Following that, we will explore the collection and use of battlefield evidence in counterterror operations, irregular warfare in the Arctic, and Chinese gray zone operations in Latin America. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of volunteer practitioners

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