Mali exit: France promises to fight from Niger

French President Emmanuel Macron announced in Paris on Thursday that French troops along with that of other European countries will leave Mali after 13 years. But they are not moving out of the region. They will move to neighbouring Niger and reduce the number of troops from around 4.800 to 2,500 to 3000. Macron said that the withdrawal operations will take four to six months. The French troops went into Mali in 2013 to defend the capital from the religious extremists, who had swept the famous centre of Islamic learning, Timbuktu in northern Mali and were moving towards Bamako. But after nine years, the threat of the religious insurgents has not faded away.

Many of the local experts feel that France has simply failed in its mission. It is hard not to compare the French exit from Mali to that of the Americans from Afghanistan. In both the examples, the Western countries have failed. There are differences as well. The Americans had handed over Afghanistan to the Taliban, the hardliners. In Mali, the French are leaving the country to the military rulers.  Though it has not been spelt out, it is not clear whether France would support Mali’s military to fight the religious militants. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons France had decided to leave was its differences with the coup leaders in Mali. The military was not willing to follow the schedule for the return of democracy. Compared to the American retreat from Afghanistan, it seems that the French are not leaving this part of Africa completely.

The presence of French and European troops in the region has not helped political stability in Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad. The falling out between the French and the Mali military rulers also arose from the fact that Mali’s military leaders were dealing with Russian military contractors. Mali’s military spokesman Souleymane Dembele said of the French withdrawal: “I think that there has been no military solution because terrorism has engulfed the entire territory of Mali.” There is a note of despair in the observation. But France has asked its allies to support countries in the Gulf of Guinea, especially Ivory Coast, Togo, Benin and Ghana against the spread of religious militancy.

The previous day, Macron conferred with representatives of African and European countries in Paris and announced in a press conference: “The heart of this military operation will no longer be in Mali but in Niger – and perhaps in a more balanced way across all the countries of the region which want this (help).” So, Macron envisions a longer battle and a broader front in Africa against the religious extremists.

The political dilemma of the countries in this region is whether they can confront religious extremism under democratically elected governments or under military rule. But the more important question is about who is funding and arming the extremist groups which are threatening democracies in this part of Africa. If the extremists are getting their arms from an underground international arms market, is there some way that the international community will deal with it effectively, and whether the global money-laundering that enables the extremists to procure arms is ended? Unless and until the support systems of global terror networks are destroyed, the conventional war against extremism will remain incomplete. The West African countries are also vulnerable because they are poor and undeveloped. Economic assistance becomes a key bulwark against the spread of extremism. Neither France nor Europe have yet come up with a global strategy of countering religious extremism. And it seems that America has withdrawn into a shell, and it is not concerned with the problems of extremism.