Here is yet another report, this one from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal*, on how NATO’s failure to secure Moammar Gaddafi’s weapon stockpiles has led to war elsewhere in Africa and is supplying al Qaeda affiliates there (and elsewhere?) with weapons:
“Islamist fighters pounded the northern Malian city of Gao for six hours Thursday with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, a display of firepower that compounds worries that the al Qaeda-backed militants in Africa have enough arms to mount an insurgency that could last years.
The attack – beaten back only with the intervention of French troops and helicopters – is the second in 10 days on the mud-brick city. It appeared to confirm fears that arms from the caches of former Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi have washed across the Sahara to militant groups such as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, which has become a pressing target of U.S. counterterror efforts. …
Diplomats, security experts and others familiar with the militants' arsenal say it includes land mines, automatic weapons with ample ammunition, long-range rifles and missiles, and caches of high-powered plastic explosives such as Semtex.
An examination of such arms reveals the apparent limits of the international effort to secure Gadhafi-regime weapons – a push that focused on securing shoulder-fired missiles that could bring down planes. Less heed was paid, international experts say, to the more workaday weapons that now appear to be deployed by Sahara militants for guerrilla strikes, desert ambushes and suicide attacks.
But it is those weapons, the experts say, that position the militants to fight a long insurgency against a weak government, much like that waged by the Taliban in Afghanistan or Sunni militants in Iraq. Or, they say, well-armed militants could carve out a haven to plot international attacks, as al Qaeda's Yemen branch has done.
The arms have brought a new level of war to Mali, say soldiers and analysts. …
For African soldiers and diplomats, the specter of a deep rebel arsenal has reignited criticism over what they see as U.S. and European failure to contain small arms from leaving Libya.
When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and United Nations helped Libyans overthrow Gadhafi, defense chiefs recognized the threat of proliferation to neighboring countries. [Comment: I thought the stated purpose was to protect Libyan civilians.] Washington spent millions of dollars on intelligence teams in Libya to track down surface-to-air missile systems they believed Gadhafi possessed. Officials feared that Islamists across the region would use these weapons to shoot down an airliner.
But neither the Libyan opposition nor their Western advisers devised a strategy to secure conventional weapons depots, said several diplomats familiar with the situation. …
In the political vacuum, Libyans hauled arms from several large depots across the country. Mali-born mercenaries and weapons smugglers operating in Libya brought back weapons to their homeland, said northern Malian leaders and State Department officials. …
Mali militants have been seen with 106 mm recoilless rifles – which are typically truck-mounted and fire armor-piercing shells – that were ‘almost certainly’ the ones the U.S. government sold Libya in the 1950s, said James Bevan, director of London's Conflict Armament Research Ltd.
A U.S. State Department spokesman said that while the U.S. government did initially focus its nonproliferation efforts in Libya on surface-to-air missile systems, it is now ‘actively supporting’ Libyan government efforts to secure all weapons stockpiles. [Comment: A little late.]
By January 2012, Libyan weapons were showing up in Mali. AQIM-backed militants chased Mali's ragtag troops from the country's north. That retreat prompted junior officers – angry about the Malian army's insufficient firepower – to overthrow what had been one of the Sahara's rare democracies.”
Not one of the finest moments of the Obama administration’s foreign policy.
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* Drew Hinshaw and Margaret Coker, “Defenders Outgunned By Islamists In Desert,” The Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2013.
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