Is North Africa the West's First Climate War?

We've witnessed unrest and uprisings in one form or another from Egypt to Morocco over the past two years.   We, the West, intervened directly in two - Libya and Mali.   We've been quick to label each of these conflicts as uprisings to break the shackles of tyranny or Islamist terrorism.   Yet that is much too simplistic no matter how convenient to our purposes.  In Tunisia and Egypt, for example, an instrumental element was a disaffected youth movement, educated, tech savvy and yet denied opportunity in a society plagued with nepotism.   They allied with those fighting tyrannical persecution and corruption and another large group rioting over basic food insecurity.

Writing in The Guardian, Eliza Griswold contends the latest conflicts between the West and Islamist terrorists in Mali and neighbouring environs was more than just a struggle against Islamist Jihadis but a war to defend Western investments against the destabilizing impacts of climate change.

"What might be emerging more clearly into public consciousness is a sense that Africa is a zone of strategic concern for the west. Rather than being a place that crosses our radar because of famine, civil war or the legacies of colonialism, we're entering an era in which it becomes a place where western powers directly intervene to protect their interests. So what might this mean for the continent, for some of those key countries, to be placed in this position? And how will it affect our perception of Africa and Africans?

Tuareg Homeland

One of Africa's vital interests, which is linked to the rise in militancy, is climate change. Nowhere is this a more urgent issue than in the Sahel, where both flash floods and droughts – which contribute to the Sahara desert's southern spread – are growing more extreme. In Africa, there are now more people fleeing the weather than fleeing war.

Many of these environmental refugees are nomads whose itinerant way of life is in peril. In North Africa, most are Muslims. Since water and grasslands are being replaced by sand dunes, nomads of the Sahel are being forced into different means of survival, such as smuggling cocaine and cigarettes to Europe along ancient salt routes, or joining up with one militant outfit or another.

Another disastrous pattern is that across the continent, Muslim nomads are pushing south into settled land, which tends to belong to Christian farmers. In many places, what begins as a local fight for land and water becomes a globalised battle for religion. In Sudan, for example, the Islamist regime of the north has armed paramilitary Muslim nomads to push south for the sake of their cattle's survival. Deep beneath the surface, that push allows Khartoum to secure its rights to oil.

Oil underlies much of the Sahel – and its well-known curse leads to that curious paradox in which governments such as Nigeria's or Chad's, which receive billions in revenue each year, impoverish their citizens. Despite vast wealth, these states don't safeguard most people's rights to the basic infrastructure of roads, water, electricity or education. Once again, both Muslims and Christians turn to their local mosque or church to help them survive. The resulting corruption on behalf of governments across the region also feeds rebellion in the name of Islam.

...During the cold war, the west fought proxy battles against the Soviets across Africa. In some ways, the vacuum the cold war left behind has left room for a new political contest between Islam and the west. The west's greatest mistake would be to do nothing but militarise this conflict and to shore up corrupt leaders just because they parrot the right kind of western-friendly speak, as we have done in the past.

Far more important – and more daunting – is the need to address the underlying causes of this burgeoning conflict. Corruption and climate change top the list. Until then, American surveillance drones are going to fly over a growing desert that's increasingly hospitable to its enemies."

We in the West have a recent history rich in willfully misconstruing conflicts to conform to our geopolitical narrative.    That has real and costly consequences.   In Afghanistan, for example, it led us to formulate objectives that we could not hope to achieve and to get drawn into a type of "whack-a-mole" warfare in which we could not be defeated but could also not prevail.

If this analysis of the war in the Sahel is right, then we're getting it wrong again which means the risk of getting drawn into another wrong-headed war of the sort so appealing to the incompetent and ineffectual political and military leadership so prevalent today in the West.   If Griswold's take that this is a conflict fueled by corruption and climate change is accurate then our chances for success are dependent on how willing we are to respond to those forces and that's not willing at all.