Al-Qaeda in Mali?

An interesting BBC report looks at the possible influx of al-Qaeda affiliates into Mali, the landlocked West African country that’s perennially found on lists of the poorest countries in the world. Which reminds me of something I wrote recently in The National:

Which brings us to the curious fact that the deepening US engagement in Afghanistan is part and parcel of a revolution in strategic thinking which holds that space itself – not lush farmland, but simply space – is a vital commodity over which the Pentagon must hold sway. This is the crux of the “safe havens” issue: the fear that somewhere on Earth there might exist a remote locale in which al Qa’eda can gather without fear of the local police. At first glance, it seems like a compelling argument: America has been hunting al Qa’eda for eight years; a hunted group might seek refuge in a safe haven; therefore we must shut down the safe havens. On reflection, however, this apparently simple objective implies an astonishingly ambitious grand strategy, with boundless costs and little prospect for success. It’s a strange inversion of America’s Cold War priorities, which focused first and foremost on securing the rich industrial territories of Western Europe and Japan, and secondarily on securing access to the oil reserves of the Middle East, while evincing little concern for obscure conflicts in impoverished states.

It’s a sort of ugly turn of phrase, but I’ve tried referring to this as the “backwaterification” of American foreign policy. Instead of paying the most attention to the places that matter most—traditionally Europe, Japan, and the Gulf now joined by China, Brazil, smaller industrialized Asian countriesm etc.—the logic of safe havens is for our focus to drift toward the places that matter least. Places like (no offense to any Maliens in the audience) Mali. The optimistic view of this is that thanks to the events of 1989, the the world in 2009 is a less troubled place than the world of 1969 so things that wouldn’t necessarily have counted as a big deal in the past are now the biggest problems around. The negative view would be that our thinking about international engagement has become so lopsided toward the defense department that we’re now focusing the bulk of our attention on plausible candidates for military intervention (Somalia! Yemen!) while neglecting the parts of the world where the important things are happening.