The third time will not be the charm. As radical jihadis close in on Bamako, the capital of Mali and a city with roughly the same population as Los Angeles, the United States appears woefully unprepared, if not AWOL.
President Donald Trump has yet to appoint an assistant secretary of State to oversee and coordinate policy in Africa at a time when Russian and Chinese influence has surged and Africa has become the epicenter for rare earths and commodities trade. The U.S. Embassy in Mali has only a skeleton staff. African states in the region, including U.S. partners like the Ivory Coast and Senegal, will soon need to brace for the arrival of millions of refugees.
Making the situation worse is that the United States has been in this situation before, but appears not to have learned the lesson that proactively rebuffing the jihadists is far less costly than cleaning up the mess after they seize territory.
As the Islamic State began its rampage through Syria and Iraq, President Barack Obama thought himself clever by withholding U.S. assistance. Not only did he oppose involving the United States in “stupid wars,” but he also believed he could extract concessions from Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki by blackmailing him in his time of need. The result? The United States spent close to $50 billion to defeat the Islamic State militarily in “Operation Inherent Resolve.”
That lesson fell on deaf ears during the first Trump administration. Not only did Trump seek to undermine the Syrian Kurds, the U.S. allies that served as the vanguard of the movement to roll back the Islamic State, but he and his mercantilist special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad also set the stage for the Taliban’s capture of Kabul. True, that event did not come on Trump’s watch, but he set the stage with an ill-considered peace deal. Trump and his supporters are right to foist blame on President Joe Biden’s team for the incompetence of planning for the withdrawal, but it would be dishonest to ignore the Trump team’s naive belief that the Taliban were interested in peace or serving in a national unity government.
On a human scale, Afghanistan is a tragedy not only because the Taliban’s seizure of power sparked a refugee crisis, with 3.6 million refugees fleeing to neighboring countries and snuffed out the hope of tens of millions of Afghan girls and women, but also because it was entirely preventable. The cost of the tragedy was huge. Between 2001 and 2022, the United States spent upwards of $2 trillion when interest on debt is included. That money need not have been wasted; Afghanistan was transforming when Trump and Biden decided to pull the rug out from underneath its elected officials. The annual amount spent in terms of blood and treasure during the last five years of America’s Afghanistan presence was not much greater than the average annual U.S. investment in its Korea and Japan’s presence. The costs will likely only grow in the coming years as the Taliban again turns Afghanistan into a haven for terrorists and the illegal drug trade.
If Kabul was the first capital to fall to Islamists, Damascus was the second as a group led by an Islamist terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head seized the Syrian capital. Trump may praise interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa as a strong man and a transitional leader, but Chechen, Uyghur, and Arab terrorists now use Syria as their petri dish. His rhetoric may sway Trump, but al-Sharaa’s policies appear geared to transform Syria into a jihadi state, hostile to moderates and religious minorities.
SHUTDOWN ENTERS 40TH DAY WITH FLIGHTS SNARLED AND SNAP DISRUPTED
The Al-Qaeda-affiliated group Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin could take Bamako any day, as it tightens the noose on the city. The group’s emir, Iyad Ag Ghaly, cares far less about public relations than Al-Sharaa does. Trump may not care about “sh-thole” countries, but radicalism does not respect borders. If Mali falls, the Islamic State will only be one state removed from the Atlantic coast, and terrorists can use refugee flows for cover.
Trump must decide: Is being on watch when Al Qaeda affiliates seized two capitals 4,000 miles apart the legacy Trump wants?
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.