Washington ? As Washington broadens its military "footprint" in the Sahel region of Africa, U.S. analysts are urging the administration of President Barack Obama to devote more effort to diplomacy, especially in Mali.
In particular, they are calling for Washington to press for a swift transfer of power to a democratically elected government in Bamako which can then reach out to rebel Tuareg forces in hopes of driving a wedge between them and Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) and other armed Islamist groups that, until this week, controlled northern Mali for most of the past year.
And they insist that the U.S.-backed French-led offensive that drove AQIM and its allies out of three key towns in northeastern Mali over the past 10 days will not be sufficient to secure the France-sized region indefinitely without some kind of settlement between Bamako and the Tuaregs.
"Clearly there has to be a political solution at some point," according to David Shinn, an Africa specialist at George Washington University and former ambassador to Burkina Faso and Ethiopia.
"What the latest military activity is not doing is dealing with the Tuareg problem which has to be addressed seriously," he told IPS.
Since the French-Malian offensive against the AQIM and its allies was launched Jan. 11, Washington has taken a series of steps both to support the offensive and to broaden its own military involvement in the larger Sahel region.
The Pentagon confirmed Tuesday that it had concluded a new military accord with the government of Niger to set up a base for Predator drones to carry out surveillance missions over the region's vast desert areas.
U.S. officials have not ruled out the possibility that the drones could eventually be deployed to carry out strikes against suspected AQIM militants, much as they have been used against the group's ideological counterparts in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
The base announcement followed Washington's initially halting agreement to Paris's requests for intelligence, logistical, and aerial-refuelling support during the French offensive, which reached the storied oasis town of Timbuktu earlier in the week.
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201301311164.html
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