in this morning's new york times there's an article about the pentagon's plan to create more of a military presence in africa. the plan is to increase american bases or access to bases in a dozen or so african countries (3 of the 4 i have visited. oddly, the one that does not seem to be on the list is kenya, the site of several terrorist attacks attributed to al qaeda. but maybe that's because kenya already provides the u.s. military with a lot of access to its bases).
anyway, according to the article, one of the concerns is that the u.s. fears that the empty sahel and sahara regions that cut across africa, for centuries a lawless area and haven for smugglers, is becoming fertile ground (though "fertile" is an odd word to use for this region) for al qaeda.
when reading the article i had a flashback to my time in mali it was mid-October 2001, about 5 weeks post-9/11. afghanistan was being bombed by american forces. though this had been going on for about 2 week, i had little access to news sources so had only heard rumors, many wildly exaggerated, about what was happening there. that is, until i reached timbuktu. timbuktu was the most remote feeling place i have ever been. however, it had the best internet access in the country. when i got to timbuktu, i planted myself at a computer surrounded by malians in traditional garb (next to me was guy in bright blue tuareg robes and a turban surfing through porn sites) and got myself back up to speed on world events.
as i left the internet site, i met a guy named issa. issa wanted to talk about 9/11 with me. he may have lost a friend in the terrorist attack (according to issa, an american stayed with him in timbuktu for about a month a year or so earlier. at the end of the american's stay, they would email each other every day. this american told issa at some point that he worked "on the 100th floor" of the world trade center. after 9/11 issa wrote him an email to ask if he was okay, but didn't get a response. 5 weeks later, when i spoke with issa, he had concluded his friend had died). issa, this young muslim kid from the middle of the sahara, was really rooting for the americans to blow the hell out of afghanistan to avenge his friend's death. i ended up arguing the other side with him on several points. moments like that remind me that the political views of the people of the world are much more complex than we are sometimes led to believe.
anyway, at one point, we were wandering the sandy streets and issa, lowered his voice and pointed out some guy down the road. the guy was dressed in a robe and turban, like more than ½ of the people i saw on the streets. in fact, he looked no different from a native timbuktuian to me. issa warned me not to talk to that guy. "people always come to timbuktu to hide," he told me. "in the last week, people have been coming from afghanistan to hide from the americans." i looked at the robed guy down the street and realized i would not be able to tell him apart from any other random person i saw, but we walked on and it never came up again. i wasn't sure whether to believe issa, about the alleged taliban or al qaeda guy who he pointed out or his friend who allegedly worked in the w.t.c. still, timbuktu is a great place to hide, that is, if you're able to get there. the place where the sahel meets the sahara really feels like the farthest place from everywhere.
so now, almost 2 years later, i guess the pentagon has finally noticed.
there was another article from the n.y.times this morning that got my attention, this one about reactions in britain and australia to the bush military tribunal plan. i even wrote a letter to the editor of the times about one portion of the article. we'll see if anything comes of that.
