we can play a book appealing to people's values not about facts it's not about what he can really do he knows he can't pinpoint i'll be let's be honest you cannot use a multi billion dollar industry in america it's not being banned so we're appealing to conserves again look i think paul is but you think it's better vote for me that's what it comes down to it's an emotional appeal over logic never a dull moment here at r.t. that's going to do it for now i will be back in an hour and a half thanks for watching.

take a. blow and welcome to crossfire i'm peter lavelle molly in a mess in the wake of the recent military coup there are growing fears that his african state could plunge into protracted civil strife that could result in a failed state and a safe haven for terrorists for the people of mali what is it state security or democracy or night. live. to cross out the recent military coup in mali i'm joined by peter pham in washington he is the director of the atlantic council's michael and sorry africa center and in london we go to james snyder he is the editor in chief of think

africa press all right gentlemen this is cross talk you can jump in anytime you want and i very much encourage and peter if i'm if i go to you in washington first what is in play here let's before we talk about what's going on with the coup now and afterwards let's talk about how we got there i mean there seems to be this rule of thumb is that critics of the libya intervention say i told you so the law of unintended consequences if you shake up the regime forcefully and impose order there you're going to have a i'd undesirable effect and we've got one in mali is that a fair reading a fair narrative. well i think there's a great deal of truth in it the fact is for all his faults colonel gadhafi was more or less in his box in recent years and he kept by himself all sorts of undesirable actors once that regime collapsed some of these actors including some of the toerags who are now causing the problems in northern mali returned home bringing with them weapons and fighters and that has spread throughout the saheli region and

we're going to be dealing with these outflows from libya in the next year or two several years all across the sub region ok pete if i can stay with you could this have been predicted should have been predicted i think you wrote about it before this happened i wrote about it over a year ago saying that these are second third order consequences that are inevitably going to flow so if you're going to intervene in libya you better have a contingency plan to deal with this for sure that was drowned out in the period of the conflict but even after the conflict the governments of this region spoke up in november last year i hosted the foreign minister of mali who is now being held prisoner by the junta in washington as he came and made a personal plea for assistance to deal with the situation that was engulfing his country already and he saw this very clearly several months ago ok james what do you think about that narrative of because you can say also

a lot of people say this coup was in the making for a very very long time and we've had these kind of disturbances for decades since independence. i don't think that the torah got prizing was too much directly to do with the fall of gadhafi actually. helps for the timing and the intensity of this rebellion this rebellion was planned before or before the uprising benghazi before nato intervention in libya the political arm of the n.r.a. was formed in october two thousand and ten long before the uprising in benghazi it's about to the military plans had been delayed by hunger who was in libya at the time but he'd been planning this from two thousand and nine onward so i i think that the fall of gadhafi. sped up the rebellion the time of the rebellion and possibly gotten more arms but i don't think that this is

a direct consequence i don't think that narrative is that hopeful ok peter what do you think about that in washington it's an epiphenomenon i think a direct result. but surely the the the the tensions in the north feet grievances legitimate or not what can debate. those are all going problems but certainly there was a new empathy with the outfall fires i.d.m. ellie's military commander archeology is was a for a colonel in the libyan army maybe he would have been sent anyway but the fact is he and of the fighters that form the the tip of the spear here in the stipulated units of military go ahead james jump in he defected from the libyan military. hunger what he was doing in libya having been chased out by government allied militia from from mali in two thousand and i was trying to encourage. members of the gadhafi military to come back to join the m.l.a.

and to bring with them. vehicles which they. which they did and it's interesting to see that it was long before that he actually fell ok after the benghazi uprising before gadhafi fell and also importantly before the no fly zone and senior commanders started to me that people were taking with arms and guns. heading back towards northern mali in order to. jason let me jump in right here i mean the military in mali said to be done with they have done because the civil authorities didn't give them the arms they needed to fight the rebellion uprising so i mean in a way and i'm not just a fine cool here but the military saying we have to protect the sovereignty of this country because the civil government is not doing that and that story is beginning to come out now i mean you're talking about weaponry going into the country because

of the libyan situation and then we have the military in mali saying we have to protect sovereignty i mean it's not so clear cut is it. because the the fall of gadhafi as i said did have some effect but it's not the prime driver. who was already building up weaponry and they could have got weaponry from elsewhere as well as libya before the fall of gadhafi it's all coincidental in terms of timing and then it is helped intensify it and speed up operations but this rebellion was going to take place at some point and at some point reasonably soon anyway with or without the fall of gadhafi peter what about the legitimacy of protecting the state sovereignty ok i mean but justification we can talk about the the merits of the democracy in their country if we want but they came out and said we have to protect the borders of this country and their arms coming in we have a minority they've been trying to break away for of way a long time now i mean what are the justifications there i mean it's security

versus democracy versus constitutional order etc etc again it's not black and white . you know it's not like i like although i would say this much about the actual points of the took power the justifications they're advancing now are just vacations which have a reason behind them and certainly a certain cretin's but they're invented ex post facto and the fact is the coup that occurred on the night between the twenty first and twenty second march was for all intents and purposes an accidental coup which started out as a small mutiny and it cascaded good for too long into a full fledged rebellion it was not planned out it was junior level officers acting up and because the state was actually so inefficient. they turned into a coup so now they're advancing these justifications which ought to be taken seriously but we also hold a little suspect the timing now as for the government that was overthrown all right

certainly he just said the timing and i think you're getting at the coming election that's going to happen right there and again we have to hunt is saying they're going to have they want to democratic order but we have elections just around the corner i mean if they waited a couple of weeks well i that's why i think this is i call this the accidental coup they certainly had grievances they had problems with the government that was in power and i'm not sure they planned out to overthrow it but it cascaded very quickly got out of control and they ended up with a coup and now they have a whole into so i think the timing was probably indicates that this was not a well thought out conspiracy if it was actually pre-planned at all to begin with but that being said now they've got it and now they have and they and the rest of the world have to deal with the situation ok as we have it today not as we would have liked it ok james it sounds like an accidental mess for everybody. i absolutely agree it's. called exactly the same thing i think i agree entirely with peter's narrative i think it was something that went to roy and it happened in

terms of going back to your previous question about the merits of security versus democracy and so on. the coup this year nobody ari. has been remarkably unsuccessful at securing clearing the territorial integrity of mali which is what they went for which is which was the original reason for their justification for that and you can you can see that because they can negotiate with the m.l.a. now the minute they have sought negotiation in the past as a way in which you can see war in the north and are licensed in north as part of been part of a long time which has been taking place sort of fifty years between. governments for accept this. so it is an accidental situation but. they failed in getting any security they can't negotiate and they won't be

negotiated with and they can't be a negotiation in till there is a legitimate government that is able to actually get to the negotiating table and make some forms of concessions peter if you look at the rebels or we've been remarkably successful why would you want to negotiate you've got quite a bit right now if succeeded where they've got beyond their wildest imaginations a. few months ago. no certainly there is a good position and as the confusion continues with the hordes of flailing away and . they're only going to consolidate their hold in the north so they're going to be in a very strong negotiating position when we have an interlocutor to represent the government of mali they can talk to them so i think they've they've certainly scored a strategic success very much so now they're going to consolidate that and that's something that the international community has to watch and i think the responsible thing to do to encourage is the fact that there are legitimate grievances and desires in the north especially monks or eggs but other peoples in in the north as

well they have to be met in some way shape or form what is preoccupying is the presence of the islam as words like that i want to get to that point in the next time i want to go to that next point in the next part of the james real quick before we go to the break how they are the claims for independence for the rebels right now how legitimate. definitely i'm not so far as saying that they necessarily have a cause for were independent and they certainly have legitimate grievances that have not been met and the concessions that have been made to them in the previous peace accords just a few years ago and again in the ninety's were not entirely met and they do have legitimate grievances and it is clear that some form of increased ptolemy and integration of. international life. ok we'll talk

about the security element in the next part of the program after a short break we'll continue our discussion on the situation in mali stay with. download the official tee up location on the phone on my i pod touch from the i choose up store. lunch on sea life on the go. video on demand copies in mind bold colors and r.s.s. feeds now in the palm of your. question on the t.v. dot com. more

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teach students. to. welcome back across time cue ball to much more talking about mali as a potential failed state. to teach. students. ok if you don't have to go back to our guest in washington peter you

know all that went well we were there seems another facet we haven't discussed and i want to put in this part of the program is the presence of al qaeda and other islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups whatever you want to tell you want to put them on to what degree is that being overestimated and underestimated as events play out in mali. well peter i think you hit the nail right on the head it's both over and underestimated overestimated in the sense that some media reports talk about al-qaeda in the islamic magreb as if we're dealing with a monolithic organization or a parameter of structure when in fact it's a very diffuse organization increasingly factionalized with with some of its components engaging more criminal activities for enrichment then terrorist activities but it does also clearly also contain a hardline element as well so it's a very diffuse entity on the other hand i think there's a very there's an opposite tendency to dismiss the islamists and focus on the

nationalist element of the uprising while the majority of torak are clearly. not pursuing an islamist agenda there is a component among them which has been asserting itself since the fall of the three regional capitals in the north in the administration of those cities we see it in kid ah we see in timbuktu we see it and go where this group ansari d.n.a. led by this long connected character gali is clearly asserting itself well i think there will be a struggle within the the toerag movement but so we shouldn't overestimate the danger but we certainly shouldn't dismiss it out of hand either change what you stand on that because they you know when you through when they all cried aliment and then it becomes a much broader picture story it's not you know poor little molly struggling here becomes an international story certainly a regional story i mean to what degree is it over underestimate in your mind. i

think it's overestimated for the same reasons that people just do i disagree with what you just said about. i agree that there is going to be a struggle between the announcer of the in which there always was going to be regardless of whether there is an islamic tend to answer. the secular nationalists tend to the m.l.a. let's not forget the believe. in the early was the leader of the toerag uprising in the early ninety's he also tried to become a leader in october of last year of the m.l.a. but was rejected because it was thought by many more of nationalists that he betrayed because he was too close to mali in the peace negotiations in the early ninety's so he then went off after failing to become leader of the to go to his tribal tribal group in northern region to see if they would allow

him to be their leader. they would have and so he set up his own group and his own group. has a more islamic to injure it's also less radical in terms of the mons for independence and statements coming out from commanders suggest that yes once they secured. the northern the northern territory there will be some sort of struggle between the two that has been the endless pattern in risings is there is disunity between between competing factions also don't completely agree that. are really trying to gain the upper hand in the three towns once they've been taken in actually probably. left to garrison towns was taken out for teaching positions against invasion or. counter attack from

this is i think it's quite. to say that. certain cells as in this in this peter it's very interesting because he has been seen as a important player to one degree or another depending on who you want to believe in america's war on terror against al qaeda and other groups in africa i mean how much is this strategy been disturbed because we have the head of the hunter was trained by americans. yes as were most officers of his grade or above in mali but certainly i think the partnership the us has had with mali for over a decade on color terrorism had its ups and downs certainly the emphasis on counterterrorism. helped build up a certain capacity within the mali military but it also made it somewhat unique dimensional they were good hunting terrorists but they clearly were pretty well prepared to fight

a counterinsurgency and so i think their strategy well papers are being a little more your version of really preemptively on that point we're waiting to see a very interesting toy james i think that's a very interesting point and that's what i was trying to kind of lead all of us down to is that the americans have their agenda for the region against certain groups and then you have the local officials there in military in mali saying well we want to control our own country's borders but there are these outsiders americans who just want to go after these islamic figures if it's al qaeda and others and they are they're not the same but in some ways you can remind me a little bit of pakistan on a minor scale go ahead james i think if you take a look at the. wiki leaks cables from two thousand and six two thousand and ten from mali which came out and you can see from those two very interesting things one is that the military. wasn't very good at all and also didn't really gauge very often times different elements of al qaeda in the islamic magreb one and two

for all the attempts to tar the m.n.a. with connection to a.q.i.m. it was more the emmental a. pretty decisive groups led by him behind he died in august last year who were actually fighting. elements it's the one thing that the have consistently said is that once they have taken us a while they will try to. out of the area ok peter what do you think about that because again i mean it looks like there are different agendas being played out here and we have to all wonder how they're going to deal with this one to there because i mean again you know the people of mali have to decide you know if it's democracy of security and put in the region has to think that in africa itself and then there's the outside players like the united states and nato when we look at what happened in libya is this going to be another mission creep or are they just going to sit there and watch and see what happens because we have this really hemorrhaging from issue from libya going into mali that's fueling this. right i

think several points one is we're going to have a rougher now both united states and europe have law cut almost all assistance to mali except for basic humanitarian assistance feeding people from the drought and famine all the development assistance we've got and certainly military assistance has been cut so at some point there there would have to make a decision whether the whole at hearing to the principle of no extra legal unconstitutional changes of government where that creates a tension with security concerns and i agree with with james there are other in prison we have to recognize not just the u.s. and europe interested neighboring countries have their own interests and their own spins that they're going to put on this both in terms of defending themselves and in the greater balance of power within the sub region so for example today general carter ham the commander of the u.s. africa command is in algeria meeting with the algerian president and his top

advisors clearly the perspective they're going to get for algeria on this crisis is going to be entirely different from what they're going to get if they want to martina or he's heir much less if they went in they could go on the ground in in mali and engage actually mali in society ok james but nobody wants to see a failed state in the center of africa do they i mean i am what i'm what i'm getting at is what they are hearing you wait here till you hear what peter said in washington you know there's going to be punishment of the hunter to do certain things or not do certain things but it is certain point you don't want to he to state collapse go ahead. i don't think we are going to see a failsafe i also think currently the common sanctions that are being placed by of course will have will have an effect and we're seeing about playing out now negotiations between sanogo is trying to play for time trying to work out his exit strategy. i don't think that we're going to see state collapse and so on it may

take it may take a week it may take a month to meet a six months and maybe take a year but there will be an end to military junta return to some kind of constitutional government at some point elections and that really is the necessary precursor from the perspective of self in mali if it wants to try to retake the north because it's going to require us assistance to do so and just not going to help them is going to change if i can say with you james there's a big worry is of course is that this area that the rebels have control of in whatever affiliation they have with al qaeda and other groups people worried about it's going to turn into another afghanistan before nine eleven it's just going to turn into a haven for terrorists and drug dealers in crime i mean how long can you wait and long can you just watch that i'm afraid that doesn't really i don't really think that works as an argument because. i mean just just three months ago when mali

technically had control. over the whole area you would still be able to have criminal and terrorist groups operating let's remember this is a. desert the size of france and it's got something like only one and a half million people or so. it's already going to be known to have come outside of the state control and so the ability for. terrorist groups and all the rest to operate in there has always been there and i actually think it's interesting that the terrorist threat has emanated from mali in the last five years on the grand scheme of things hasn't been that large and i don't think it's about to intensify to any great degree ok peter i'm going to be your last program my last word on this program what your prognosis was for the next six months what the next year what will it look like. well i agree with james i think we're going to move slowly perhaps too slowly but we're going to eventually going to move to some sort of negotiated solution the hunter's going to have to step aside i'm not sure that

the deposed president will raise necessarily going to be restored but some sort of transition of government elections and then greater engagement both on the part of the sub regional body ecowas and the international community shore up government first in the south of mali and then eventually i move to the north hopefully create the conditions for a negotiated settlement with the toerag and then with any problematic actors who are beyond the pale of the north you know there are other ways of dealing with can't you know you make it real sounds very simple thank you very much gentlemen many thanks my guest today in washington and in london and thanks to our viewers for watching us here see you next time remember across the. street.

you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for langley you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture .

me it is easy peasy.