The Dark Sahara: America’s War on Terror in Africa (review)

Jeremy Keenan is an anthropologist of the Tuareg, but The Dark Sahara is more the work of an investigative reporter seeking an audience of concerned global citizens. The book purports to show how the White House under George W. Bush ramped up a largely fictitious Saharan ‘terrorist’ threat as part of the War on Terror. The underlying objective was to build a case for a US military command for Africa (AFRICOM), eventually activated in 2008. AFRICOM (in Keenan’s view) is intended primarily to safeguard African oil exports.

Much of the US manoeuvring in the Sahara depended on an increasingly close cooperation between the US and Algerian secret services under the auspices of the War on Terror. This development came after a decade of civil war in Algeria in which the national army had sought to overturn the result of the 1992 elections favouring an Islamist political party. Some of the most heinous atrocities in that war were engineered by Algerian army agents in order to discredit the Islamists, though Keenan also concedes that some atrocities were the work of fringe Islamist groups.

By 2001 some of the secret service provocateurs who had worked for the Algerian army now risked international exposure. Perhaps fearing war crimes prosecutions they were willing (Keenan suggests) to offer their services to the Americans in return for protection as allies in the War on Terror. Well-versed in the dark art of faking outrages, these agents subsequently stage-managed the abduction and ransoming of 32 German-speaking tourists in 2003, making it appear to be the work of an Islamist terrorist cell. The ‘instability’ thus revealed allowed the Bush regime to build its case that international terrorism had already spread to the Sahara.

At a crucial point in Keenan’s story the wheels fall off the wagon. This is where he dives into the topic of private security companies, and the smuggling and criminality associated with Saharan trade. This seems both to undermine his strategic claim concerning AFRICOM and to impart a worrying mythic gloss to the account of Algerian dirty tricks. Reliance on private contractors, if true, would seem to suggest that AFRICOM was not so central to White House strategic thinking after all. When Keenan then tells us (p. 103) that his informants suggested involvement of personnel from Executive Outcomes, the pudding seems in clear danger of being over-egged.

This UK-based private security company (registered in the Isle of Man in 1993, and employing specialists in ‘dirty warfare’ from the former apartheid South African military) was expelled from Sierra Leone in 1997, and wound up in 1999, probably as part of the fall-out from revelations in 1998 concerning clandestine British official involvement in the Sierra Leone civil war. If the Algerians were so good at dirty tricks, why would a crew of white South Africans, speaking no local languages, also be needed to fake a terrorist attack in 2003? It seems more likely that we are dealing with half-remembered local recollections of BBC reporting from Sierra Leone in the mid-1990s.

Keenan is frank that parts of his argument are based on inference and rumours conveyed by his Tuareg informants, doubtless worried about the possibility of bombing raids and drone attacks. A reflexive account of the political sympathies and projects of these anonymous informants – only a shadow presence in his book – would have been helpful, to address the frequent allegation that anthropologists of war all too readily become captivated by their informants’ interests.

Nevertheless, the broad outlines of Keenan’s fascinating tale seem plausible enough, and its conclusions make sense (that Africa is now firmly on the American security map). But the complicity and intrigue the book unfolds are perhaps less revelatory than the author appears to believe. The Algerian secret services are not alone in stage-managing atrocities to discredit an enemy (I encountered evidence often enough in Sierra Leone). And one...