Contextualizing the French War in the Sahel

When we hear about the French operations in Mali and surrounding countries, I suppose few have much sense of how extraordinary the action is. I suspect that those who follow the news casually take it for granted that France has long been involved militarily in sub-Saharan Africa, without much sense of history or the details. This is all the more significant because, certainly where an American news audience is concerned, the commitment of 3,000, or even 5,000, troops to the region does not sound like very much, used as it is to thinking in terms of tens or hundreds of thousands of troops in overseas action. And Americans who have seen their forces almost continuously engaged against or in Iraq since 1990--for thirty years--might not be too struck by a commitment that began only in 2013. And so what France is doing in the Sahel does not seem like anything out of the ordinary.

Still, it is worth remembering that if France remained militarily active in Africa after decolonization, with its bases numerous and its interventions frequent, it has during that last half century been very sensitive to the scale and length of operations, especially where they have involved "boots on the ground." (By the end of the '60s France's sub-Saharan presence was down to 7,000 troops, total, and trended downward afterward.) The French government preferred brief actions emphasizing air power rather than ground troops (its '70s-era interventions sometimes referred to as "Jaguar diplomacy" for that reason), while its '80s-era confrontation with Libya over Chad, was exceptionally taxing--scarcely feasible without considerable American support.

Indeed, for the whole generation afterward no operation was comparable to the '80s action in Chad in its combination of scale and duration. Given the difference in population and the size of its armed forces (one-fifth and one-seventh of the U.S. figures, respectively), France's deployment has been comparable to a commitment of 15-35,000 American troops, equal to what the U.S. deployed in Afghanistan for much of that war--and likewise fulfilling an evolving mission over a far vaster area. What had originally been an action to recover specific ground from a specific enemy (recovery of northern Mali from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad) turned into a broader regional alliance/counter-terrorism operation (the Joint Force of the Group of Five Sahel/Operation Barkhane) against a multiplicity of groups extending across the Sahel, from Mauritania to Chad (an area the size of Western Europe)--overlapping with but separate from the ongoing peacekeeping mission in north Mali that picked up after the original French operation, the "United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali" that quickly acquired the dubious distinction of being the world's most dangerous peacekeeping operation. Moreover, in contrast with the direct clash-avoiding, selective, minimalist use of force seen against Libya three decades ago, combat, if comparatively low in intensity, has been a continuous feature of the operation, which increasingly looks like an indefinite commitment to the general policing of this vast and still unstable region.

Consequently it is not for nothing that a recent New York Times article called it "France's Forever War." One might add, moreover, that the Sahel military operation(s) are just one way in which French policy has become more militarized, with France pursuing new overseas bases, and talking about sixth generation fighter jets, and French Presidents even fantasizing about (and perhaps even taking small steps toward) reviving conscription. And that, in turn, bespeaks how the conduct of every last major power has become increasingly militarized this past decade, supposedly pacific "Old Europe" included.