The North African front in war on terrorist

Washington Post:

Locked in a prison here, for now, is a desert bandit dubbed the "Bin Laden of the Sahara," whose capture was secretly orchestrated by U.S. forces after a long chase across some of the most forbidding terrain on Earth.

Amari Saifi, 37, a former Algerian army paratrooper, was caught in 2004 after he and a band of rebel fighters kidnapped 32 European tourists in the Algerian Sahara and ransomed them for about $6 million.

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The hunt for Saifi lasted more than a year and nearly unraveled at the end, despite a joint operation among the U.S. military and seven countries, according to counterterrorism officials in North Africa and Europe. He was caught by happenstance, by a ragtag rebel army in Chad, as he fled his pursuers across the desert.

Although Saifi was finally transferred to Algerian custody, there are signs that he may not be in prison much longer. After giving him a life sentence last year, the Algerian government said this spring it might release him under an amnesty program, reflecting doubts as to how big a threat he posed in the first place.

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Together, the Defense and State departments are devoting $500 million to new counterterrorism programs in the region. Last year, the Pentagon sponsored Operation Flintlock, the largest U.S. joint military exercise in North Africa since World War II. About 700 U.S. Special Forces personnel trained troops from nine African nations, leading a war game that mirrored the effort to hunt down Saifi a year earlier.

"The threat is evolving," said Rear Adm. Richard K. Gallagher, a top commander at the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, which is responsible for most of Africa. "Africa, for a lot of reasons, is a place that we've got to care hugely about. We ignore Africa at our peril."

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The suggestion that he was caught by happenstance reflects ignorance of how military operations work in making war against people who use a raiding strategy. First you have to deny sanctuaries, then set up points that make it difficult for the enemy to operate without running into your forces. That is exactly what happened here. The only happenstance is that he happen to run into some forces in Chad as opposed to running into some forces somewhere else. This is part of a lengthy story in the Post, the theme of which is that the US is screwing up by taking the battle to the terrorist in North Africa. The critics are the people who want the US to switch over to the strategic defensive. This would leave us in the position of responding to attacks like 9-11 rather than taking the initiative away from the enemy.