Sahel Zone

[Quintus Fabius]

https://mwi.usma.edu/how-to-lose-an-unwi...as-failed/

A Better Strategy—that Won’t Happen

Despite all the rhetoric, the United States and other donor countries that provide official development assistance have never been good at promoting democracy. As a recent report by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy explained, even though the world is in a prolonged democratic recession: “When countries decide where to send official development assistance (ODA) funding, whether the recipient is a democracy is not a big factor in their decisions. 79% of aid went to autocracies in 2019. . . . Democratic initiatives supported by Western states are often outweighed by their everyday engagements with authoritarian partners—from trade deals to joint security programmes.” While the United States suspended military aid to Mali in 2020 because of the coup that year, it continues to provide development aid and humanitarian assistance that amounted to $223 million in Fiscal Year 2021.

Without using ODA as leverage to improve governance, there is little chance that democracy will strengthen because authoritarian governments have no incentive or interest in governing better. In February 2023, the Eurasia Group, a leading consulting firm in political risk analysis, came out with a project called the Atlas of Impunity. It demonstrated a strong positive correlation between overall impunity and unaccountable governance, economic exploitation, and human rights abuse. The government in Mali, and those in most of the rest of the Sahel, scored high marks on the measurement of the degree to which they are immune to repercussions for their actions. Their interest is not in doing what’s best for their people and their countries. Their main goal is hanging on to power.

Because power is more important than peace to these governments, they will be unimpressed with the efforts of donor countries aimed at getting them to govern better. The kind of coercive diplomacy that might have any chance of making that happen is something donor countries are unwilling to try. And the argument will be made that it is necessary to accept an undemocratic government to confront a critical threat.

The central justification offered by Osama bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks was the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia to protect a corrupt monarchy. The possibility of a terrorist attack on the homeland originating from the Sahel seems remote. But renewing the provision of military aid and training to a government like the one in Mali might inspire a Sahelian version of bin Laden. And that would be one way to lose an unwinnable war.