The New Battle of Algiers

...But like so much in this long war of shadows and mirages, bombs and machine guns, reversals and betrayals, the Algerian scene is opaque...

...Energy-sector revenues are facilitating some rebuilding of infrastructure, but they have not sparked the small-enterprise boom needed for the creation of real wealth, as opposed to riches divvied up by the ruling cliques...

...As a result, women can now sue for divorce, for example, and do not need a male family member’s permission to get a passport...

...Africa Command, which at present is still operating out of Europe Command in Stuttgart, Germany...

...So Boutefl ika’s record is somewhat ambiguous...

...Two days later, in Dellys, on the eastern coast, a truck bomb killed 35...

...He easily won a national referendum in 2005 approving his offer of forgiveness for repentant Islamist fi ghters...

...The Maghreb al Qaeda, whoever they really are, are trying to do the same thing, by sharing the grievances of the indigenous peoples and playing them off against their distant governments...

...He led cautiously, preferring to let General Liamine Z?roual take the fi rst plunge into a competitive presidential election, in 1994...

...Would the amnestied Islamists return to the hills and safe-houses, as some observers, pointing to a recent spike in violence, even now believe...

...The New Battle of Algiers Boutefl ika has the upper hand, for now BY ROGER KAPLAN Overshadowed by Iraq and Afghanistan in the global war on terror, less scrutinized than Turkey as a laboratory of Islam’s compatibility with liberal democracy, Algeria remains a crucial testing ground for the ability of postcolonial Islamic societies to develop modern institutions...

...For the time being, Abdelaziz Boutefl ika is in charge...

...The other major candidates withdrew, claiming a fair election was impossible...

...Gradually, as the cycle of terror and counterterror wound down and the fi ght was reduced to mopping up and policing operations, Boutefl ika could play the magnanimity card...

...To remove this obstacle, the president is working on a constitutional amendment...

...Perhaps, too, strong air forces make good neighbors...

...Vladimir Putin...

...On the face of it, the question seems absurd...

...30 million, according to the government, which rejects the term “civil war” inasmuch as the confl ict pitted Islamists— rather than a region or a sect—against an Arab-African society trying to break with its postcolonial system of oneparty, socialist, police-state authoritarianism...

...Hardliners in the army, called “eradicators,” have not publicly challenged the amnesty...

...Here, Boutefl ika has reformed little, and cronyism and secrecy remain key to getting things done, or not...

...On the reform side, Boutefl ika loosened the fundamentalistinspired family legislation adopted under Boum?dienne, which secularists vehemently opposed and Islamists wanted to strengthen...

...They take a longer view...

...At the same time, he allowed nonviolent Islamist parties to compete in local and parliamentary elections and take portfolios in his governments...

...We Americans have to understand that this is the background against which our tactical allies maneuver for advantage—and for survival...

...Spotted before the arrival of the presidential motorcade, he detonated his ordnance, taking two dozen bystanders with him...

...For the past several years, a containment policy in all but name has done just that...

...the military, meanwhile, made English obligatory for career offi cers...

...But can we, profl igate sons of the West, complain...

...But the locals have never mixed easily with their foreign accomplices...

...His ambassador to Egypt, meanwhile, assured a newspaper interviewer in Cairo that the army is dealing with the residues of the homegrown Islamic Salvation Front...

...Quite apart from wanting to make friends and infl uence people, no one can function in the Sahara without help from the locals...

...A top Algerian Islamist named Hassan Hattab recently surrendered after protracted negotiations, underscoring a divergence of both strategy and tactics with the al Qaeda-Maghreb lot...

...And this followed repeated attacks during the winter and spring, including one on April 11 that simultaneously hit the main government center in downtown Algiers and a police barracks in a suburb...

...The government, which normally downplays terrorism news, claims its forces destroyed a substantial terrorist band in the Kabylie region last July, and followed up with successful engagements there in September...

...As the toll mounts into the hundreds, it appears that the alliance formed two summers ago between the local terrorists of the “Salafi st Group for Preaching and Combat” and a new “Al Qaeda in the Arab Maghreb” was no mere publicity stunt, as some once assumed...

...But the Algerians have nixed the U.S...

...Undercutting its potential, however, is chronic mismanagement, due to a pernicious inheritance that combines the worst features of French statism—trying to micromanage everything from the center—and Ottoman sultanism—trying to control everything from the bathhouse and the harem...

...Some really were Afghans, others were Algerian kids who had paid their dues and got their political and military training in the anti-Soviet war...

...Then there’s the awkward fact that the Algerian constitution limits him to two terms, ending in 2009...

...To the north, they see the land they still call Andalus...

...As recently as September, a C-130 transport, fl ying U.S...

...Annoying...

...This is a complicated fi ght, as the Hassan Hattab case demonstrates...

...As we juggle the challenges of keeping the lid on a vast region while staying on good terms with its most powerful country, discretion may well prove to be, as it usually has in U.S.-Algerian relations, a necessary part of wisdom...

...To the south, they see the vast regions of African Islam...

...Returning to Algeria in 1989, Bouteflika stayed in the background, eventually positioning himself on the side of a liberal, multiparty third way between the authoritarian National Liberation Front (FLN) regime of his early years and the theocracy the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) sought to impose...

...The most important thing not getting done in Algeria is job-creation...

...Who can say—Boutefl ika’s remaining in offi ce might represent some valuable stability, much as we like to think constitutional predictability is the best kind...

...The Algerian president, elected in 1999 and reelected in 2004, is widely perceived as having brought peace and prosperity and even a measure of national reconciliation to a country ravaged by civil war...

...The new president proclaimed an end to fratricide and international isolation (for several years, no non-Algerian airline fl ew into Algiers, so great was the fear of terrorism...

...They wrap themselves in blue linen against the sun and the sand...

...We send new surveillance and communication equipment, and teams to train local forces in their use and to back them up on long-range patrols...

...Now 70, he was foreign minister during the presidency of Colonel Houari Boum?dienne (1965-78), then lived mostly abroad, in the Gulf states and Europe...

...Someday, they know, they will emerge like avenging angels from their desert redoubts, the Koran in one hand, the sword in the other, and give the infi del his due...

...He traveled abroad, reopened the country for business...

...How much frustration are we willing to put up with...

...This, or “banditry,” has long been the preferred line...

...Will they send a commando to kill a heretic like Boutefl ika, or fi nd a front man to take a ministerial portfolio, knowing he’ll be marked by the security police...

...Despite his ill-disguised contempt for the Berber-majority region of Kabylie, and his refusal to apologize for the brutal repression of a grassroots movement urging faster democratization there in 2001, Boutefl ika continued to insist that Algeria could and would change...

...The Algerians, our tactical allies in this task, can be prickly, diffi cult...

...The suicide bomber waiting for the president in the eastern city of Batna on September 6 apparently thought so...

...We want the Algerians to defeat their Islamists...

...He told people to stop hating one another and get back to work...

...In their heyday, in the early 1990s, the Islamists of the FIS had openly proclaimed that one election suffi ced, so long as they won it: “One man, one vote, one time,” as the saying goes...

...One factor working against a return to civil war is the hydrocarbons-fueled prosperity that began early in Boutefl ika’s fi rst term...

...suggestion of a permanent base in the region for the new U.S...

...Kabylie is not jihad-friendly, but its rugged mountains have long served as hideouts for outlaws and insurrectionists...

...These, for the most part, are Tuareg camel herdsmen and highwaymen who are not in the jihad business and never have been...

...In the early years of colonialism, they made sport of French and Spanish military explorers who ventured into their sand sea and left their bones to bleach on its reefs...

...An important test of our willingness to learn how to fi ght a long war—which experts assure us we are facing no matter what the outcome in Iraq—is thus to be found in this vast sand sea and the countries that surround it...

...Hiding in the Sahara and the Sahel, the operatives of the Maghreb al Qaeda know they are in no position at present to take over Algeria, and in any case they view that as the parochial objective of small-minded locals like Hassan Hattab...

...Following in Z?roual’s footsteps, Boutefl ika pursued a strategy of fi ght, then vote, then reform, then reconcile...

...Algerian newspapermen, refl ecting a range of sources inside the government and military, reported variations on these explanations...

...After the assassination attempt at Batna, Boutefl ika blamed a “foreign plot” for the resurgence of violence...

...Maybe airpower will help them more than ruleoflaw seminars and other measures to win hearts and minds funded (to the tune of a mere $200 million) by our Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership...

...He sent Algerian diplomats out to reassert a claim to regional leadership...

...ambassador in Algiers, for his part, is convinced al Qaeda is to blame...

...How much time will we give ourselves to learn the mores and the languages of the peoples in these parts...

...Who would want to kill Abdelaziz Boutefl ika...

...Algeria is also, since emerging from its own war on Islamist terror in the 1990s, a de facto partner of the United States, as soldiers of both nations patrol the Mediterranean to its north and the Sahara to its south...

...He enjoys the support of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is acutely aware of Algeria’s value as a trading partner and its importance to one of his key foreign policy schemes, a Mediterranean Union, presumably including Turkey and Israel, on the model of the EU and serving as both buffer and bridge to the Middle East...

...You do not have to be Benjamin Franklin to see that with a population largely made up of young people, most of whom know someone, or know of someone, gainfully employed in Europe or North America, idleness is social poison...

...Perhaps...

...No one knows how they will react if the security situation deteriorates...

...The war took 150,000 lives in a country of Roger Kaplan is the author of Conservative Socialism: The Decline of Radicalism and the Triumph of the Left in France...

...But does that warrant killing him...

...In the past year the Algerian government reportedly signed off on a $7 billion contract to upgrade its air force...

...It is true that Boutefl ika has health problems, but so have many other statesmen...

...Nevertheless, on the whole, the policy has been successful—so far...

...They are cigarette smugglers, eco-tourist kidnappers, tentdwellers...

...The happy salesman...

...They trust no one—and there is no reason why they should...

...Boutefl ika raised the status of Berber languages, doing away with the Arabic monopoly in schools and offi cial business...

...In coordination with the State Department and other agencies, the Defense Department seeks to defeat the enemy while making ourselves attractive to the locals...

...The truth is that all of the above are mutually compatible...

...Special Forces to the rescue of a Malian garrison which the local Tuaregs proposed to turn into barbecue, was almost downed by rifl emen on camelback...

...Will the Islamists focus on the regime in Algiers or concentrate on the larger pan-Islamist war...

...Trapped between Algeria, Mali, and Niger, despised and neglected by governments, for most practical purposes stateless, their herds decimated by the long Sahelian drought, the Tuaregs are like Apaches in the Arizona deserts at the turn of the last century—fi ghting for their lives and their livelihoods against forces completely beyond their understanding...

...It worked, in part because the country was exhausted and the Islamists’ original constituency was repelled by their violence...

...There are surely foreign fi ghters in Algeria, and have been since the late 1980s, when bearded, wide-pantalooned “Afghans” began to be reported by security forces...

...Which is precisely why the American infi del would like to keep al Qaeda confi ned to the dunes...

...The attempted assassination of President Abdelaziz Boutefl ika last month reminds us how ephemeral a success on any front in this war can be, how fragile a truce, how premature a shout of victory...

...Today, Boutefl ika presides over a cabinet made up of men and women who are not otherwise on speaking terms...

...Z?roual had already moved in these directions, provoking the same kinds of questions: Did the Islamic parties really accept the democratic ground rules, or were they only fronting for the gunmen...

...Boutefl ika is the man who turned the page...

...When Z?roual stepped down in 1999 before the completion of his term, Boutefl ika ran with the support of the army leadership...

...The U.S...

...Favored in geographic and human resources, Algeria should be a prime benefi ciary of globalization...