Earlier this week, the GSPC (‘Al-Qaeda of North Africa’) mounted major car bomb attacks in Algiers. These were apparently directed at the UN and the local regime. This has been widely reported in the West. Should the GSPC now be taken seriously as having re-opened an important front in the 'War on Terror'?

However, things seem not to be so simple. Some analysts have suggested that it is not the GSPC but dissident regime figures who were ultimately behind the bombings. Sadly, some security elements in Algeria have 'form' in committing atrocities and then putting the blame on dissidents, so this suggestion is not entirely as insane as it seems.

It is possible (but no more than just possible) that ‘GSPC’ is partially manipulated by the security services, much as Pakistan's ISI allegedly manipulated Islamist extremists in Pakistan. The motive (it is said) is that some security elements oppose Bouteflika’s attempt to capture what they consider to be an  unconstitutional third term - another uncanny echo of Pakistan. 

There is so much to unpack here. Algeria, of all the countries of the region, is one of the most opaque. Western journalists find Algeria extremely difficult to understand – the FT’s Quentin Peel refers to it being in a ‘socialist time-warp’. Even experienced analysts are highly conscious that in reporting affairs in Algiers, they are reporting on a closed society where rumour and innuendo are as important as anything that might appear in print.

Our own assessment is that Algeria is becoming a type case in what happens  when a self-consciously revolutionary society, which emerges out of a war of national liberation, is forced to choose between integration into the world from which it won its freedom or joining the next generation of struggle.  Acceptance back into the family or permanent revolution - a nation as mighty as China has had to go through this same struggle within living memory.

As elsewhere, decision-making is complicated by the fact that the Western leopard has not really changed its spots in its determination to impose its own values and gain access to markets on the best terms it can get. On the other hand, the new revolutionaries are breaking with the core values of republican national liberation, secularism expressed through the authority of the army.

In any organisation, personal conflicts and disappointments and differing beliefs about what is good for the group quickly create factions or resentments. Such factions are generally neutered by careerism and centralised power so that the resentful grow into little more than aging losers. The dangerous period is when centralised authority is being imposed. Those who see themselves as the losers are tempted to move before it is too late.

The current elite group in Algeria seems have been inclined to accomodate with the West (we have seen similar tendencies across the region) but more because of the economic opportunities offered by globalisation than because of some sudden discovery of liberal democratic values.

Globalisation cannot tolerate loose systems under one general consensual authority with shared values. It demands a 'leader' with whom the system's other leaders can negotiate. There is no necessity for democracy but there is generally a necessity for the rule of law (if only for contract compliance) and a certain minimum standard of human rights.

A national strategy of accommodation with democracy requires increased centralised control internally in order to rein in forces that may act unacceptably in terms of human rights or 'border raids' on neighbouring countries. This creates tension between the highest levels of Government and those traditionalists who cannot understand what is happening. They suspect that corrupt officials want to sell out the country to get their fingers in the coming business pie.

Something like this may be happening in Algeria. As the dissidents justify themselves as true guarantors of the revolution, so they find their allies where they can. Just as Baathists and Islamists may be converging on the other side of the Mediterranean despite their mutual history of hatred, so radical republican nationalists and Islamists may be finding common cause in North Africa with a theory of insurgency that can encompass Chavez and Ahmadinejad in one general movement.

This creates the nightmare scenario for the United States of yet another front opening up in the 'War on Terror' in an area where it has only minimal and largely covert presence and where it relies on allies without the resources to offer much more than trade and bluster and whose intelligence systems are, shall we put it politely, compromised with their own national interest.

The general British view is that the GSPC are not currently much of a threat except in terms of the atrocious mayhem of the occasional suicide bombing. This sort of thing gets the moral dander up of Americans but suicide bombings in themselves are rarely revolutionary - they are a tactic.

The possibility of the military use or misuse of GSPC fanaticism within Algeria's internal security struggles is more serious but, even by raising the matter as a possibility, the British are suggesting that the security forces have the upper hand, even if we are not sure (in the West) whether they are 'our' security forces.

We are probably nowhere near a revolutionary situation at this time. There is certainly no current fear that the GSPC in itself will be able to trigger civil violence similar to that of the 1990s. However, while certainly not predicting complete breakdown, this Anglo-Saxon complacency is not shared in France.

Algeria is central to French concerns much as Pakistan is central to those of the British and for similar reasons - there are substantial migrant communities to deal with if conditions deteriorate. A panel of six French experts on TV5, a news channel, on 12 December, came to some interesting conclusions:

• There is a direct link between the two explosions in Algiers on December 12th and the recent set-backs for Al-Qaeda in Iraq and in Saudi Arabia - in other words, the Islamists (whether working with or against elements in the State) are consciously opening up another front at this time to counter the impression that they are no longer a force to be reckoned with (and may need to do so in asserting themselves as worthwhile allies to Iraq's Baathists).
• A good proportion of the Algerian government is 'influenced' by Islamist thinking and the local Minister in Charge of Veterans will have voiced the opinion of many when he attacked Nicolas Sarkozy as having been elected by a French Jewish lobby - we read this as a concern that France has been 'captured' (according to classic conspiracy theory) by certain interests and that Algeria is in danger of drifting into their orbit.
• The Al Qaeda-Magreb Group may be only 300 men (which, in fact, is getting close to revolutionary critical mass if they are all dedicated activists) but it has spread throughout the country in small units which act on their own, allegedly have strong links with British and Spanish terrorist cells and are (so the 'experts' believe) also infiltrating Morocco.
• France has succeeded until now in avoiding a major attack on its soil but that this owes a great deal to the infiltration of Algeria by French agents and because France has strong domestic police forces and para-military gendarmes with powers in excess of British levels.

French approaches are said to be closer to the Soviet and make the Anglo-Saxons look like 'wusses'. They allegedly identify one or two members of a terrorist group, kill them, cut off their heads and leave corpses to be seen. Or so it is said …. even if it is not true, the belief that it is true says something about what the French like to present as their public image.

Some of this we take with a pinch of salt. The French have a reputation for talking up the terrorist threat (they have their own factional issues within the security services) and there are one or two almost monomaniacal figures with anti-Islamist agendas whose views need constant discounting.

They also take pride in making claims about appropriate security tactics that would have good Anglo-Saxon libertarians taking to the hills if they were ever applied in London or Washington. In short, the French State is psychologically insecure and shows it.

Hard line anti-Islamist Judge Brugière says that Algerian migrants play an increasingly important role in Al Qaeda's activities in Western Europe and have done so since the early 80's. Similar statements and beliefs from other Parisian and non-French security sources have often been at the root of factional tensions within London over homeland security safeguards - and may have resulted in one or two injustices by the authorities. 

The important point is that Algeria is central not only to French security policy but it wants it to be central to global security policy - for this reason alone, we have to be wary of disinformation pumped into the global media to alarm or disconcert the rest of us into action.

Nevertheless, even stripping out the media-driven and political hysteria, something is going on and Algeria and Morocco certainly do have to be on the watch list for deterioration in the 'war on terror'. According to French sources, Algeria plays some role in mediating between Islamist groups and the West and the logic of this is that Algeria is more neutrally placed than might be comfortable for France and many others.

China is also vigorously wooing Algeria (again, the analogy with Pakistan is interesting), no doubt because of the country's increased production of gas and petroleum. China is as anti-Islamist as the West because of the risk of losing its own mini-empire over the Muslims in Western China. Its pragmatic national developmentalism offers the Algerian Government a useful third way between the Western way and another round of revolutionary bloodletting.

With China's recent major economic intervention in Afghanistan and in Sudan, you can see immediately that the West has its own difficult geo-strategic choices to make. China can buttress major regional allies in the War against Islamism and it can act as a potential restraint on states like Iran or Sudan, but it also threatens to oust Westerners from nodal points in some very interesting economies.

But what do Westerners really want? Their markets or to remove the threat of radical insurgent Islamism? Balancing the need to create strong pivotal states able to crush insurgency with the loss of exclusive rights within their markets will be exercising a lot of minds in the West. The issue can only be satisfactorily resolved in the long term if the West feels reassured that China is fully integrated into the global economic system.

There is also growing antagonism between Algeria and Morocco. There have been (we are told) border skirmishes, not reported by the media. Morocco is said to be backing the Kabyle and Algeria is said to be supplying arms to the West Saharan tribes. 

Again, you get the easy analogies with the complex of gun-trading and tension in Afghanistan, Waziristan and Kashmir through to 9/11 when traditional conflicts seemed to operate under the aegis of security units, regardless of the grand strategic considerations made by diplomats in the capital cities.

Morocco is itself troubled, with a weak Government with weak democratic credentials. Social tensions arise from an economic development programme that is placing the social system under strain. An ineffective Socialist Party is being replaced by Islamism as representative of the dispossessed. The monarchy cannot easily decide how far down the road to liberal democracy it can safely go.

Tension between Algeria and Morocco is unlikely to become a direct conflict but it is important because Morocco is highly integrated into the US-Saudi alliance. The removal of any lingering Saudi patronage of insurgent Islamism in North Africa (whose politics are far too complex for a single Blog Posting) has left it in its current curious position of being simultaneously derived from, opposed to and potentially collaborative with various radical republican, socialist, anti-imperialist and reform traditions across the region.

If Morocco applies an (admittedly deficient) form of democracy, Algeria has clamped down on its population under the dictatorship of a hard core of the "Republican" FLN (Front de Libération Nationale). This clampdown, possibly associated in the public mind with corruption, is what makes Algeria so opaque to the West. 

To what extent this FLN hard core is seeking realignment against the West or with the West depends on the outcome of factional struggles that are still mysterious. Our own instinct is that anti-Western rhetoric increases as pro-Western centralisation of power takes place and that things may get very sticky indeed as Bouteflika moves towards his third term.

Where is this leading? If prominent British journalists can admit that they are not sure, so can we. Analysts tell us that there is a swell of popular discontent at the old regimes right across North Africa. While violent actions alienate the street, Islamism is the beneficiary of discontent because traditional socialism and republicanism seem not to be delivering the goods.

Islamism can only gain as the official opposition when Bouteflika wins his struggle for centralised power. 'Republican' losers will eventually have to decide whether to carry on their opposition or just accept what they are - losers.

It is probable that the West will remain keen to support local elites as they assert power over their own political machinery, precisely because they offer longer term stability once they have re-established their authority - once again, there is the analogy with the current crisis in Pakistan where the West just wants Musharraf to cut a deal with Bhutto and sort out the Pathans. 

Some of this Western support will come in the form of economic development projects but there may be insufficient trickle-down to the people who may be being displaced as a result of 'progress'. And the extent of the discontent that may arise will be a deciding factor in whether Islamism has any opportunity in seizing power with disaffected military men.

I have, of course, assumed that Bouteflika will 'win' but if, within the military or security networks of these states, there is growing discontent because the elite group appears to be 'selling out' the revolution, then things may get very difficult indeed. Of the five states from Rabat to Cairo, Algeria has the most history of internal violence and the GSPC may have good reason to see some revolutionary potential for themselves as a 'cadre'.

www.tppr.co.uk

[Our appreciation to Bood & Co in Paris for information provided. They are not responsible for the interpretation placed on this material by TPPR]