After years spent waging war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq,
almost $1.5 trillion in direct costs and hundreds of thousands of lives
lost, the Western public feels it has learned a hard lesson. It is more
convinced than ever that even the best-intentioned foreign intervention
is bound to bog its armies down in endless wars fighting invisible
enemies to help ungrateful locals.
Echoes of Afghanistan rang loud earlier this month when French forces
swooped on advancing columns of Islamists threatening the Saharan state
of Mali. And they were heard again, a few days later, when a unit of
bearded, gun-toting jihadists from the “Signed-in-Blood Battalion”
seized a gas plant and slaughtered dozens of foreigners in next-door
Algeria—more than in any single Islamist terror attack since the bombing
of a Bali nightclub in 2002. Here, it seemed, was the next front of the
global war on terror and also a desert quagmire to entrap vainglorious
Western leaders. [...]
Ver artigo da revista Economist
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