Beyond Tautology on JNIM's Bamako Attack
Striking Mali's capital proves that jihadists can strike the capital...but there's more to say.
On September 17, the jihadist group Jama‘at Nusrat al-Islam wa-l-Muslimin (the Group for Supporting Islam and Muslims, JNIM) attacked Mali’s capital Bamako, killing an estimated 77 people and striking major symbols of the military government’s authority.
A lot of the news coverage and analysis that I’ve seen has been tautological or near-tautological in nature; in other words, commentators explain that the attack shows JNIM has the capacity to strike in Bamako, or that security is weak, or that JNIM is expanding. On this last point one could push back a bit, actually, and say that JNIM’s trajectory in southern Mali has not been one of linear expansion but has been a bit more complex and has had moments of contraction. In any case the attack calls for a deeper analysis than these kinds of statements.
In this piece, published at Responsible Statecraft today, I tried to explain that there is an underlying political-strategic stalemate between JNIM and the Malian junta. In that light, the attack represents a degradation of an already grim status quo rather than a new phase of conflict. Put simply, the stalemate is this: jihadists would be fools to make a bid for Bamako and the Malian state can continue exist in skeletal form even if it cannot provide meaningful security. JNIM’s reach can expand militarily and operationally but its political limitations persist. Malians are thus left caught between (1) jihadists who can cause chaos and exercise shadow rule but not overt rule, and (2) a predatory state that does not meaningfully rule Mali but that also would be difficult to sweep away entirely.
Even if the particular set of military leaders in power were overthrown, the skeletal state would likely still be there - see Burkina Faso 2022 for a demonstration of this thesis. And even if the state collapsed completely, I’m not sure that JNIM could fill the vacuum, for reasons outlined here; rather, I think there would be fragmentation and the international state system would still require that there be a kind of placeholder state. And not all collapse plays out the same way; I’m thinking of writing a piece comparing Somalia 1991, Central African Republic 2013, and Mali (2025??) to discuss how the structure of Malian state collapse would likely look considerably different than other examples of collapse - indeed, as Faisal Ali has eloquently argued, the “Mogadishu analogy” is both overplayed and superficial. If Mali “collapsed,” it would do so in its own way and JNIM would not be in a position to rule the country; this is not Afghanistan 1992-1994, to take yet another example.
The bottom line, as I also argue in the piece at Responsible Statecraft, is that the way out for Mali continues to lie through negotiations because that is the only path that realistically acknowledges the structural weakness of the state. The path forward does not lie in the particular bravado of the Malian junta plus the Wagner Group, a model that is visibly running aground both in far northern Mali and now back in Bamako as well; nor does the way out lie in the counterinsurgency fantasies of Washington and Paris, although I do fear that after power eventually changes hands in Bamako, Western powers will push for a return to the status quo ante and the “stabilization” models of Mali circa 2015, which will again not work.
Former Foreign Affairs Minister Tiéman Hubert Coulibaly also makes the case for negotiations very well here. In fact we can note that negotiations have been recommended by various Malian voices since at least 2017; the idea is neither new nor particularly satisfying, but it remains the least bad of various bad options.
The problem with negotiations is that I don’t think any of the key actors want them - not the junta, and probably not JNIM, unless substantial concessions are on the table. Washington and Paris might still recoil from the idea of negotiations, and many Malians might too; after all, at this point, meaningful negotiations would probably end up centering on a de facto partition of the country, with JNIM and other armed groups carving out even more formalized zones of influence. Partition has been tried before, in various forms, and is only worth considering because it’s a likely life-saving measure. In any case (this is one of my mantras), it’s never the “right time” to negotiate, otherwise there would be nothing to negotiate over.
So that’s my take - the attack was significant not because it revealed some “security gap” (that was already there, and JNIM’s capacity to strike Bamako has been clear for some time), but because the attack underscores the need for (if not the likelihood of) negotiations.