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South Korea and US begin military drills as North Korea threatens war

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North Korean state media said Monday that Pyongyang had carried through with a threat to cancel the 60-year-old armistice that ended the Korean War, as it and South Korea staged dueling war games amid threatening rhetoric that has risen to the highest level since North Korea rained artillery shells on a South Korean island in 2010.

Enraged over the South’s joint military drills with the United States and recent U.N. sanctions, Pyongyang has piled threat on top of threat, including vows to launch a nuclear strike on the U.S. Seoul has responded with tough talk of its own and has placed its troops on high alert.

The North Korean government made no formal announcement Monday on its repeated threats to scrap the armistice, but the country’s main newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, reported that the armistice was nullified Monday as Pyongyang had earlier announced it would.

The North followed through on another promise Monday, shutting down a Red Cross hotline that the North and South used for general communication and to discuss aid shipments and separated families’ reunions.

The 11-day military drills that started Monday involve 10,000 South Korean and about 3,000 American troops. Those coincide with two months of separate U.S.-South Korean field exercises that began March 1.

The drills are held annually, and this year, according to South Korean media, the “Key Resolve” drill rehearses different scenarios for a possible conflict on the Korean peninsula using computer-simulated exercises. The U.S. and South Korean troops will be used to test the scenarios.

Also continuing are large-scale North Korean drills that Seoul says involve the army, navy and air force. The South Korean defense ministry said there have been no military activities it considers suspicious.

The North has threatened to nullify the armistice several times in times of tension with the outside world, and in 1996 the country sent hundreds of armed troops into a border village. The troops later withdrew.

Despite the heightened tension, there were signs of business as usual Monday.

The two Koreas continue to have at least two working channels of communication between their militaries and aviation authorities.

One of those hotlines was used Monday to give hundreds of South Koreans approval to enter North Korea to go to work. Their jobs are at the only remaining operational symbol of joint inter-Korean cooperation, the Kaesong industrial complex. It is operated in North Korea with South Korean money and knowhow and a mostly North Korean work force.

The North Korean rhetoric escalated as the U.N. Security Council last week approved a new round of sanctions over Pyongyang’s latest nuclear weapons test Feb. 12.

Analysts said that much of the bellicosity is meant to shore up loyalty among citizens and the military for North Korea‘s young leader, Kim Jong Un.

“This is part of their brinksmanship,” said Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based expert on North Korea with the International Crisis Group think tank. “It’s an effort to signal their resolve, to show they are willing to take greater risks, with the expectation that everyone else caves in and gives them what they want.”

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NKorean uranium nuclear test would raise stakes

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As North Korea warns that it plans its third nuclear test since 2006, outside governments and analysts are trying to determine a crucial question: Just what will Pyongyang’s scientists explode?

The last two tests are believed to have been of plutonium devices, but the next logical step for Pyongyang’s ambitious nuclear program could be to conduct a highly enriched uranium explosion. That would be a major accomplishment for North Korea — and a worrying development that would raise already high stakes for the United States and its allies.

Here’s why:

EASY TO HIDE:

Nuclear bombs can be produced with highly enriched uranium or plutonium. North Korea is believed to have exploded plutonium devices in the two tests it has conducted so far, in 2006 and 2009.

Uranium bombs worry Washington and North Korea‘s neighbors because plants making highly enriched uranium are much easier to hide than plutonium facilities. The latter are larger and generate more heat than uranium enrichment plants, making them simpler for outsiders to monitor and for satellites to detect.

Uranium can be enriched for use in bombs by using centrifuges that can be operated almost anywhere: in small factories or even in tunnels and caves. They can be spread around the country out of sight of nuclear inspectors. And it would take a relatively small amount of highly enriched uranium to build a simple bomb similar to the one dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II.

“A uranium test would be a big deal because a centrifuge plant is much easier to conceal than a plutonium reactor, which is practically impossible to hide,” said Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based expert on North Korea with the International Crisis Group think tank.

It is also simpler in some ways to build a nuclear bomb with highly enriched uranium than one with plutonium.

“While a plutonium bomb requires the assembly of a complicated weapons system to deal with pre-detonation issues, a HEU bomb is relatively easy to construct,” Harvard physicist Hui Zhang wrote in an analysis for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “Moreover, unlike plutonium, HEU poses no significant health hazards during the construction phase because of its low level of radiation.”

Scientist and nuclear expert Siegfried Hecker said plutonium is considered better for building small warheads, which North Korea is believed to be attempting to develop so it can threaten the U.S. with long-range nuclear-tipped missiles.

“Switching to HEU at this point actually increases the technical challenge” for North Korean scientists to build miniaturized nuclear warheads, James Acton, a physicist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in an email.

It’s not clear whether North Korea has made bomb-grade uranium. But Pyongyang confirmed long-held worries that it was enriching uranium in late 2010, when it showed foreign experts a facility at its well-known Yongbyon nuclear reactor site. Analysts strongly suspect Pyongyang has other uranium enrichment facilities, and it is feared that hidden plants could be producing large amounts of weapons-grade uranium.

EASY TO DIG UP:

North Korea says the program is for peaceful, energy-generating purposes. But while uranium enriched to low levels is used in power reactors, centrifuges can also be made to enrich uranium to the high levels needed for bombs.

North Korea apparently decided a few years ago to focus on highly enriched uranium rather than plutonium, Acton said. That’s probably because its leaders realized that “with a given amount of investment, it could produce more bombs-worth of HEU than plutonium,” he said.

North Korea has large deposits of uranium ore, and is far less able to acquire plutonium.

Hecker estimated that Pyongyang has only 24 to 42 kilograms of plutonium — enough for perhaps four to eight rudimentary bombs similar to the plutonium weapon used on Nagasaki in World War II. It does not appear to making more; its plutonium reactor north of Pyongyang was shut down during disarmament negotiations.

“It’s only logical that it would now test an HEU device, since that would be most helpful for designing its future arsenal,” Acton said, though he didn’t exclude the possibility of a plutonium test.

Acton, Hecker and other analysts have raised the possibility that North Korea may try to test both plutonium and uranium devices simultaneously.

AN OPEN SECRET:

Even as Pyongyang negotiated with the world to scrap its plutonium efforts in the latest round of nuclear disarmament talks, which began in 2003 and were last held in late 2008, its scientists were apparently working on a secret uranium program.

Outsiders have long raised suspicions of such a program.

James Kelly, a U.S. envoy during the George W. Bush administration, confronted North Korean officials with claims about uranium enrichment during a 2002 visit to Pyongyang, sparking a nuclear crisis that led to the creation of the now-stalled six-nation disarmament talks.

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has said North Korea worked with A.Q. Khan, creator of Pakistan‘s atomic bomb, to obtain the centrifuges needed for uranium enrichment before Khan’s operation was disrupted in 2003. Musharraf wrote in his 2006 memoir that Khan transferred nearly two dozen centrifuges to North Korea.

In 2007, then-U.S. nuclear envoy Christopher Hill said Washington knew Pyongyang had bought equipment only used for uranium enrichment.

North Korea finally revealed at least some of its uranium enrichment equipment in November 2010 to visiting Americans. They saw what appeared to be a sophisticated, modern uranium enrichment facility with 2,000 centrifuges.

Pyongyang’s long pursuit of uranium “is the clearest indication that North Korea intends to retain and enhance its nuclear weapons capabilities and has no intention to give up these capabilities,” according to Jonathan Pollack, a North Korea analyst at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. “That is the fundamental fact that all outside powers must address.”

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Algeria militants played shrewd media game

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As wildly contradictory accounts trickled out about a terror attack at an Algerian gas plant, one source of information proved to be the most reliable: announcements by the al-Qaida-linked militants themselves.

The hostage-takers phoned in regularly with up-to-the-minute reports, offered eerily accurate numbers of hostages taken and killed, and clearly laid out their goals.

All this came via a Mauritanian news website that — apart from receiving calls from radical Islamists and al-Qaida-linked militants — is known for its reliability on more mundane local news.

Algeria‘s official information, in contrast, was silent and murky. At one point the state news service even went dark online before returning with a home page scrubbed of all mention of the hostage crisis that had riveted the world.

When Algerian officials were willing to comment — only anonymously — their information drastically underplayed the scope of the hostage siege that left at least 37 captives and 29 militants dead and sent scores of foreign energy workers fleeing across the desert for their lives.

The reliability of the information from the kidnappers was a departure from the more bombastic and exaggerated announcements typical of al-Qaida-affiliated insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan and other conflicts.

Also, instead of publishing statements on a password-protected jihadi website entirely in Arabic, the Masked Brigade that claimed responsibility for the gas plant attack sent its information to a news website published in both French and Arabic, reaching a much wider audience.

“It was in the interests of the gunmen to get their story out and the Algerians didn’t perceive it was in their interest to get the story out in real time,” said William Lawrence, the North Africa analyst for the International Crisis Group. “The gunmen needed to negotiate through the media, politicize the Mali conflict through the media, and score jihadist points in the media.”

The editor of the Mauritanian site, the Nouakchott Information Agency, also known as ANI, attributed the difference in style to the Masked Brigade‘s founder, Moktar Belmoktar.

“Moktar is a man who speaks frankly of what he wants, he’s straight forward,” said El Mokhtar Ould Sidi, who added that his site left out the parts of the kidnappers’ statements that he deemed to be propaganda. “It’s very different from al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb or al-Qaida central.”

Figuring out what was happening during North Africa‘s most audacious terror attack was no easy matter with the Ain Amenas natural gas complex deep in the Sahara desert, more than 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) from the capital, Algiers.

Despite a vibrant local newspaper scene, Algeria is not an easy place for foreign journalists to operate and information about security matters is kept under tight control by the military-dominated government.

Instead, as the four-day standoff unfolded, it was the regular dispatches from the militants carried by the Nouakchott agency that provided the most consistent source of information. The reports also bolstered the militants’ assertions that the Algerian forces had endangered the hostages with their tactics.

No matter how shocking the news was, it seemed to come first and most reliably from the militants.

Soon after the attack began Jan. 16, the militants claimed to have seized 41 hostages. That night, Algerian Interior Minister Dahu Kabila maintained there were only 20 hostages and they were being held by a local terror group.

The militants replied by listing their diverse nationalities, including the presence of Canadians — something only confirmed by the government several days later.

The biggest revelations came on the second day of the standoff when frantic messages from the militants described Algerian helicopters shooting at the complex’s living quarters, followed by a full-scale attack on a convoy of vehicles carrying hostages.

Algerian Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci at the time denied there had been any such airstrike, and all that was reported that day was that the army had foiled an escape attempt.

The ANI, meanwhile, said 35 hostages and 11 fighters were killed, with only seven hostages left alive — a death toll it took Algerian authorities several days to match. In the end, their final numbers were quite close.

The accounts of two hostages who barely escaped the doomed convoy, Irish electrician Stephen McFaul and Filipino civil engineer Ruben Andrada, ended up corroborating the militants’ version of events.

While the Algerian government claimed the kidnappers were trying to escape with their hostages, the militants were trying to take the captives from the complex’s living quarters to the more defensible gas works on the other side when the helicopters attacked.

Being the chosen media outlet for high-profile hostage-takers has not been easy on ANI. At one point, its director was summoned by Mauritanian authorities to defend charges that it was a propaganda outlet for terrorists.

The site was also hacked twice with bogus articles posted blaming the Algerian military for the planning the attack and was also savaged in the Algerian press.

Of course, there were important elements of the hostages’ accounts that didn’t make it into ANI‘s reports. Algerians evacuated from the site described how the militants searched for foreign workers room by room, killing some outright and booby-trapping others with explosives.

Still, late Thursday after the strafing by its helicopters, the Algerian government claimed its special forces had taken control of the gas plant and insisted that only four hostages were dead.

The next morning it turned out that the standoff was still ongoing. Gradually over the next few days, the official toll rose to meet the one first set out by the militants.

In the absence of official information, including at one point Friday when the Algerian Press Service website shut down for 45 minutes and returned with no stories whatsoever on the standoff, quotes from anonymous officials proliferated. Even material carried by that official news service was often sourced to anonymous officials as the military and police kept up a veil of secrecy.

The local press was filled with assertions from anonymous officials, some of which were wildly untrue.

At one point, an anonymous official confirmed Sunday that 25 burnt bodies had been discovered. That meant, when added to the official toll, more than 80 people were dead in the attack. Yet the final amount the next day was just 66 — and it was not clear where the extra bodies had disappeared to.

One area in which there was a zone of silence was the question of any possible Algerian army casualties in the chaotic, four-day fight against an enemy armed with heavy machine guns, missiles and mortars.

It wasn’t until Wednesday, four days after the fighting had ended, that Algeria‘s Ministry of Defense issued a curt statement saying that “contrary to insinuations” regarding casualties, only eight soldiers were lightly wounded.

“Algeria has nothing to hide and we opted for total transparency in communicating all information on this matter as soon as it was available,” a member of the prime minister’s office told the AP on Tuesday.

He insisted, however, on speaking on condition of anonymity, because he said he wasn’t authorized to talk to the press.

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Launch, sanctions, nukes: NKorea may repeat cycle

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North Korea‘s nuclear agitations follow a well-worn route. It starts with a long-range rocket launch. The United Nations punishes the act with sanctions. And Pyongyang responds by conducting a nuclear test.

It happened in 2006, and again in 2009. With the U.N. leveling new sanctions, the world is about to find out whether North Korea‘s young new leader will detonate an atomic bomb, or step away from the path his father laid.

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to adopt a resolution, the third of its kind since 2006, condemning a North Korean rocket launch as a violation of banned missile activity. North Korea‘s Foreign Ministry swiftly rejected the move early Wednesday, maintaining that the launch was a peaceful bid to explore space and accusing the U.S. of “hostile” intent in leading the push for punishment.

In the face of what it considers to be a U.S. threat, North Korea “will take steps for physical counteraction to bolster the military capabilities for self-defense, including the nuclear deterrence, both qualitatively and quantitatively,” the ministry warned in a statement.

Analysts say the wording hints at a nuclear test. In 2006 and 2009, North Korea responded to similar Security Council punishment by detonating devices underground, which experts say is a key step in the process of developing an atomic bomb small enough to mount on a long-range missile.

“Things are lining up to make a nuclear test likely,” said Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based analyst with the International Crisis Group. “There’s a long-term pattern. The logic is to demonstrate your strength.”

But this time, North Korea has a new leader, Kim Jong Un, who took power in December 2011 following the death of his father, Kim Jong Il. How he will handle the standoff with the international community remains unclear.

While sending a satellite into space was his father’s dying wish, the young Kim has focused less on defense, saying in a recent speech that “the building of an economic giant” is his country’s most pressing task. He’s also hinted at a desire to make a shift in foreign policy by saying publicly that he is open to reaching out to former foes.

At the same time, Kim has already thrown away one agreement with the United States by going ahead with a rocket launch in April, and further antagonized the international community with the launch that put North Korea‘s first satellite into space last month.

It would be burdensome to order a nuclear test that would risk additional sanctions at a time when Kim wants to revive the economy, said Koh Yu-hwan, professor of North Korean Studies at Seoul’s Dongguk University. He said that with President Barack Obama starting a second term and a new South Korean government taking office next month, Kim will be watching to see how their foreign policies toward North Korea take shape before making any big moves.

A nuclear test could also strain Pyongyang’s relationship with Beijing. China, North Korea‘s main ally and traditional protector, broke form in agreeing to the binding Security Council resolution and an expansion of sanctions.

The Security Council resolution demands that North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons program in a “complete, verifiable and irreversible manner,” and orders the regime to cease rocket launches. The binding resolution orders the freeze of more North Korean assets, including the space agency, and imposes a travel ban on four more officials.

China opposed tougher sanctions, and analysts said it is continuing to protect its ally.

“China is striking a balance here. It wants to punish North Korea for the latest launch and tell it not to undertake a new ballistic missile launch,” said Shen Dingli, a regional security expert and director of the Center for American Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University. “But it doesn’t want to put unbearable pressure on Pyongyang.”

There was no indication Wednesday of an imminent nuclear test. However, satellite photos taken last month at North Korea‘s underground nuclear test site in Punggye-ri in the far northeast showed continued activity that suggested a state of readiness even in winter, according to analysis by 38 North, a North Korea website affiliated with the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

Last month’s rocket launch has been celebrated as a success in North Korea, and the scientists involved have been treated like heroes. Kim Jong Un cited the launch in his New Year’s Day speech laying out North Korea‘s main policies and goals for the upcoming year, and banners hailing the launch are posted on buildings across the capital.

Washington and others consider the rocket launches covert tests of ballistic missile technology since satellite launches and long-range missile launches have similar firing mechanisms. At a military parade last April, North Korea showed off what appeared to be an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Though it insists its efforts to launch a satellite are peaceful, North Korea also claims the right to build nuclear weapons as a defense against the United States, which stations more than 28,000 troops in South Korea. The adversaries fought in the three-year Korean War, which ended in a truce in 1953 and left the Korean Peninsula divided by the world’s most heavily fortified demilitarized zone.

North Korea has enough weaponized plutonium for about four to eight bombs, according to nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker, who visited North Korea‘s nuclear complex in 2010. In 2009, Pyongyang also declared that it would begin enriching uranium, which would give North Korea a second way to make atomic weapons.

For years, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and the U.S. negotiated with North Korea to offer aid in return for disarmament. North Korea walked away from those talks after U.N. sanctions in 2009.

Later, Pyongyang indicated its readiness to resume discussing disarmament. In February 2012, it negotiated a deal with Washington to place a moratorium on nuclear and missile tests in exchange for food aid.

That deal fell apart when North Korea unsuccessfully launched a long-range rocket in April that it insisted did not constitute a missile test and thus was not a banned activity.

In July, North Korea‘s Foreign Ministry issued a memorandum declaring that it felt forced to “completely re-examine the nuclear issue due to the continued U.S. hostile policy” toward Pyongyang. On Wednesday, the ministry said talks about disarmament are off the table.

It may be a non-nuclear issue that returns North Korea and the U.S. to negotiations.

A U.S. citizen is in North Korean custody after being arrested in the northeastern city of Rason in November, according to state media. Kenneth Bae is accused of committing “hostile” acts against the regime.

Similarly, in 2009, two American journalists were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for committing “crimes against the state.” That August, three months after the nuclear test, former President Bill Clinton flew to Pyongyang to negotiate their release, a visit that provided an opening for dialogue between the foes.

Kim Jong Un, like his father, appears to be resorting to nuclear threats to deal with friction from the outside world, Pinkston said.

“It’s more of the same — not that much change in the overall grand strategy and orientation,” he said.

___

AP writers Peter James Spielmann at the United Nations, Hyung-jin Kim and Sam Kim in Seoul, and Christopher Bodeen in Beijing contributed to this report.

___

Follow AP’s Korea bureau chief at www.twitter.com/newsjean.

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Al-Qaida flourishes in Sahara, emerges stronger

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The Islamists are back as a force in Algeria.

The terrorist attack on an Algerian natural gas plant that left dozens of hostages and militants dead has demonstrated how a failing Algerian insurgency transformed itself into a regional threat, partly by exploiting the turmoil unleashed by the Arab Spring revolts.

Al-Qaida’s branch in Algeria retreated into a Sahara no man’s land between Mali, Algeria and Mauritania after it was largely defeated by the Algerian army in a 10-year war in the 1990s that claimed 200,000 lives. There it grew rich on smuggling and hostage-taking, gained new recruits and re-emerged stronger than ever, armed with looted high-tech weapons from Libya‘s 2011 civil war.

The audacious assault last Wednesday on Algeria‘s Ain Amenas gas complex by a multinational band of Islamists shows how long-simmering ethnic tensions in Mali, a civil war in Algeria and a revolution in Libya have combined to create a conflict spanning the deserts and savannahs of both North Africa and West Africa.

Algeria‘s Islamists were driven south into the desert by the military’s brutal counterinsurgency tactics — a take-no-prisoners approach vividly on display in the resolution of the latest hostage crisis.

Factions of Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb became rich in the lawless desert by smuggling guns, drugs and cigarettes and by kidnapping foreigners for ransom. Soon they became involved in the longstanding disputes of the desert Tuareg against the government in Mali, whom the tribesmen felt ignored or abused them.

One of their prominent leaders was Moktar Belmoktar, who made millions smuggling and kidnapping and went on to mastermind the attack on the Ain Amenas plant.

While taking up the Tuareg cause in northern Mali, these al-Qaida-allied groups decided to use their new-found strength to settle scores against old opponents like Algeria and the West.

“It seems that Moktar has tasked himself with the internationalization of the Mali conflict,” said William Lawrence, the North African analyst for the International Crisis Group. “There’s no question there is struggle between different groups in the Sahel and Sahara to have the upper hand in claiming the jihad mantle in the region.”

Belmoktar fell out with the local al-Qaida franchise, the Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and formed his own northern Mali-based group in December called the Masked Brigade. He promised to attack those threatening the radical Islamist mini-state that was emerging in northern Mali.

“We threaten everyone who participated in and planned for the aggression against our Muslim people due to their implementation of Islamic Shariah law on our land,” he announced in December on jihadi websites. “You will taste the heat of war in your countries and we will attack your interests.”

With the money to be made in smuggling and kidnapping, all that was missing was easy access to heavy weaponry. That changed in 2011, and weapons came cascading across the borders when Libya fell apart and dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s vast arsenals of oil-bought weapons were looted.

What began in January 2012 as a secular revolt of disaffected Tuaregs hoping to carve out a homeland in northern Mali was soon hijacked by al-Qaida and allied extremist groups.

With their new weapons, money and men, Algerian militants like Belmoktar could now do what had never been possible before — hit oil-rich Algeria‘s strategic energy infrastructure in the remote desert.

National borders were no impediment to these heavily armed fighters in four-wheel drive vehicles.

“AQIM and other militant Islamist groups’ control over northern Mali and weak security along Libya‘s borders has provided the organization with greater operational freedom,” noted Arun Pillai-Essex, an analyst with Maplecroft, a risk analysis group, who said AQIM has also been able to capture weapons from the Libyan and Malian armies.

The question now is where the Islamists will strike next.

Another attack on an Algerian energy installation is doubtful, analysts say. Already heavily guarded, security will no doubt be vastly increased and there are suggestions that the Ain Amenas attack only succeeded by having some type of inside help.

France and its Western allies fear AQIM could metastasize its terrorism into Europe if left unchecked.

In the last two weeks, France has been taking the fight to AQIM with punishing air strikes against the vast territory the group controls in northern Mali — raising questions about whether the group’s fighters will have much time to think about new terror attacks.

“It is one-off episode, they got lucky,” said Riccardo Fabiani, North Africa analyst of the Eurasia group. “I would think that the next attacks are going to target other countries. Mauritania could be an easy target, Morocco or any ECOWAS country or possibly in Libya.”

The attack has also pushed France and Algeria — two nations with fraught relations due to bloody colonial ties — closer together over the need to combat these groups.

Prior to the attack, Algeria had long publicly opposed France‘s call for armed intervention to deal with the rise of extremist groups in northern Mali, citing the threat to regional stability and the chances of the crisis spilling over into its own desert regions.

Now, with the fight brought to Algeria‘s doorstep, al-Qaida-linked groups will be facing their old implacable enemy once more.

Unlike other Western nations, French officials refused to criticize Algeria for its strong-fisted handling of the Ain Amenas hostage ordeal.

“When a country is attacked in this way, and its own sovereignty is jeopardized, it decides on how to respond with its own army,” French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Sunday on France-5 TV.

Throwing more military operations at al-Qaida, however, is not going to solve the underlying problem, warned Lawrence, the North Africa analyst.

“This is linked to the Libyan conflict, it’s linked to the Mali conflict, it’s linked to 50 years of struggle by the Tuareg, it’s linked to 20 years of struggle in Algeria,” he said.

Ultimately, he says, the countries of North and West Africa, not to mention Europe, will have to address the conditions that allowed al-Qaida to flourish in this impoverished region.

“A security response is at best a partial response. Until a robust political, humanitarian and economic effort is implemented, the security effort won’t solve these problems,” Lawrence said.

_____

Schemm reported from Rabat, Morocco.

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