The threat of the Islamic State “It is particularly alarming on the African continent, specifically in the Sahel region, but also in areas of East Africa, such as northern Mozambique. For this reason, with the support of the US and many other partners, I have proposed to establish a Working Group dedicated to Africa, which can identify and stop the terrorist threats connected to Daesh existing on the continent by developing specific countermeasures to be defined in coordination. with local partners".
Abstracted from the context, this would seem to be the declaration of the leader of a country aware of its geopolitical weight and with the clear desire to identify its priorities in foreign policy. In reality, these are some of the words spoken by the Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio at the Roman anti-ISIS summit in the presence of the US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and the mere mention of the real "creator" of this so witty period, makes what was said in precedence, that is, that it is the general program of a country aware of its geopolitical role.
Certainly the withdrawal from Afghanistan can allow a recalibration of the Italian geostrategic center of gravity again on the "enlarged Mediterranean" and therefore also on the African continent, as well as the Italian military participation in the Task Force Takuba lets think, but this does not mean that the national ruling class has real knowledge of this, just think of the fact that every time you have to make an important decision for national interests, Di Maio hides behind the trench of "constitutional pacifism" .
To fight the Islamic State in Africa, Di Maio explained, it is necessary to envisage a "holistic" approach to the territory, which is a way like any other to explain to an interlocutor like Blinken - who is known not to be exactly an admirer of solutions " Gandhian "to international crises - that Islamist militias can be fought and defeated above all with the diplomacy of" development cooperation "rather than with arms.
Put simply: Rome does not intend to shoulder the responsibilities (including military ones) that maintaining security in Africa entails, unless it is "mother America" who once again shows the muscles, then leaving it to the allies, Italians included, the task of socially and economically rebuilding a war-torn territory. Maximum performance (for a country that makes the economic approach to international relations its mantra) with minimum effort.
African jihadism represents a very complex galaxy to decipher, capable of spreading like a patch on the black continent, has its own characteristic elements, different from Middle Eastern militant Islamism, and has been able to inflict serious defeats on the ground to the troops of weak governments. Africans both in the Sahel and in the Horn of Africa, not to mention the breeding ground for terrorists represented by the chaotic situation of Libya in transition, still to be cleared up.
Developing and thinking of a "road map" to combat Islamism in Africa as proposed by Di Maio is an opportunity, but it is the ideological ("political") assumptions with which the idea was presented to be totally wrong: Italy is essentially "afraid" of using its military instrument to defend national interests and from this point of view it perceives itself and is also perceived as a "different" power and to which it can, in certain cases, even trimming some impropriety as happened with the SAIPEM ship off the coast of Cyprus (v.articolo), to the plane bound for Herat for the withdrawal ceremony of the soldiers engaged there (v.articolo), to Italian soldiers left without a visa to enter Libya and so on (v.articolo).
That is, given the premises - of which the governments of the last ten years, regardless of the political color of reference, are largely guilty - Di Maio in the “anti-ISIS champion” version makes you smile rather than convince. And it angers those who really care about Italy and its international image.
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