It should now be considered standard operating procedure—in order for the Pentagon to set-up shop in far-flung nations, a threat from “al-Qaeda” must be present. Thus we learn “U.S. counterterrorism officials are paying renewed attention to an increasingly dangerous incubator for extremism: a swath of northern and sub-Saharan West Africa, from the Atlantic coast of Morocco and Mauritania to the harsh deserts of Chad,” according to USA Today. “The centerpiece of terrorism problems in the region is Algeria’s Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, better known by its French initials GSPC. Late last year, it joined forces with Osama bin Laden and renamed itself al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an Arabic term used to refer to North Africa.”

And why exactly is the Pentagon warning us about “al-Qaeda” terrorists that “probably could not attack the U.S. homeland”?

As usual, the answer is simple and predictable enough. “The U.S. focus on the group comes as the Bush administration finalizes plans to create a new military command in Africa, called AFRICOM,” part and parcel of the neocon vision of Pax Americana.

According to the “experts,” GSPC is led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, “a former [Algerian] soldier who followed the familiar route for radical young Muslims and went to fight in Afghanistan,” the BBC reported in 2003.

In other words, Mokhtar Belmokhtar was recruited by the CIA. “Between 1982 and 1992, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East would pass their baptism under fire with the Afghan mujahideen,” writes Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. “Tens of thousands more foreign Muslim radicals came to study in the hundreds of new madrassas [religious schools] that Zia’s military government began to fund in Pakistan and along the Afghan border. Eventually more than 100,000 Muslim radicals were to have direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan and be influenced by the jihad [against the USSR],” a pet project of Zbigniew Brzezinski and later CIA director William Casey.

James Ingalls summarizes:

The CIA assembled a terror network that remains a cause of misery worldwide. CIA Director William Casey called it “the kind of thing we should be doing.” According to standard sources, aid to extremist groups in Afghanistan was a response to the Soviet invasion. The truth is that President Carter gave the green light for covert support to the Mujaheddin six months before the December 1979 invasion. In the words of then National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, a major architect of Carter’s policy, they were “drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.” The US supported seven fundamentalist extremist groups throughout the 1980s and into the early 90s with cash, sophisticated weapons, and training to the tune of $5 billion–according to official figures. The secret Black Budget of the CIA reportedly quadrupled to $36 billion per year when Reagan became president in 1980, and some of this money went to support secret operations in Afghanistan. Some of the earliest training exercises took place inside the US, including rifle shooting at the High Rock gun club in Naugtuck, Connecticut. More technical training took place at the CIA’s Camp Peary, nicknamed “The Farm,” northeast of Williamsburg, Virginia. Among the topics covered by training sessions were surveillance and countersurveillance, counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics and paramilitary operations.

“Motivated by nationalism and religious fervor, the Islamic warriors were unaware that they were fighting the Soviet Army on behalf of Uncle Sam,” explains Michel Chossudovsky. “While there were contacts at the upper levels of the intelligence hierarchy, Islamic rebel leaders in theatre had no contacts with Washington or the CIA.”

And no doubt, as well, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, described by locals in Algeria “as a kind of modern day Robin Hood,” a former officer in the Algerian army and veteran of the CIA-ISI war in Afghanistan, does not realize he is working for the CIA and the Pentagon, providing a pretext for the establishment of AFRICOM. “The goal is to prevent another Afghanistan,” Lieutenant Commander Joe Carpenter, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Boston Globe last December.

On the other hand, the idea may be to create another Afghanistan, an incubator for engineered terrorism, this time in the Islamic Maghreb.

For an unknown number of impoverished African villagers, death by way of AC-130H Spectre gunship is now a certainty.