OUtside View: Elliot Abrams' Maghreb Plot

WASHINGTON, April 13 (UPI) -- As the debris from bombings by the newly formed al-Qaida in Maghreb offshoot in the heart of the Algerian capital still smolders, another attack is looming in the diplomatic front.

Elliot Abrams, the deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy, is again sowing the seeds of conflict in the Middle East. This time it's in the disputed Western Sahara, under Moroccan control following the end of Spanish colonial rule in 1975.

After being marginalized from the Arab-Israeli arena, now under the almost exclusive domain of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her State Department, Abrams is pulling free the grenade pin that may shortly cause North Africa to explode.

He is on the verge of achieving a major U.S. policy shift that would have Washington backing Morocco's unilateral imposition of its so-called Western Sahara Initiative, or autonomy plan upon the indigenous Sahrawi people of Western Sahara.

U.S. officials distracted by other pressing regional conflagrations first viewed Abrams' Maghreb meddling as a small price to be paid for getting him out of the Arab-Israeli domain. They barely paid attention as Abrams tinkered with a new Western Sahara strategy, an embryonic idea raised by outgoing U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton (who threatened to do away with the Western Sahara peacekeeping mission, which turned costly over time in the absence of a successful settlement).

Largely indifferent U.S. government bureaucrats were jarred awake this week with the terrorist bombings in Algeria. State and government counter-terrorism officials began immediately scrutinizing Abrams' new Western Sahara strategy out of fear that the perception the United States was siding with Morocco would upend the U.S.-Algerian Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative and undermine closer cooperation in the energy sector. At a time when al-Qaida's presence in Algeria exponentially grows and Algerian jihadis flock to Iraq, the U.S. government needs Algeria more than it needs to curry favor with Rabat.

Algeria has long given political, financial and military support to the Sahrawi inhabitants of Western Sahara, represented by the nationalistic Polisario Front. A majority of the supporters of Polisario live in Tindouf, a squalid refugee camp on the Algerian side of the border. The possibility of a new U.S. tilt toward Morocco, one that risks undermining a fragile cease-fire held in place by U.N. peacekeepers since 1991, will only add volatility to an already destabilized region. Indeed, the issue of Western Sahara strikes raw nerves of mutual enmity between both Moroccans and Algerians, fanning the embers of nationalism for each.

Worse, this provocative change in U.S. position would further isolate the United States from the international community (aside from France and Spain, the stake-holding, post-colonial holdouts). Additionally, some U.N. members back the International Court of Justice's 1975 holding that sovereignty for Western Sahara must be determined through a referendum in which all the inhabitants of Western Sahara would vote. The new Abrams policy favoring Morocco will also be a break from traditional U.S. positions expressed at the United Nations (involved U.N. staff in New York are perplexed), as well as the previous efforts by former U.N. envoy for Western Sahara James A. Baker, co-author of another document disregarded by Abrams: the Baker-Hamilton Report.