Westerners Think They Understand The World. Things They Just Don't Get.

"RCMP officials were incapable of seeing our situation outside the narrow and highly distorted prism of a Canadian criminal investigation; beyond, that is, the compilation of a case file, the amassing of forensic evidence. For “the Force” it was exclusively about bringing Mokhtar Belmokhtar and his accomplices to court in Mali or even in Canada, securing a conviction, and putting him and the members of his katiba in jail. The RCMP officers were neither capable of understanding nor much interested in the broader geopolitical complexities and implications of the fraught and dangerous situation in which we found ourselves, even though many of those complexities were quite capable of ending our lives. The first Canadians I spoke to following our release were RCMP officers, and they interviewed me endlessly: on the plane from Gao to Bamako, in the Radisson Hotel in Bamako, between tests at the hospital in Germany, and as soon as I set foot back in Ottawa. They were not interested in learning how to defeat Al Qaeda, how to protect Canadians working in that part of the world from experiencing what we had just been through, or how to rescue the two remaining captives. Their exclusive interest was forensic—whom had I brushed up against and when during my captivity so they could search for and catalogue the relevant DNA on the sleeve of my tattered shirt in order to build a case for the criminal prosecution of our AQIM kidnappers. I believe that, instead, we ought to have been using most of that energy, those resources, and every available moment to work with others simply to destroy the threat that AQIM represents. Our misadventure took place dramatically far beyond the RCMP’s known world and bore little resemblance to a kidnapping in Canada. Nevertheless, the RCMP jealously defended its turf as “the Canadian government’s hostage negotiator,” insisting that this authority applied to Tombouctou as fully as it did to Regina and that its expertise was equally applicable to either, when so manifestly it was not. Its officers consistently asserted that theirs was “the lead department” (and while some have denied this was the case, there were certainly no other evident contenders), but never understood the extent to which West Africa was not western Canada. All this said, a number of individual RCMP officers worked selflessly and tirelessly and to the very best of their abilities, risking their health and abandoning their families, to secure our freedom, and I owe them a debt of gratitude."

(Robert Fowler. A Season In Hell: My 130 Days In The Sahara With All Qaeda)