General Charles “Chuck” Wald thought he knew the answer. Wald, a stocky, blunt-talking officer who’d been drafted by the Atlanta Falcons as an H‑back before he joined the Air Force in 1971, was the deputy commander of the Pentagon’s European Command, which at the time had responsibility for Africa. In 2003, U.S. surveillance spotted Belmokhtar at a militant training camp in a remote patch of desert just south of the Algerian border. The military had been searching for him for some time, and Wald thought this was the best chance to take him out.

Wald and his staff developed a range of options for trying to kill Belmokhtar while they had a fix on his hiding place in northern Mali. One of the highly classified plans called for sending in a B‑52 bomber to obliterate the militant outpost; another would have used air strikes by F‑16s to destroy the encampment; and a third proposed flying in a team of elite Special Operations forces to capture or kill Belmokhtar on the ground. When I spoke to Wald recently, he told me that he and his command team were never serious about using a B‑52 strike, and had put the idea forward as a “throwaway” in the internal government negotiations. His preferred option was to send in a team of U.S. commandos, which could have been done without attracting much public attention. Regardless of the method, Wald was adamant that the U.S. needed to take out Belmokhtar while it could. “We finally had this guy in our sights,” Wald, who has since retired, said. “I kept arguing that we needed to take the shot before he disappeared again.”

The U.S. military is expanding its presence across northern Africa. Shown here: Djibouti, which hosts Camp Lemonnier, the only official U.S. base on the continent; Niger, where the U.S. recently sent military personnel and drones to support the French mission in neighboring Mal; and the countries where the U.S. is reported to field troops, launch drones from, or both. (Map by James Bamford)

Vicki Huddleston, the U.S. ambassador to Mali at the time, felt very differently, and argued for patience during a series of tense discussions. She and her team said that the intelligence marshaled by Wald and his supporters was far from conclusive as to who exactly had been found. The U.S., she said, risked carrying out a politically sensitive operation inside a sovereign country only to find out that the target wasn’t there. And even if it had the right man, Huddleston said, she didn’t believe there was enough evidence against Belmokhtar to warrant a strike. “We didn’t even know who Belmokhtar was,” she told me. “All we knew at the time was that he was an Algerian cigarette smuggler. As far as I know, there’s no legitimacy to unilaterally killing Algerian cigarette smugglers.” Huddleston argued that taking out Belmokhtar would set a dangerous precedent, by killing someone who had not yet shown the inclination or the capacity to attack the United States. African countries were particularly sensitive about Western military operations inside their borders, and Huddleston feared that a high-profile American air strike would turn public opinion against the U.S. “Wald seemed to think you can carry out kinetic strikes without cost,” she told me. “But they can radicalize people on the ground. They do have a cost.”