Why didn't North Africa become the "next Afghanistan"?

This NY Times Magazine piece asks some good questions about why Northern Africa didn't turn into the next serious jihad base as some experts had predicted.

Of course, the region has has plenty of problems with terrorism, regime collapse, and instability in general. And we could find out in the near future that Country X 2009 seems a lot like Afghanistan 2000. But at least so far, the scale hasn't been the same as Afghanistan pre-2001, and there hasn't been an al Qaeda resurgence or "new al Qaeda."

The article doesn't thoroughly answer the question, I don't think, but it provides a good start. It is clear the author knows the region, particularly Mauritania, so his case study is interesting.