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The Rif tribes in the interior of Morocco kicked the butts of the Spanish, who ruled a northern sliver of Morocco in the early 1920s, but then the tribes attacked French-held territory.  Spain and France united to crush the tribes.  A poster on AlternateHistory.com asked what would have happened if the Rif tribes hadn’t attacked French Morocco.

The problem here is that France correctly felt that the Rif rebellion was becoming a threat to their rule in the French part of Morocco. They did a passive aggressive strategy to force the Rif rebellion's leadership to attack them. As I recall it, they moved forces into areas that were technically part of French Morocco but had never really been under French direct control. That threatened the food supply of the rebel area. The rebels pretty much had to attack.

The question then becomes: How can you keep the French from feeling threatened enough by the Rif rebellion, or from taking action against that threat?

I've toyed with a timeline that might do that. From old and possibly wrong on a few details memory, the situation developed like this:

Spain pushed aggressively and brutally into the mountainous interior of their part of Morocco, which they had previously left alone. They got their butts handed to them by the local tribes, losing a lot of men and supplies, but persisted in the fight. There was one point where the White Russian general Wrangel offered to recruit men from his exiled and now unemployed White Russian army to fight in the Rif. He got turned down. (That’s an interesting potential Point of Divergence in and of itself, but for another time) Eventually the Spanish public got tired of fighting and losing in the Rif, and parliament started investigating army corruption.

Primo de Revera staged a coup in Spain. He played the Morocco issue smart. He consolidated surviving Spanish forces in Morocco and threatened to withdraw completely unless sufficient forces were sent to put down the rebellion. That did several things: First, it cut the rebellion off from its best source of weapons which was overextended Spanish troops. Second, it opened up latent rifts in the rebellion, which was a coalition of usually warring tribes brought together by a small core of educated men who wanted to establish a modern Riffian state complete with modern army and flag. With the Spanish no longer in their territory, the old feuds came to the fore, as did tensions between the tribes, who just wanted to be left alone, and the modernizers who realized that the Rif was going to be controlled by a nation, whether it be their own or somebody else. Third, it brought France off the sidelines. The French had been quite willing to sit on sidelines, figuring the Rif war was karma for the Spanish allowing the Germans to intrigue in Morocco during World War I. Primo de Rivera's moves and threats forced France off the sidelines.

So how do you avoid that sequence of events? Maybe the Rivera coup fails or launches the Spanish Civil War over a decade early. Maybe parliament is a little more conscious of the consequences of investigating the guys with the guns and the military doesn't find it necessary to do a coup at least not yet.

In any case, Spain pursues the same strategy they've been pursuing in the Rif, putting more men into the grinder for another three or four years. By that time, the Spanish are totally exhausted financially. The public will not put up with continued war. Spain doesn't just threaten to totally withdraw. It does. The French are threatened at that point, but they are also entering the 'hollow years', the years where kids that should have been born during World War I but weren't should have been coming into service. The anti-war sentiment that had been building in the aftermath of World War I has had more time to develop. Do they react aggressively at that point? I don't know. They would still have a motive to, but the cost would be higher and the will to fight lower. If they did gear up and fight the Rif tribes on their own in say 1928 or 1929, that would have an interesting impact on their army in World War II--a lot more combat experienced reservists in the B-series division for one thing.