Yves here. This post by Nick Turse tells the very sorry tale of how US pretenses at counterterrorism in the Sahel not only made matters a lot worse but are now getting US forces run out of the region, now out of Niger. That also means Niger takes over our pricey base. I wonder if we will wind up not being able to extract all our kit.<\/p>\n
My impression is that the Brits in their heyday were able to exert much more influence with less deployment of manpower, materiel, and infrastructure. Of course, part of how the UK did it was Oxford and Cambridge. Niall Ferguson remarks that England was very successful at exporting what we would now call talent to act as colonial bureaucrats. <\/p>\n
For the at least moderately clever from not all that monied backgrounds, a long-term posting in a colony was a great deal: status, usually nice housing and servants, meaning a lifestyle better than they would enjoy at home, and nearly alway better, or at least sunnier, weather. . By contrast, when I would lunch sometimes with a PWC partner in Sydney (this in the early 2000s) he said only 15% of the US partners had passports. So is US provincialism one of the reasons we aren\u2019t very good at the imperialism game?<\/p>\n
By Nick Turse. Originally published at TomDispatch<\/p>\n
Dressed in green military fatigues and a blue garrison cap, Colonel Major Amadou Abdramane, a spokesperson for Niger\u2019s ruling junta, took to local television last month to criticize the United States and sever the long-standing military partnership between the two countries. \u201cThe government of Niger, taking into account the aspirations and interests of its people, revokes, with immediate effect, the agreement concerning the status of United States military personnel and civilian Defense Department employees,\u201d he said, insisting that their 12-year-old security pact violated Niger\u2019s constitution.<\/p>\n
Another sometime Nigerien spokesperson, Insa Garba Saidou, put it in blunter terms: \u201cThe American bases and civilian personnel cannot stay on Nigerien soil any longer.\u201d<\/p>\n
The announcements came as terrorism in the West African Sahel has spiked and in the wake of a visit to Niger by a high-level American delegation, including Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee and General Michael Langley, chief of U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM. Niger\u2019s repudiation of its ally is just the latest blow to Washington\u2019s sputtering counterterrorism efforts in the region.\u00a0In recent years, longstanding U.S. military partnerships with Burkina Faso and Mali have also been curtailed following coups by U.S.-trained officers. Niger was, in fact, the last major bastion of American military influence in the West African Sahel.<\/p>\n
Such setbacks there are just the latest in a series of stalemates, fiascos, or outright defeats that have come to typify America\u2019s Global War on Terror. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n
This maelstrom of U.S. defeat and retreat has left at least 4.5 million people dead, including an estimated 940,000 from direct violence, more than 432,000 of them civilians, according to Brown University\u2019s Costs of War Project. As many as 60 million people have also been displaced due to the violence stoked by America\u2019s \u201cforever wars.\u201d<\/p>\n
President Biden has both claimed that he\u2019s ended those wars and that the United States will continue to fight them for the foreseeable future \u2014 possibly forever \u2014 \u201cto protect the people and interests of the United States.\u201d\u00a0The toll has been devastating, particularly in the Sahel, but Washington has largely ignored the costs borne by the people most affected by its failing counterterrorism efforts.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cReducing Terrorism\u201d Leads to a 50,000% Increase in\u2026 Yes!\u2026 Terrorism<\/p>\n
Roughly 1,000 U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors are deployed to Niger, most of them near the town of Agadez at Air Base 201 on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Known to locals as \u201cBase Americaine,\u201d that outpost has been the cornerstone of an archipelago of U.S. military bases in the region and is the key to America\u2019s military power projection and surveillance efforts in North and West Africa. Since the 2010s, the U.S. has sunk roughly a quarter-billion dollars into that outpost alone.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n<\/div>\nWashington has been focused on Niger and its neighbors since the opening days of the Global War on Terror, pouring military aid into the nations of West Africa through dozens of \u201csecurity cooperation\u201d efforts, among them the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, a program designed to \u201ccounter and prevent violent extremism\u201d in the region. Training and assistance to local militaries offered through that partnership has alone cost America more than $1 billion.<\/p>\n
Just prior to his recent visit to Niger, AFRICOM\u2019s General Langley went before the Senate Armed Services Committee to rebuke America\u2019s longtime West African partners. \u201cDuring the past three years, national defense forces turned their guns against their own elected governments in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Niger,\u201d he said. \u201cThese juntas avoid accountability to the peoples they claim to serve.\u201d<\/p>\n
Langley did not mention, however, that at least\u00a015 officers\u00a0who benefited from American security cooperation have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the Global War on Terror. They include the very nations he named:\u00a0Burkina Faso\u00a0(2014, 2015, and twice in 2022);\u00a0Guinea\u00a0(2021);\u00a0Mali\u00a0(2012, 2020, and 2021); and\u00a0Niger\u00a0(2023). In fact, at least\u00a0five leaders\u00a0of a July coup in Niger received U.S. assistance, according to an American official. When they overthrew that country\u2019s democratically elected president, they, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as governors.<\/p>\n
Langley went on to lament that, while coup leaders invariably promise to defeat terrorist threats, they fail to do so and then \u201cturn to partners who lack restrictions in dealing with coup governments\u2026 particularly Russia.\u201d But he also failed to lay out America\u2019s direct responsibility for the security freefall in the Sahel, despite more than a decade of expensive efforts to remedy the situation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe came, we saw, he died,\u201d then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton\u00a0joked\u00a0after a U.S.-led NATO air campaign helped overthrow Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, in 2011. President Barack Obama hailed the intervention as a success, even as Libya began to slip into near-failed-state status. Obama would later admit that \u201cfailing to plan for the day after\u201d Qaddafi\u2019s defeat was the \u201cworst mistake\u201d of his presidency.<\/p>\n
As the Libyan leader fell, Tuareg fighters in his service looted his regime\u2019s weapons caches, returned to their native Mali, and began to take over the northern part of that nation. Anger in Mali\u2019s armed forces over the government\u2019s ineffective response resulted in a 2012 military coup led by Amadou Sanogo, an officer who learned English in Texas, and underwent infantry-officer basic training in Georgia, military-intelligence instruction in Arizona, and mentorship by Marines in Virginia.<\/p>\n
Having overthrown Mali\u2019s democratic government, Sanogo proved hapless in battling local militants who had also benefitted from the arms flowing out of Libya. With Mali in chaos, those Tuareg fighters declared their own independent state, only to be pushed aside by heavily armed Islamist militants who instituted a harsh brand of Shariah law, causing a humanitarian crisis. A joint French, American, and African mission prevented Mali\u2019s complete collapse but pushed the Islamists to the borders of both Burkina Faso and Niger, spreading terror and chaos to those countries.<\/p>\n
Since then, the nations of the West African Sahel have been plagued by terrorist groups that have evolved, splintered, and reconstituted themselves. Under the black banners of jihadist militancy, men on motorcycles armed with Kalashnikov rifles regularly roar into villages to impose\u00a0zakat\u00a0(an Islamic tax) and terrorize and kill civilians. Relentless attacks by such armed groups have not only destabilized Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, prompting coups and political instability, but have spread south to countries along the Gulf of Guinea. Violence has, for example, spiked in Togo (633%) and Benin (718%), according to Pentagon statistics.<\/p>\n
American officials have often turned a blind eye to the carnage. Asked about the devolving situation in Niger, for instance, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel\u00a0recently insisted\u00a0that security partnerships in West Africa \u201care mutually beneficial and are intended to achieve what we believe to be shared goals of detecting, deterring, and reducing terrorist violence.\u201d \u00a0His pronouncement is either an outright lie or a total fantasy.<\/p>\n
After 20 years, it\u2019s clear that America\u2019s Sahelian partnerships aren\u2019t \u201creducing terrorist violence\u201d at all. Even the Pentagon tacitly admits this. Despite U.S. troop strength in Niger\u00a0growing by more than 900%\u00a0in the last decade and American commandos training local counterparts, while fighting and even dying there; despite hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into Burkina Faso in the form of training as well as equipment like armored personnel carriers, body armor, communications gear, machine guns, night-vision equipment, and rifles; and despite U.S. security assistance pouring into Mali and its military officers receiving training from the United States, terrorist violence in the Sahel has in no way been reduced. In 2002 and 2003, according to State Department statistics, terrorists caused 23 casualties in all of Africa. Last year, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution, attacks by Islamist militants in the Sahel alone resulted in\u00a011,643 deaths\u00a0\u2013 an increase of more than 50,000%.<\/p>\n
Pack Up Your War<\/p>\n
In January 2021, President Biden entered the White House promising to\u00a0end his country\u2019s forever wars. \u00a0He quickly claimed to have kept his pledge. \u201cI stand here today for the first time in 20 years with the United States not at war,\u201d\u00a0Biden announced months later. \u201cWe\u2019ve turned the page.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Late last year, however, in one of his periodic \u201cwar powers\u201d missives to Congress, detailing publicly acknowledged U.S. military operations around the world, Biden said just the opposite. In fact, he left open the possibility that America\u2019s forever wars might, indeed, go on forever. \u201cIt is not possible,\u201d he wrote, \u201cto know at this time the precise scope or the duration of the deployments of United States Armed Forces that are or will be necessary to counter terrorist threats to the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
Niger\u2019s U.S.-trained junta has made it clear that it wants America\u2019s forever war there to end. That would assumedly mean the closing of Air Base 201 and the withdrawal of about 1,000 American military personnel and contractors. So far, however, Washington shows no signs of acceding to their wishes. \u201cWe are aware of the March 16th statement\u2026 announcing an end to the status of forces agreement between Niger and the United States,\u201d said Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh. \u201cWe are working through diplomatic channels to seek clarification\u2026 I don\u2019t have a timeframe of any withdrawal of forces.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe U.S. military is in Niger at the request of the Government of Niger,\u201d said AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan last year. Now that the junta has told AFRICOM to leave, the command has little to say. Email return receipts show that TomDispatch\u2019s questions about developments in Niger sent to AFRICOM\u2019s press office were read by a raft of personnel including Cahalan, Zack Frank, Joshua Frey, Yvonne Levardi, Rebekah Clark Mattes, Christopher Meade, Takisha Miller, Alvin Phillips, Robert Dixon, Lennea Montandon, and Courtney Dock, AFRICOM\u2019s deputy director of public affairs, but none of them answered any of the questions posed. Cahalan instead referred TomDispatch to the State Department. The State Department, in turn, directed TomDispatch to the\u00a0transcript of a press conference\u00a0dealing primarily with U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Philippines.<\/p>\n
\u201cUSAFRICOM needs to stay in West Africa\u2026 to limit the spread of terrorism across the region and beyond,\u201d General Langley told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March.\u00a0 But Niger\u2019s junta insists that AFRICOM needs to go and U.S. failures to \u201climit the spread of terrorism\u201d in Niger and beyond are a key reason why. \u00a0\u201cThis security cooperation did not live up to the expectations of Nigeriens \u2014 all the massacres committed by the jihadists were carried out while the Americans were here,\u201d said a Nigerien security analyst who has worked with U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n
America\u2019s forever wars, including the battle for the Sahel, have ground on through the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden with failure the defining storyline and catastrophic results the norm.\u00a0From the Islamic State routing the U.S.-trained Iraqi army in 2014 to the Taliban\u2019s victory in Afghanistan in 2021, from the forever stalemate in Somalia to the 2011 destabilization of Libya that plunged the Sahel into chaos and now threatens the littoral states along the Gulf of Guinea, the Global War on Terror has been responsible for the deaths, wounding, or displacement of tens of millions of people.<\/p>\n
Carnage, stalemate, and failure seem to have had remarkably little effect on Washington\u2019s desire to continue funding and fighting such wars, but facts on the ground like the Taliban\u2019s triumph in Afghanistan have sometimes forced Washington\u2019s hand. Niger\u2019s junta is pursuing another such path, attempting to end an American forever war in one small corner of the world \u2014 doing what President Biden pledged but failed to do. Still, the question remains: Will the Biden administration reverse a course that the U.S. has been on since the early 2000s?\u00a0 Will it agree to set a date for withdrawal? Will Washington finally pack up its disastrous war and go home?<\/p>\n
Copyright 2024 Nick Turse<\/p>\n
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