American troops are
fighting in multiple African countries without anyone back home really
noticing.
President Trump’s inexplicable fight with the widow of a Green Beret who was
killed in Niger has sparked a political firestorm that shows no signs of dying
down. It’s also brought new attention to a little-known aspect of Washington’s
ongoing war on terror: The Pentagon is rapidly expanding its presence in Africa
and is now engaged in military operations — including active combat — in more
than half a dozen African countries.
It’s a fight that takes place largely in the
shadows, led by small teams of US special operations forces. In Somalia, Navy
SEALs are hunting members of al-Qaeda and ISIS-linked
militants from groups like al-Shabaab (one of the commandos died in a botched raid earlier this year). In
Libya, they’re carrying out counterterror missions like the one that capturedAhmed Abu Khattala, a militant linked to the
deadly assault on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi. And in
Djibouti, the US flies armed drones out of a major airbase at Camp Lemonnier, which is also used for
counterterrorism and counter-piracy operations in the region.
US forces have also regularly conducted raids
and other missions in Chad, Cameroon, Uganda, and, of course, Niger, where there are at
least 800 American troops deployed.
The missions rely on a broad array of legal authorities but have one
particularly important thing in common: They have never been specifically
authorized by Congress, let alone discussed and debated by the American public.
Huge questions exist as to the strategic importance and relevance of all these
missions, and whether they improve US national security enough to justify the
high cost in blood and treasure. Since 2001, at least 36 soldiers have died
conducting or supporting military operations in Africa, including Sgt. La David
Johnson and the three others killed in Niger earlier this month.
With
6,000 troops operating in Africa, and US commanders describing the continent as
the next big battleground in the terror fight, the pace and number of American
military engagements is certain to increase even more sharply. That raises
legitimate new questions about whether the US has committed itself to unending
and expanding war in Africa through missions that are taking place with nearly
no political or public oversight.
Niger is getting the headlines, but it’s a
small part of what the Pentagon is doing in Africa
As Zack Beauchamp has written for Vox, the US has been working with
governments in heavily Muslim West Africa to counter local Islamist groups
since the George W. Bush administration. The US presence there ramped up
considerably under the Obama administration, which sent special forces to train
and assist local partners in countering both al-Qaeda and ISIS groups.
None of these missions have been specifically
debated, much less authorized by Congress; Sen. John McCain has already talked about
issuing subpoenas to the Pentagon for more details about the mission in Niger.
For operations against al-Qaeda-linked groups, the Pentagon relies on the old
post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force as its legal authority.
In the aftermath of the botched mission, there’s a new push in Congress to
repeal that legislation and require the Trump administration to seek a new one,
but it’s not clear if those efforts will pay off. In the meantime, the military
continues to operate in the shadows across Africa.
Most US missions aren’t intended to involve
any form of combat. Instead, they’re designed to help African nations build up
their own capacity to fight militants inside their borders without American
help. The theory underlying all of these missions is that it’s cheaper, less
risky, and more effective to train and equip local forces to fight than rely on
American troops operating far from home on unfamiliar terrain. The problem is
that it’s not clear those types of missions work — let alone serve broader US security
interests.
THE US IS FIGHTING IN MULTIPLE AFRICAN COUNTRIES WITH NEARLY NO POLITICAL OR PUBLIC OVERSIGHT
However, in countries like Niger and Mali,
the US has struggled to build effective local capacity to fight terrorism, in
part because of the difficulty of the task and the
relatively meager resources allocated (tens of millions of dollars, compared to
the billions spent in places like Afghanistan or Syria).
In her forthcoming book, former Pentagon official Mara Karlin concludes that “in practice, American efforts to
build up local security forces are an oversold halfway measure that is rarely
cheap and often falls short of the desired outcome.” Kings College London
professor Walter Ladwig pins many of these failures on rifts that emerge
between the patron (like the US) and the client in these relationships. Ladwig
studied three major cases of military aid — Vietnam, El Salvador, and the
Philippines — and found that the US did well managing the relationship in just
one of these (the Philippines), while doing a fair job in El Salvador and a
disastrous job in Vietnam.
Others, like Naval War College professor Jonathan Caverley and Trinity College Dublin
professor Jesse Dillon Savage, have noted that security assistance can have a
destabilizing effect by effectively forcing Washington to choose sides in local
conflicts and empowering the military at the expense of civilian politicians. In 2010,
a military junta overthrew Niger’s president; democratic
elections were held in 2011, and another military coup attempted to overthrow that president in 2011.
As Nick Turse noted for the Intercept, Chad’s military
launched coup attempts in 2006 and 2013, the Mauritanian military toppled the
civilian government in 2005 and again in 2008, and a US-trained military
officer ousted the democratically elected president of Mali in 2012. The latter
coup helped set the stage for an al-Qaeda affiliate to conquer a broad swath of the country before
being pushed out by a French-led military coalition.
The
bottom line is that it’s impossible to predict when, or if, training local
militaries will help US interests or regional stability. Over the past 75
years, the US has successfully helped local forces win, as in 1947 with Greek
forces fighting the communists, in the 1980s helping Afghan fighters defeat the
Soviets, in 1995 helping Croat forces battle the Serbs, or more recently in
Iraq, helping local units retake Mosul. The problem is that the list of
failures is even longer — and that success doesn’t always further US interests
in the long run, as seen most clearly in Afghanistan.
A second major risk is that these operations can quickly escalate from training or advisoryefforts into combat operations —
often when least expected, and at the initiative of the enemy. That appears to
be what happened in Niger.
Johnson and his fellow soldiers were advising
Nigerien military on the ground, seeking to improve their ability to fight
al-Qaeda- and ISIS-linked fighters leaking over the porous border with Mali. On
October 4, an Army Special Forces team (composed of 12
soldiers) set out on a patrol with its Nigerien counterparts along the
Niger-Mali border. Intelligence told the team they faced little chance of enemy
contact on this reconnaissance mission. Although US military forces had
conducted nearly 30 similar missions in that area before, October 4 was only
this particular team’s second such mission in Niger.
NBC News reports that the mission changed at
some point from reconnaissance to something more like a “kill/capture” mission,
focused on insurgent leader Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahraoui. The joint US-Nigerien
unit was ambushed on October 4, suffering heavy casualties.
THE PENTAGON IS HUNTING TERRORISTS ACROSS AFRICA. SOMETIMES THE TERRORISTS STRIKE FIRST.
The Pentagon wants to keep its troops out of
harm’s way. That may not be possible.
Modern US
advisory efforts attempt to minimize risk to American forces like those killed
in Niger by distinguishing between “train and assist” and “advise, assist, and
accompany” missions. In the former, US troops generally stay on well-secured
bases or embassy grounds, providing training or remote assistance where allowed
by their mission parameters. In the latter, US troops actually accompany local
forces on their missions, exposing themselves to the same risks as their
counterparts battling al-Qaeda or other violent extremists.
The
latter type of mission — the kind where US forces face risk — is far more
effective. However, it exposes US troops, often in places where the US has no
military infrastructure for combat air support or medical evacuation.
This is
the third risk unique to these small (“light footprint” in Pentagon parlance)
operations: They expose troops to tremendous risk by their very nature. Special
forces teams, like the one ambushed on October 4 in Niger, are incredibly
skilled but carry minimal weaponry and cannot fight their way out of battles
with numerically superior foes, nor survive when they sustain large numbers of
casualties. These advisory missions frequently rely on local health care
facilities or allied forces for medical evacuation and treatment, or rely on
nearby embassies or intelligence personnel to obtain such support, because they
rarely deploy with their own organic evacuation helicopters and medical units.
Consequently, when troops on these advisory
missions do find themselves in combat — as they often do — they may be more
vulnerable than conventional troops to taking large numbers of casualties, or
even having comrades captured or left missing, as appears to have happened with Johnson in Niger.
In a
Monday press conference, Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, repeatedly highlighted the risks inherent in this kind of mission,
especially when acknowledging that it took the military two full days to find
Johnson’s body. “This is a very complex situation that they found themselves
in, a pretty tough firefight,” Dunford said, going on to add that Pentagon
leaders still don’t quite know whether the mission switched from reconnaissance
to something else, and, if so, on whose orders.
"I
don't know how this attack unfolded,” Dunford said bluntly.
What’s clear, though, is
that a larger, more robust force — like the kind the US has mostly fought with
in Iraq or Afghanistan, or deployed to combat Ebola in Africa — would
likely have more support on standby, and more ability to respond to an ambush
than the small Special Forces team that made contact in this instance.
In this case, the Special Forces teams in
Niger had conducted similar missions in this location on 29 occasions prior to
the October 4 ambush. (That pattern itself may have played a role in the
incident, by showing enemy forces there was a target to be attacked, and
inducing a kind of complacency among the US Special Forces troops themselves about
the risks on these patrols.) Washington has reportedly been operating in the
country since 2002, with American personnel working with Nigerien forces on the
Mali border and leaked Pentagon documents suggesting the
construction of a major US airbase in central Niger for the operation of drones
and other American aircraft.
Can the US prevent a major war by launching a
bunch of smaller ones? Africa may provide the answer.
Unfortunately,
the trigger for whether a given mission like the one in Niger ends in combat
isn’t in American hands. Just as enemy forces in Iraq and Afghanistan
frequently decided when and where combat would erupt, so too did extremist
elements in Niger. And so it is with all these “light footprint,” advisory
missions: The enemy gets a vote, and often the deciding vote, as to when and
where these missions will go from training to fighting.
This fact highlights the fourth and broadest
risk of these operations: They share a tenuous link to US national security,
and leave many questions about what, if anything, is purchased with them for
our benefit (as opposed to be benefit of the local forces we arm and train). In
theory, security assistance missions go to countries that are fighting a common
enemy, such as Afghanistan or Niger. These missions represent an “economy of force” approach to warfare: easier,
cheaper and more efficient to send a few advisers to build up local forces, and
have them fight, than to fight these wars with thousands of US troops.
These missions also reflect a growing belief
among national security professionals in the importance of preventive war —
something that also goes by other names, such as gray zone operations, shaping operations, or “Phase
Zero” operations. Just as it is more efficient to fight wars with proxies, so
too is it more efficient (and effective) to prevent larger wars by fighting
small ones wherever possible.
This theory currently justifies an expansive view of military activity from naval
patrols in contested waters to advisory missions in Southeast Asia to the
assorted advisory missions in Africa. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and other senior military leaders have adopted this
approach as part of official US military doctrine, embracing the view that
persistent conflict at a low level is the best way to prevent large-scale wars
from breaking out.
The theory has worked in some places. US
advisers in Colombia did, eventually, help the Colombian
government achieve a stunning victory over the rebels and narcotraffickers
there. US military units have successfully trained with local forces in
Southeast Asia for many years, boosting the effectiveness of military forces
they work with. American efforts to support African military units operating as
part of AMISOM against Somali militants have also worked
well, aided by targeted strikes conducted directly by US special operations
forces. Most of these missions have unfolded in the background — not
deliberately hidden as covert, but not trumpeted either.
That lack
of public attention has often been a good thing, enabling US military units to
sustain efforts over a period of years and enabling local forces (and their
political leaders) to work with US forces when that might not always be a
popular thing.
However, the great downside has been a
massive expansion of US military operations without any meaningful political
oversight, let alone a specific vote, like the war in Iraq. “The war is
morphing,” Graham said after a briefing from Defense Secretary James Mattis on
military operations in Africa. “You’re going to see more actions in Africa, not
less; you’re going to see more aggression by the United States toward our
enemies, not less; you’re going to have decisions being made not in the White
House but out in the field.”
McCain, the powerful chair of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, admitted as much when he called for a congressional debate over whether
continued US military operations in Niger were lawful and necessary. However,
past congressional efforts to review and possibly revise the post-9/11
authorization for the use of military force have failed, and there is no reason to think a
Niger-focused debate will be any more successful.
And that means that Johnson and Staff Sgts.
Bryan Black, Jeremiah Johnson, and Dustin Wright are the most recent US
soldiers to fall in Africa, but they won’t be the last.
Phillip
Carter and Andrew Swick are both former Army officers and veterans of Iraq and
Afghanistan, respectively, who are researchers at the Center for a New American
Security in Washington, DC.
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