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THE NEW JUNTA IN NIGER TELLS THE UNITED STATES TO PACK UP ITS WAR AND
GO HOME  
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Nick Turse
April 2, 2024
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]

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_ Even the Pentagon tacitly admits that US-Sahelian partnerships
aren’t reducing terrorist violence at all after 20 years. _

Niger's National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (CNSP)
Col. Maj. Amadou Abdramane (second right) is greeted by supporters
upon his arrival at the Stade Général Seyni Kountché in Niamey on
August 6, 2023., AFP via Getty Images

 

Dressed in green military fatigues and a blue garrison cap, Colonel
Major Amadou Abdramane, a spokesperson for Niger’s ruling junta,
took to local television last month to criticize the United States and
sever the long-standing military partnership between the two
countries. “The 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,” he said,
insisting that their 12-year-old security pact violated Niger's
constitution.

Another sometime Nigerien spokesperson, Insa Garba Saidou, put it in
blunter terms: “The American bases and civilian personnel cannot
stay on Nigerien soil any longer.”

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’s repudiation of its ally is just the latest blow
to Washington’s sputtering counterterrorism efforts in the
region. In 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.

Such setbacks there are just the latest in a series of stalemates,
fiascos, or outright defeats that have come to typify America’s
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.

This maelstrom of U.S. defeat and retreat has left at least 4.5
million people dead
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estimated 940,000 from direct violence, more than 432,000 of them
civilians, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. As
many as 60 million
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people have also been displaced due to the violence stoked by
America’s “forever wars.”

President Biden has both claimed that he’s ended those wars
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and that the United States will continue to fight
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them for the foreseeable future — possibly forever — “to protect
the people and interests of the United States.” The 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.   

“REDUCING TERRORISM” LEADS TO A 50,000% INCREASE IN… YES!…
TERRORISM

Roughly 1,000 U.S. military personnel
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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 “Base Americaine
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that outpost has been the cornerstone of an archipelago of U.S.
military bases
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in the region and is the key to America’s military power projection
and surveillance efforts in North and West Africa. Since the 2010s,
the U.S. has sunk roughly a quarter-billion dollars
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that outpost alone.

Washington 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 “security
cooperation” efforts, among them the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism
Partnership, a program designed to “counter and prevent violent
extremism” in the region. Training and assistance to local
militaries offered through that partnership has alone cost America
more than $1 billion.

Just prior to his recent visit to Niger, AFRICOM’s General Langley
went before the Senate Armed Services Committee to rebuke America’s
longtime West African partners. “During the past three years,
national defense forces turned their guns against their own elected
governments in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Niger,” he said.
“These juntas avoid accountability to the peoples they claim to
serve.”

Langley did not mention, however, that at least 15 officers
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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: Burkina Faso
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2015, and twice in 2022); Guinea
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and 2021); and Niger
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In fact, at least five leaders 
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a July coup in Niger received U.S. assistance, according to an
American official. When they overthrew that country’s democratically
elected president, they, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members
of the Nigerien security forces to serve as governors.

Langley went on to lament that, while coup leaders invariably promise
to defeat terrorist threats, they fail to do so and then “turn to
partners who lack restrictions in dealing with coup governments…
particularly Russia.” But he also failed to lay out America’s
direct responsibility for the security freefall in the Sahel, despite
more than a decade of expensive efforts to remedy the situation.

“We came, we saw, he died,” then-Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton joked
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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
“failing to plan for the day after” Qaddafi’s defeat was the
“worst mistake
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of his presidency.

As the Libyan leader fell, Tuareg fighters in his service looted his
regime’s weapons caches, returned to their native Mali, and began to
take over the northern part of that nation. Anger in Mali’s armed
forces over the government’s 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.

Having overthrown Mali’s 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’s complete collapse but pushed
the Islamists to the borders of both Burkina Faso and Niger, spreading
terror and chaos to those countries.

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 _zakat_ (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.

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 recently insisted
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security partnerships in West Africa “are mutually beneficial and
are intended to achieve what we believe to be shared goals of
detecting, deterring, and reducing terrorist violence.”  His
pronouncement is either an outright lie or a total fantasy.

After 20 years, it’s clear that America’s Sahelian partnerships
aren’t “reducing terrorist violence” at all. Even the Pentagon
tacitly admits this. Despite U.S. troop strength in Niger growing by
more than 900%
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the last decade and American commandos training local counterparts,
while fighting and even dying there
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despite hundreds of millions
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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 11,643 deaths
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an increase of more than 50,000%.

PACK UP YOUR WAR

In January 2021, President Biden entered the White House promising
to end his country’s forever wars.
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 He quickly claimed to have kept his pledge. “I stand here today
for the first time in 20 years with the United States not at
war,” Biden announced months later
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“We’ve turned the page.” 

Late last year, however, in one of his periodic “war powers
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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’s forever wars might, indeed,
go on forever. “It is not possible,” he wrote, “to 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.”

Niger’s U.S.-trained junta has made it clear that it wants
America’s 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. “We are aware of the March
16th statement… announcing an end to the status of forces agreement
between Niger and the United States,” said Deputy Pentagon Press
Secretary Sabrina Singh. “We are working through diplomatic channels
to seek clarification… I don’t have a timeframe of any withdrawal
of forces.”

“The U.S. military is in Niger at the request of the Government of
Niger,” 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_’s questions about
developments in Niger sent to AFRICOM’s 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’s 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 transcript of a press conference
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primarily with U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Philippines.

“USAFRICOM needs to stay in West Africa… to limit the spread of
terrorism across the region and beyond,” General Langley told the
Senate Armed Services Committee in March.  But Niger’s junta
insists that AFRICOM needs to go and U.S. failures to “limit the
spread of terrorism” in Niger and beyond are a key reason why.
 “This security cooperation did not live up to the expectations of
Nigeriens — all the massacres committed by the jihadists were
carried out while the Americans were here,” said a Nigerien security
analyst
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who has worked with U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of
anonymity.

America’s 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. From the Islamic State routing the
U.S.-trained Iraqi army in 2014 to the Taliban’s 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.

Carnage, stalemate, and failure seem to have had remarkably little
effect on Washington’s desire to continue funding and fighting such
wars, but facts on the ground like the Taliban’s triumph in
Afghanistan have sometimes forced Washington’s hand. Niger’s junta
is pursuing another such path, attempting to end an American forever
war in one small corner of the world — 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?  Will it agree to set a date for withdrawal? Will
Washington finally pack up its disastrous war and go home?

Copyright 2024 Nick Turse

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_Follow _TomDispatch _on Twitter
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Nick Turse [[link removed]] is the managing editor of
_TomDispatch [[link removed]]_ and a
fellow at the Nation Institute. An award-winning investigative
journalist, he has written for _The New York Times_, the _Los Angeles
Times_ and _The Nation_, and is a contributing writer for _The
Intercept_ [[link removed]]. His latest
book is _Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival
in South Sudan
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* Niger; US military in Niger; AFRICOM; US Forever Wars;
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