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Niger to Biden: Pack Up Your Forever War and Go Home
Will the Biden administration reverse a course that the U.S. has been on since the early 2000s?
Apr 02, 2024
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.
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.
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, including an 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 people have also been displaced due to the violence stoked by America’s “forever wars.”
President Joe Biden has both claimed that he’s ended those wars and that the United States will continue to fight 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 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,” that outpost has been the cornerstone of an archipelago of U.S. military bases 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 into 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.”
After 20 years, it’s clear that America’s Sahelian partnerships aren’t “reducing terrorist violence” at all.
Langley did not mention, however, that at least 15 officers who 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 (2014, 2015, and twice in 2022); Guinea (2021); Mali (2012, 2020, and 2021); and Niger (2023). In fact, at least five leaders of 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 after a U.S.-led NATO air campaign helped overthrow Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, in 2011. Former 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” 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 benefited 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 that 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% in 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 11,643 deaths—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. 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. “We’ve turned the page.”
Late last year, however, in one of his periodic “war powers” 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.”
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.
“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 dealing 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 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?
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Is Western Media's Perception of Africa Racist?
Africans are good "allies" when they toe the Western line and hungry, easily manipulated, and illegitimate regimes when they reject the West's conditions.
Aug 21, 2023
Racism goes beyond the use of certain words or the discriminatory practices of everyday life. It is also about political perceptions, intellectual depictions, and collective relationships.
Consider the way that Africa is currently portrayed in the news.
From a political viewpoint, Africa is seen as a totality, and not in a positive way, as in a united Africa.
The truth is that African leaders were not looking for "giveaways" but were hoping to negotiate a stronger geopolitical position in a vastly changing global political map. Just like everybody else.
For example, mainstream Western media coverage of the U.S.-Africa Summit, held in Washington last December, presented all of Africa as poor and desperate. The continent, one can glean from headlines, was also willing to pawn its political position in the Russia-NATO conflict in exchange for money and food.
"Biden tells African leaders U.S. is 'all in' on the continent," an Associated Press headline announced on December 15.
The phrase "all in"—a lingo used in Poker when someone is willing to risk it all—was cited many times in the U.S. and Western media.
Biden offered unconditional U.S. commitment "to supporting every aspect of Africa's growth," AP reported. But "growth" had little to do with Biden's offerings. He merely tried to outbid Russia's support for Africa so that the latter may adopt an anti-Moscow stance. He failed.
When a Russia-Africa Summit took place on July 27-28, U.S.-western media lashed out, again presenting Africans as political vagabonds, while belittling the strategic value of such a meeting for both Russia and African countries.
A CNN headline began with "Isolated Putino..," while a Reuters headline read "Putin promises African leaders free grain."
Very little mention was made of African leaders spending much time discussing a possible role in finding a peaceful resolution to the horrific war underway in Ukraine.
Indeed, several African leaders articulated a sincere political discourse, rejecting imperialism, neocolonialism, and military interventions.
Moreover, there was little media discussion that Africa, like Europe, can negotiate a stronger political position in world affairs.
Instead, the coverage seemed to center around the Black Sea Grains Initiative— brokered in July 2022—insinuating that Russia is threatening food security in an already impoverished continent.
But this was hardly the case.
In a speech at the Economic Forum in Vladivostok last September, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that, of the 87 grain-loaded ships, only 60,000 tons out of 2 million reached the United Nations' World Food Program.
Though Putin's overall figures were contested, the U.N.'s Joint Coordination Centre (JCC) said in a statement published in Euronews that "Putin is correct to say only a small amount has been shipped under the World Food Program."
Even though Western countries have been the largest recipients of grains shipped through the Black Sea, no mainstream media has made it a mission to depict Europeans as starving populations, or worse.
Additionally, Europe is hardly presented as greedy, either. Indeed, the blame is never on Europe, its colonialism, arms, and political meddling. Yet, the blame is readily assigned elsewhere.
This headline in The Conversation is a good illustration: "Putin offers unconvincing giveaways in a desperate bid to make up for killing the Ukraine grain deal."
The bias is astonishing.
The truth is that African leaders were not looking for "giveaways" but were hoping to negotiate a stronger geopolitical position in a vastly changing global political map. Just like everybody else.
Whether Putin's "bid" in Africa was "desperate" or not, matters little. The bias, however, becomes clear when the alleged Russian desperation is compared to the outcome of the U.S.-Africa summit last year.
Biden's "bid"was presented as an attempt at building bridges and creating opportunities for future cooperation. All is done, of course, in the name of democracy and human rights.
The misrepresentation of Africa can also be viewed independently from the Russia-Ukraine war.
Take, for example, the way Western media dealt with the Niger military coup on July 26.
Niger is part of the Sahel countries in Africa, a stretch of nations that have all been colonized by France.
Decades after these countries gained nominal independence, Paris continued to exert strong political influence and economic control.
This is called neocolonialism. It ensures the wealth of former colonies continues to be exploited by former colonizers.
In fact, Niger's wealth of uranium ore has helped fuel more than a fourth of the E.U.'s nuclear energy plants, and much of France's.
A decade ago, France returned to the Sahel region as a military force, in the name of fighting Jihadists.
Yet, violence grew, forcing African Sahel countries to rebel, starting in the Central African Republic, then Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad, and, finally, Niger.
Little of that context features in the coverage of Western media. Instead, like Mali and the others, Niger is depicted as another of Russia's lackeys in Africa.
Thus, the CNN headline, on August 2, "A Niger coup leader meets with Wagner-allied junta in Mali." Here, CNN leaves no room for the possibility that African leaders have agendas, or political wills, of their own.
The West's problematic relationship with Africa is complex, rooted in colonialism, economic exploitation, and outright racism.
Africans are good "allies" when they toe the Western line and hungry, easily manipulated, and illegitimate regimes when they reject the West's conditions.
It is time to rethink and confront this demeaning perception.
Africa, like all other political spaces, is a complicated and conflicted region, deserving of deep understanding and appreciation, beyond the self-serving agendas of a few Western countries.
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To Prevent Coups Like Niger's, Ban the Recognition of Military Regimes
The institutionalization of such principles under international law would foster democracy and better governance throughout the world.
Aug 04, 2023
The recent military coup in Niger highlights a major weakness in worldwide efforts to promote democracy. It also underscores the need to establish a binding international precedent to ban the recognition of military regimes, particularly those that result from military coups. The institutionalization of such principles would foster democracy and better governance throughout the world.
In international law, the issue of recognition of illegitimate governments has ancient roots. The Tobar Doctrine, proposed in 1907 by the then Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador Carlos Tobar, calls for denying recognition of de facto governments emerging from revolutions against the constitutional order. However, this doctrine never gained widespread acceptance.
The Estrada Doctrine, formulated in 1930 by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, Genaro Estrada, landed a similar fate. This doctrine also denies recognition to the government that has assumed power by extra-constitutional means. Although both doctrines are known in international law, they did not get the wide recognition they deserved.
It can be argued that non-recognition of de facto regimes will not by itself restore democracy. However, it is, a significant initial step that could be followed by stronger collective measures.
Politics is the driver behind the recognition of illegitimate governments; world powers have often encouraged overturning a constitutional government, as happened in 1973 when the U.S. supported Augusto Pinochet's takeover of the legitimate Allende government in Chile. Overt or implied recognition by Western democracies through ambivalent signs of disapproval have also encouraged military officers to overthrow constitutional governments.
Anthony W. Pereira, Director of the King's Brazil Institute at King's College in London, observed that since the end of World War II, military rule has occurred almost exclusively in developing countries. Military coups d'état reached their height in the 1960s and 1970s.
The playbook in these cases is similar. Although the military often promises a quick return to civilian rule, this almost never happens, and the military remains in power for long periods of time, often through a puppet regime. The military relinquishes power either when forced by popular will, or when its own incapacity to govern makes its position untenable. This happened to the Greek military junta in 1974 after its debacle in Cyprus, to the Chilean regime under Pinochet in 1990, and to the Argentine military after the Malvinas-Falklands conflict of 1982.
The United Nations General Assembly and its International Law Commission could be called upon to draw up appropriate legislation to declare the illegality of all military regimes. As the late U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold observed, the United Nations is "the most appropriate place for development and change of international law on behalf of the whole society of states."
The non-recognition of military regimes as a universal principle raises some practical questions. First, is it possible to apply the precedent retroactively, when military regimes have already been recognized and established? This issue was relevant in the 1923 Tinoco case.
Federico Tinoco Granados was a Costan Rican general who overthrew the constitutional government of Costa Rica in 1917. Two years later Tinoco Granados left the country, after multiple accusations of corruption. The new government in Costa Rica nullified all agreements signed by Tinoco, among them a concession to a British oil company. The matter was submitted to the arbitration of U.S. President William Howard Taft.
The Costa Rican government argued that Great Britain could not enforce the contract because both Costa Rica and the U.S. had not recognized the Tinoco regime. According to Taft, however, Tinoco, who exercised de facto control of the state, even if he had not respected the constitution, had the right to incur debts on behalf of the State. Taft's decision created a debatable precedent whose consequences are felt even today.
Second, what if military forces stage a coup against an oppressive or corrupt civilian regime? An ousted civilian government that has been freely elected by the people should not be denied recognition in favor of a post-coup military regime unless the overthrown government was responsible for gross human rights violations. Further, after a coup, recognition should be withheld until another civilian government is chosen in free and democratic elections.
It can be argued that non-recognition of de facto regimes will not by itself restore democracy. However, it is a significant initial step that could be followed by stronger collective measures. To the contention that non-recognition implies undue interference in a state's internal affairs, this objection loses validity if non-recognition is a consistent precedent of international law as established by the United Nations.
Consistent with this approach, both the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States have condemned the coup in Niger.
Non-recognition of military regimes is a response to increasing worldwide demands to eliminate the plague of military coups d'état. Once established as a legal precedent, it could become a significant step toward world peace, justice, and democracy.
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