U.S. Weighs Troop Cuts in Africa, Leaving Allies to Confront Growing Militant Threat
At the closing ceremony of U.S.-led military exercises in this expansive Saharan nation, American diplomat R. Clarke Cooper stepped to the podium and assured African military commanders that Washington stands ready to help them in their time of need.
“The U.S. has an unwavering and longstanding commitment to Africa,” Mr. Cooper, the State Department’s assistant secretary for political-military affairs, said late last month.
In fact, U.S. allies are increasingly worried that America’s commitment may be wavering when wide swaths of Africa face a surging threat from militants affiliated with al Qaeda and Islamic State.
U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper is conducting a world-wide review of troop commitments, in keeping with the Trump administration’s strategic tilt away from dispersed actions against terror groups and toward great-power competition with China and Russia.
Africa is the first region on Mr. Esper’s list, and military officers and lawmakers expect him to order fresh troop reductions on the continent, on top of the 17% cut in personnel over the past two years. The Pentagon hasn’t said when he will announce his decision.
The Pentagon has already sliced some 1,200 personnel from its rolls in Africa since deployments there hit a peak in 2018. It now has 6,000 troops and civilians concentrated in Niger in the west and in Somalia and Djibouti in the east. Instead of combat power, the U.S. offers specialized support for those doing the fighting
Africa’s security situation is especially serious in the middle of the Sahel, the semiarid belt between the Sahara to the north and more tropical lands to the south. The number of extremist attacks in the Sahelian heartland—Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali, across the border from Mauritania—is doubling annually, to 803 last year from 55 in 2015, according to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project figures assembled by the Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies. More than 4,000 civilians and African soldiers died in attacks in the three countries last year, up from 770 in 2016, the United Nations reported.
A sequence of large-scale attacks against military and civilian targets has sent more than one million people fleeing south in Burkina Faso alone in recent months, creating what aid agencies are calling the world’s fastest-growing refugee crisis.
Abdallah Wafy, Niger’s ambassador to the U.S., worries about the threat of troop reductions after Mr. Esper’s review. “How can we trust a partner who’s withdrawing while the situation is deteriorating?” he asked.
Niger is a landlocked nation of more than 22 million people, among them some 450,000 displaced by violence at home or in neighboring countries. The country faces threats from Boko Haram fighters in the east and Islamic State and al Qaeda affiliates in the west, and shares a border with volatile Libya in the north.
France, which colonized much of the Sahel, leads the West’s military response to the crisis. Paris has 4,500 troops stationed in West Africa and is adding 600 reinforcements, a third of them paratroopers from the French Foreign Legion.
Islamic State in the Greater Sahara killed at least 70 Nigerien soldiers in a single assault on a military base in December. And the violence is creeping south toward Benin and other countries on the Gulf of Guinea, African and U.S. officers warned.
Among the militants flooding the region are men hardened fighting for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The U.S. military says the Sahel is one of the few places in the world where al Qaeda cooperates with Islamic State, which aims to establish a caliphate governed by its harsh interpretation of Islam. Militants in the Sahel exploit local grievances, such as disputes over water rights, to undermine national governments and recruit alienated young men, according to researchers on the region.
French forces are concentrated in the barren expanses of northern Mali, and French warplanes conduct strikes out of Niamey, the capital of Niger. Thirteen French soldiers died late last year when two helicopters collided during combat operations in Mali.
France is contributing hundreds of troops to a major offensive by some 5,000 West African soldiers where the borders of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger come together and where militants maneuver freely among isolated villages, according to African officers. The French Ministry of Defense declined to comment.
Under Attack
The Sahel, the semiarid belt south of the Sahara, has been hard hit by extremist violence.
U.S. troops don’t conduct unilateral counterterrorism raids or airstrikes in West Africa, unlike in Somalia, where they carry out frequent air attacks on al-Shabaab militants. In 2017, four U.S. servicemen and five Nigerien soldiers were killed when their patrol was ambushed by fighters from the Islamic State of the Greater Sahara. The U.S. military subsequently barred its troops from accompanying West African forces on such operations.
U.S. support includes aerial refueling for warplanes, air transport for troops and supplies, and airborne surveillance by drones at a new, $110 million U.S.-built base in Agadez, Niger. U.S. Green Beret teams are stationed in Niger to mentor elite local units, and American commandos periodically visit Burkina Faso to train its forces, according to officers from those countries.
The U.S. won’t say publicly whether it is providing intelligence or other assistance in the new offensive, which is targeting Islamic State of the Greater Sahara and a collection of al Qaeda affiliates operating as Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, or JNIM. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency estimates JNIM’s strength at 1,000 to 2,000 fighters.
“You don’t want your boys at the front? Give us training with the Special Forces,” said Maman Sidikou, permanent secretary of the G5 Sahel, a grouping of five West African countries, which is fielding the African battalions for the operation.
U.S. Africa Command is already pulling back from a strategy of trying to “degrade” extremist groups to simply attempting to “contain” them, according to a report to Congress last month by a Pentagon inspector general.
The U.S. is pressing its European allies, who also train regional military and police forces, to fill whatever gaps it may leave. “It is about expanding that burden-sharing,” Mr. Cooper told reporters.
During a visit to Washington in January, France’s defense minister, Florence Parly, stood next to Mr. Esper as she told reporters that a reduction in U.S. support would “severely limit” the effectiveness of French operations in the Sahel.
U.S. officials tried to calm nerves among the Africans gathered for the exercises in Mauritania. “A posture review doesn’t always equate with absence or reduction” of forces, Mr. Cooper said in an interview.
Brig. Gen. Dagvin Anderson, commander of U.S. special-operations forces in Africa, said he told his African counterparts that the U.S. isn’t pulling up stakes completely. “A small footprint can have a large impact,” Gen. Anderson said in an interview. “It’s not so much about the number of troops. It’s the right troops and the right capabilities and putting them in the right places.”
Still, the possibility of a drawdown has sparked a rare show of bipartisanship in Congress. Lawmakers have launched a campaign to persuade Mr. Esper to leave U.S. forces in place.
“Any reduction in U.S. military presence in West Africa would have real and lasting negative consequences for our African partners,” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R., Okla.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after leading a congressional delegation to Mauritania last month.
Sen. Inhofe is among the lawmakers and counterterrorism officials warning that a U.S. pullback could also provide an opportunity for China and Russia to expand their influence in Africa, the very phenomenon the administration says it is trying to prevent in its global reshuffling of forces.
Among other signs of its ambitions on the continent, China has 26 port projects in Africa and has built its first African military facility in Djibouti, adjacent to the largest U.S. base on the continent, according to U.S. Africa Command. Russian private military contractors are active in 16 African countries, and Moscow sold $1 billion in arms to African buyers in 2017, the most recent data Africom has provided.
“Africa is key terrain for competition to China and Russia, who are aggressively using economic and military means to expand their access and influence,” Gen. Stephen Townsend, head of Africa Command, told the House Armed Services Committee last week.
African governments prefer to receive counterterrorism aid and military training from the U.S., which has extensive experience fighting militant groups since the Sept. 11 attacks. “We are not going to build stadiums and railroads and ports and palaces, which are all things China builds on the continent,” he said.
Trump administration officials have argued that the U.S. can’t do it all. “The need to address near-peer competitors requires us to make adjustments to our posture and avoid prioritizing near-term problems at the expense of building readiness and capacity for a high-end conflict in the future,” Kathryn Wheelbarger, acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, told the House committee.
The U.S. has organized the West African military exercises annually since 2005, an attempt to improve the ability of African commando units to operate on their own and to coordinate with other countries in the region.
This year’s event involved hundreds of participants from 31 countries gathered in Mauritania and Senegal. Spanish soldiers coached Senegalese troops on the rifle range. A U.S. Green Beret monitored Malians, Guineans and Mauritanians conducting a mock attack on a mock terrorist hideout, while a surveillance plane—donated by the U. S.—circled overhead. The two platoons that Burkina Faso sent to train were slated to return to the front lines immediately afterward.
A U.S. Army veterinary team corralled 1,300 cattle and treated them for parasites, a small hearts-and-minds campaign to accompany the military buildup.
In some countries, segments of the public remain unconvinced that a foreign military presence makes them safer. Rights groups have accused Niger’s government of arresting opposition supporters who have demonstrated against the presence of U.S. forces. In January, protesters took to the streets of Bamako, Mali, waved anti-France placards and burned a French flag.
Nigerien officials are desperate for Americans to deepen their involvement instead of stepping back. Nigerien commanders would like U.S. Green Berets to resume joint patrols with their men. And Niger’s government would welcome U.S. airstrikes against militants inside the country, said a senior Nigerien official.
“They can kill anyone they’d like,” the official said, not entirely joking.
Photo: Families and officials prayed next to the bodies of soldiers killed during an attack on an army camp on the Niger-Mali border, Dec. 13, 2019 - TAGAZA DJIBO /REUTERS
