Rolling Stone: “The U.S. is Losing Yet Another ‘War on Terror’”

Despite substantial engagement by American commandos, terrorism trends across the continent are dismal, according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center. Militant Islamist group violence in Africa has risen inexorably over the past decade, expanding by 300 percent during this time, reads an August assessment of the entire continent. Violent events linked to militant Islamist groups have doubled since 2019.

Earlier this year, Rolling Stone’s Kevin Maurer accompanied Green Berets on a training mission in the Sahelian nation of Niger, where four U.S. troops were killed in an Islamic-state ambush in 2017. It is hard to see how a dozen Special Forces soldiers and roughly 120 Nigérien commandos covering 200,000 square miles make a difference against an estimated 2,500 fighters aligned with either ISIS or Al Qaeda, he wrote. The numbers bear out his skepticism.

Nick Turse

Despite being driven back in the Middle East, ISIS and other terrorist groups are surging in Africa – as some have been warning for years. And the US intervention appears just as deficient and lacking strategic direction as in Syria and Afghanistan.

Soldiers with the 1st Expeditionary Force of Niger (EFoN), the country’s premier anti-terrorism unit, take part in an air interdiction exercise. Andrew Craft for Rolling Stone

At the same time, West African officers trained and advised by U.S. special operators keep overthrowing the governments the United States is trying to prop up — including four coups by Flintlock attendees since 2020. SOCAFRICA’s chief, Rear Adm. Milton “Jamie” Sands, tells Rolling Stone that the United States was not responsible for the rebellions, was powerless to prevent them, and suggested a major reason for the coups was popular dissatisfaction with U.S. partners on the continent who suppress the will of their own peoples.

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Rear Adm. Sands, the Special Operations Command Africa chief, maintained that U.S. training was not linked to coups and instead suggested that a key reason for them was that the U.S. was partnered with repressive regimes or, as he put it, governance that is not necessarily aligned with the rights and will of their people. Despite the rebellions by U.S. trainees and the partnerships with oppressive governments, Sands insisted, there is no other option but to continue U.S. support but no way to halt the coups.

The U.S. partnering with repressive regimes is not quite the justification the Admiral seems to think it is. Whatever happened to Biden’s grand agenda of autocracies vs. democracies? Looks like the Pentagon didn’t get that memo…