on October 4th, four U.S. Special Forces soldiers were ambushed and killed in Niger and much of the media coverage and reaction on Capitol Hill to the Niger deaths has implied that it’s a mystery why the U.S. has troops in Niger and that this somehow is a new development under Trump, which of course it is not.
In fact, President Obama greatly expanded U.S. counterterrorism and drone operations throughout the African continent. So much of how U.S. counterterrorism policy is covered in the U.S. media is linked to when things go wrong, and soldiers or diplomats are killed, or when an act of terrorism hits. Like the recent hotel bombing in Somalia reportedly carried out by the militant group al Shabaab that killed more than 300 people.
So, today we’re going to take a comprehensive look at U.S. militarism and counterterrorism in Africa. And also the role that the forces of U.S. allies in Africa play in their own countries, as well as so-called peacekeepers from the military coalition known as AMISOM.
Nick Turse talking:
This really dates to 2013 when President Obama dispatched about 100 U.S. forces to conduct what they call ISR, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance operations in Niger. So basically flying drones to give over watch over Niger and other neighboring countries in West Africa.
at that time we’re looking al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, these were also used for a Boko Haram who was, at that point, really in Nigeria but beginning to expand out. So those were the two main groups and since then we’ve seen a splintering and proliferation of other groups in the area.
Just after 9/11, talking around 2002 or so, the United States started dispatching small teams, special operations forces, generally Green Berets to work alongside local forces, all across West Africa under the trans-Sahara counterterrorism partnership. Niger was a key component of this. So, U.S. troops have been coming in and out all throughout that time. Small teams, out in the field, a lot of times working in very remote areas doing desert patrolling, that sort of thing. And with greater numbers of terror groups and militants out there, there’s always escalating chance of this happening. Now, recently we’ve heard from the last commander of U.S. special operations forces in Africa, General Donald Bolduc that actually, U.S. troops have been involved in firefights over the last few years.
So, you know, that could have happened it almost any time it seems within the last few years. It just happened in October where we had fatalities from it.
Samar Al-Bulushi talking:
It may be true that the U.S. military has been operating in the shadows from the perspective of the average American, but for many Africans there’s no hiding the brutal every-day reality of counterterrorism policies that are sanctioned and often funded by the U.S. government. So, although, people may not necessarily be talking about AFRICOM or the U.S., they’re actually talking about their own police and militaries because this is who they see on the ground.
In the past few years what we’ve seen is the African continent has seen the largest relative rise in military spending of any region in the world, amounting to over $50 billion, it’s roughly corresponded to about an 81 percent cumulative increase in spending. So, what we’re witnessing is a growing investment in war across the region and of course this is, it’s no coincidence that this coincides with the emergence of AFRICOM.
If we take Kenya as an example, in fiscal year 2016, military spending in Kenya rose to a new high of $933 million, and this is a figure that stands at more than double the military spending of Ethiopia and Uganda combined for 2016.
Now, as we know each of these governments have deployed troops to Somalia, so it’s logical to make the connection between these troops deployments and the higher spending. But there tends to be less consideration of what impact the spending has for the populations back home on the streets of Nairobi and Kampala for example.
So, if we take, you may recall in April 2014, the Kenyan government launched what they called Operation Sanitize Eastleigh, when more than 6,000 members of the security apparatus were deployed to city streets and rounded up over 1,000 people in a sports stadium in Nairobi.
Yet, even this operation I think is in many ways just a spectacular form of what’s going on in an everyday basis in a place like Kenya.
when Obama was president you had this attempt to even further Africanize U.S. counterterrorism operations using other countries’ forces. And so, Obama would say, “Well, we’re no longer doing these extraordinary renditions.” But they would have the Kenyan government, for instance, snatch someone and then fly them to Somalia where they would be interrogated by quote-unquote Somalis and you’d have like U.S. personnel just kind of getting debriefed on it. That was the way it was portrayed.
I would agree with that, but I would take it one step further if we’re to return to this this idea of shadows. Right? Because what you just described still makes reference to the idea of a prison that’s kind of tucked away out of view from Americans, out of view from the rest of the world, when in fact what’s also happening is people who are being swept off the streets in broad daylight, and either killed outright, or held in regular prisons across the continent.
And I mentioned regular presence, you know, we can take the Kampala 2010 bombings and the suspects who were rounded up then, and who since then have been held in one of Uganda’s maximum security prisons. So, it’s significant here — is that U.S.- sanctioned bad things don’t only happen in secret prisons that are tucked away out of sight, they happen inside supposedly legitimate bodies and institutions as well.
Nick Turse talking:
I noticed, you know, the better part of ten years ago that the United States is putting a logistics network in place. When I asked about this at AFRICOM, they told me it was only about humanitarian operations: digging wells, building orphanages, that type of thing. But I could tell that they were putting in something much larger.
What you generally see are, you know, smallish outposts generally either on existing military bases for the local forces’ use and then the United States has a compound there or they will take an older airstrip sort of rehab it and become a U.S. base.
I should say that U.S.-Africa Command continues to say as they have from the beginning that they only operate one base on the continent: that is Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, which is an old French Foreign Legion base that they have built up, and up, and up. It’s become a really sprawling, hardened compound right at Djibouti’s main international airport.
And, in fact, they outgrew that base so much that they had to move their drone operations off to a place called Chabelley Airfield, a satellite base. That base sort of exemplifies what the United States has done. They took an old French airstrip and they just put in first tents, more pavement, so that they could store more drones there, and then have kept building it up, and building it up. It’s become integral to operations on the continent, also drone operations that are flown to the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen, and then used for the Islamic State, the war against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
over time, you know, the U.S. has had bases in Kenya, several in Somalia, also Chad, Ethiopia, Niger, they had a small facility in Mali for a time. I mentioned Djibouti.
there’s a lot out there and a lot of it is scattered around through military publications, on various military websites and if you can take the time and search through that, search through contracts, you can start to put together a broad outline of what the United States is doing in Africa.
Samar Al-Bulushi talking:
the last question about the value of life, because what I noticed in the response to this latest horrific attack in which over 300 were killed was that people across the Internet were using the hashtag #AfricanLivesMatter, #BlackLivesMatter, #StandWithSomalia, to capture the hypocrisy within the international community, right? In terms of the ways in which we make sense of these kinds of tragedies and the levels of attention that are attributed to Somalia versus Europe for example. Now, what struck me there is that in making these appeals to a common humanity, there is a risk that we actually obscure the ways in which African lives are quite different in fact than European lives, than white lives, right? And this is what the argument that’s been made by Black Lives Matter in the United States, I think the entire movement rests on an understanding of difference and on highlighting difference. And, what, kind of a contradictory move that ends up being made in calling for us to stand with Somalia is that it obscures that difference that obscures the ways in which African life is consistently devalued.
Now the second point that’s interesting is that why is it that we’re calling for an equal valuation of African life only in the aftermath of terror attacks. And I think the sad reality is that Africans have now realized that it’s only in the context of a terror attack that the rest of the world actually will pay attention to what’s going on, when in fact you have structural forms of violence there taking place every day that are taking so many, you know, just as many lives.
If we come back to the question of what’s actually unfolding on the ground, I think another point that was raised on social media is the need for more action on the part of the international community to help crack down on al Shabaab to stabilize Somalia. Now, the question for me is: What has the international community already been doing that in fact has exacerbated the situation rather than help to solve it? And I think the African Union mission in the form of 22,000 troops on the ground for ten years — this has, this is essentially amount to a military occupation. The UN has documented all kinds of abuse by these AMISON forces, the UN has documented the black market sale of arms that end up in the hands of al Shabaab, and people are not prepared to kind of grapple with those contradictions. And I think until we’re prepared to do that, then we won’t see an end to the instability in Somalia.
– in 2006, the Bush Administration openly endorsed an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. That was marked by horrifying war crimes: rape, murder, extrajudicial killings, and it might be unpopular to say it, but I think people who really understood the history of Somalia would agree that what the Bush administration supported in this Ethiopian invasion was overthrowing perhaps the only fragile coalition that could have potentially ended massive killing inside of Somalia. And they did it because they were called the Islamic Courts Union, the fact that Islamic was in the title of their, of their movement, even though they represented people from across Somali society and Somalia is an almost entirely 100 percent Muslim country, that was a no-no. And so, Ethiopia got the support of the United States in conducting this brutal invasion and subsequent occupation that ultimately led to the AMISOM occupation that you’re now describing.
it’s important to highlight, you know, the contradictions of the UN and African Union here too, because what you’re describing was an illegal military invasion both by Ethiopia in 2006, by Kenya in 2011, and in both occasions, not only did the UN fail to condemn these, but they actually sanctioned their continued presence, they essentially legitimized their presence by converting it into a peacekeeping operation.
What has been curious to me is to look at the kind of the State Department side of things. In the case of Kenya for example, the current ambassador to Kenya has remained in place in the transition period from Obama to Trump. And, it’s fascinating because none of the language changes, none of the approach seems to change. So, on the soft power side of things, you have continued huge amounts of money that are pouring in towards so-called countering violent extremism programs and it’s such that the public sphere now in a place like Kenya and increasingly across the continent has been colonized by this discourse of countering violent extremism and the impact of this is that people who would otherwise be speaking out, mobilizing against military operations, mobilizing against counterinsurgency operations that are unfolding on their streets in which people disappear in broad daylight, the conversation shifts instead to your neighbor, to your family member as a potential problem, rather than thinking about the ways in which the police is being is being militarized and is, it’s actually the problem, right?
And connected to that is the forms of capacity building which I know Nick has talked about as well that take place, in which people are encouraged to put their trust in the police and the military, rather than question the ways in which they’re increasingly — their powers are being expanded.
this is a good opportunity to highlight the ways in which some of the people who I spent time with in Kenya have tried to call out these forms of neocolonialism that are that are unfolding and more specifically to call out the counterterror abuses that are sanctioned by the United States. Because that is happening, it’s not as though, again, to come back to the idea of shadows, it’s not as though all of this is happening behind the scenes without anyone taking notice. People are. And in the aftermath of the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia you had hundreds of people pouring across the border, over 100 people were then disappeared into black sites and it was Kenyan human rights activists who did all of the on-the-ground work to try to find out where these people had gone. And they went literally prison to prison, guard to guard documenting this information.
So it’s just worth noting that there are forms of resistance to U.S. empire in Africa today. But that at the same time, the U.S. then responds to these forms of resistance and this is where the colonization of civil space that I was referring to earlier is significant because on the one hand, it’s, on a financial basis, it’s becoming harder for you to survive as an activist today, unless you buy into the lingo that’s authorized by the U.S. government and, on the other hand, people are actually being told in no uncertain terms that their own lives are in danger if and when they dare decide to question. And some of the people who were apprehended in the aftermath of the Kampala 2010 bombings themselves had been activists, the people who then went to represent them in Kampala were then thrown in jail, they were activists. And, more recently, the human rights groups that I spent time with in Mombasa, on the coast were placed on a list of supposed supporters of al Shabaab, not because that is in fact the case but in fact because they had been the ones to most directly challenge the Kenyan government and the U.S. and U.K. governments for their role in the war on terror.
130 countries around the world, about 70 percent of the nations on the planet had a U.S. Special Operations deployment over the last year. Any one of them could be the next Niger.
there’s a surprising degree of interest/support for Trump in Africa. I think there’s kind of an intrigue in this figure. And that should tell us something about the publics in Africa and the ways in which they understand power and checks on power or lack thereof.
The thing that’s been striking to me in the Kenyan case is not that people have been speaking out directly against the War on Terror, but in fact the opposite. If we take the general public, right, there seems to be support for Kenyan military operations in Somalia. And that’s one of the things that I’ve been trying to unpack is how and why that’s the case and how it is that people are socialized to support militarism. Right? Well and I would imagine part of it is the same reason why you see this sort of overt xenophobia in the United States and that being flamed by those in power, i.e. Trump because you want to put people in position where they’re kind of punching down or are afraid of the other, and in Kenya where you have a growing population of Somalis, you have a growing population of Muslims in Kenya, the Kenyan authorities have done their best to sort of say
Nick Turse talking:
I was just going to say that when I was in South Sudan earlier this year, there were a lot of people that were cautiously optimistic about Trump. And then, you know, a few times I heard tongue in cheek, you know, “You finally have an African strongman in the White House, and now you know what it’s like.”
— source theintercept.com 2017-11-05