The White House says a team of less than 50 special operations forces is being sent to Kurdish-controlled territory in Syria to help fight the Islamic State. It’s the first sustained U.S. troop presence in Syria since President Obama launched a bombing campaign against ISIL in September 2014. Although 50 might seem like a small number, the deployment adds Syria to a global U.S. battlefield that is at historic size. This year, special operations forces have been sent to a record 147 countries—that’s 75 percent of the nations on the planet. It’s a 145 percent increase from the days of George W. Bush. And it means that on any given day elite U.S. forces are on the ground in 70 to 90 countries.
one particular American military battlefield that often goes unnoticed: Africa. Since 2007, the U.S. has operated AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command. U.S. generals have maintained AFRICOM leaves only a “small footprint” on the continent, with just one official base in Djibouti. But Nick Turse says the U.S. military is now involved in more than 90 percent of Africa’s 54 nations. The U.S. presence includes, “construction, military exercises, advisory assignments, security cooperation, or training missions.” According to Turse, AFRICOM carried out 674 missions across the African continent last year—an average of nearly two a day, and a 300 percent jump from previous years.
Nick Turse talking:
we heard from President Obama, he sees this as just a continuation of U.S. special operations in Syria. But I think, you know, that’s basically spin. You know, he said, unequivocally, no boots on the ground. He’s right that there were some short-term missions, night raids that went on, but I think this is a significant departure—talking about 50 boots on the ground to start, and generally U.S. special operations deployments don’t end there. They have a tendency to expand.
I reported at TomDispatch, we’re talking about, you know, an exponential increase in U.S. ops on the continent—674 missions in 2014. These are anything from night raids that have been launched recently in Libya and Somalia. There’s a drone campaign. I worked on a series at The Intercept called “The Drone Papers,” where we outline this proliferation of drone bases now that dot the African continent. There’s a shadow war that’s going on in Somalia. And we also see it elsewhere. There’s just been an announcement of a new drone base being set up in Cameroon to go after militants from Boko Haram, because that force is also spreading across the continent. And the U.S. has seen this, I think, as, in many ways, a growth area for special ops and for U.S. military missions writ large.
AFRICOM, U.S. Africa Command, claims that there’s, as you said, only one base on the continent. Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. They have actually set up recently a new drone base in Djibouti at Chabelley Airfield. I did a follow-up report for The Intercept on that. They’re running at least—there’s takeoffs or landings of, say, 16 drones per day from Djibouti right now, perhaps more.
a lot of these are surveillance drones, but the ones that are armed are generally conducting the war in Yemen and also in Somalia. You know, these attacks sort of ebb and flow over time, but that’s where the armed attacks are. There’s also drone bases that are supposedly set up in Somalia now, two of them; in Chad; Ethiopia; Niger—they’re flying out of the capital, Niamey. And they’re in the process right now of setting up a new drone base at Agadez. So there’s expansion all across the continent, east to west.
if you look at the effects on the ground on the continent, it’s been rather dismaying these last years. One example is the case of Mali, where you had a U.S.-trained officer who overthrew the democratically elected government there just two years ago. You know, this was—Mali was supposed to be a bulwark against terrorism. It was supposed to be a stable success story. Instead you have that occurrence. Then, last year, a U.S.-trained officer overthrew the government of Burkina Faso. You know, this is—I think it’s troubling.
And you hear the talk about professionalism of the military and that they’re instilling values, human rights, these sorts of things. But, yeah, in reality, what we’re seeing on the continent is very different. And if you look at the groups that we’re training on the continent, the militaries we’re training, and then you compare them to the State Department’s own list of militaries that are carrying out human rights abuses, that are acting in undemocratic ways, you see that these are the same forces. The U.S. is linked up with forces that are generally seen as repressive, even by our own government.
U.S. has viewed Africa as a place of weak governance, you know, sort of a zone that’s prone to terrorism, and that there can be a spread of terror groups on the continent if the U.S. doesn’t intervene. So, you know, there’s generally only one tool in the U.S. toolkit, and that’s a hammer. And unfortunately, then, everywhere they see nails.
I think it’s really just how far the proliferation of drone bases has spread on the continent. You know, I’ve been looking at this for years, but “The Drone Papers” drove home to me just how integral drones have become to the U.S. way of warfare on the continent. You know, I think this feeds into President Obama’s strategy, trying to get away from large-footprint interventions, you know, the disasters that we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s leaned heavily now on special operations forces and on drones. And so, I think that’s probably the most surprising aspect.
I think that Libya is actually a—it’s a great example of the best intentions gone awry by the U.S. The U.S. joined a coalition war to oust dictator Muammar Gaddafi. And I think that it was seen as a great success. Gaddafi fell, and it seemed like U.S. policies had played out just as they were drawn up in Washington. Instead, though, we saw that Libya has descended into chaos, and it’s been a nightmare for the Libyan people ever since—a complete catastrophe.
And it then had a tendency to spread across the continent. Gaddafi had Tuaregs from Mali who worked for him. They were elite troops. As his regime was falling, the Tuaregs raided his weapons stores, and they moved into Mali, into their traditional homeland, to carve out their own nation there. When they did that, the U.S.-backed military in Mali, that we had been training for years, began to disintegrate. That’s when the U.S.-trained officer decided that he could do a better job, overthrew the democratically elected government. But he proved no better at fighting the Tuaregs than the government he overthrew. As a result, Islamist rebels came in and pushed out his forces and the Tuaregs, and were making great gains in the country, looked poised to take it over.
The U.S. decided to intervene again, another military intervention. We backed the French and an African force to go in and stop the Islamists. We were able to, with these proxies—which is the preferred method of warfare on the African continent—arrest the Islamists’ advance, but now Mali has descended into a low-level insurgency. And it’s been like this for several years now. The weapons that the Tuaregs originally had were taken by the Islamists and have now spread across the continent. You can find those weapons in the hands of Boko Haram now, even as far away as Sinai in Egypt. So, now, the U.S. has seen this as a way to stop the spread of militancy, but I think when you look, you see it just has spread it.
the idea was that—you know, the best of intentions there in Libya, but things just haven’t worked out that way. And it’s been the case again and again on the African continent that the U.S. has thought that, you know, sort of fighting wars on the cheap, you know, using proxy forces, would work out for them, but again and again, it just hasn’t.
You talked about the “new normal” concept. Because of the tragedy of Benghazi, the loss of life there, the U.S. has used that as, you know, some might say, an excuse to expand its footprint on the continent. As a result, there are now 11 of what they call contingency security locations, CSLs, spread across the continent. These are basically very austere bases that can be ramped up in very—very quickly. The U.S. maintains rapid response forces in Spain and in Italy. And these forces are designed to deploy to these 11 CSLs across the continent so that the U.S. can respond in the event of another Benghazi-type crisis. I think they’re seen as an insurance policy against it. But again, whenever the U.S. puts boots on the ground, whenever it builds bases, these things have a tendency to morph beyond their original—what they were originally set up to do. So I think in the future you’ll probably see them as launching pads for other types of missions.
just this morning—you know, it’s not something I reported on, just something I’ve been following on the news—we see that Kenyan forces that we’ve been backing have set up extensive smuggling networks in Somalia. They seem to have been putting down roots themselves in bases. I noticed that one of them is Kismayo, where the U.S. is supposedly flying drones out of and has a special operations base. That’s now apparently a smuggling hub for the Kenyan military, in league with the terrorist group al-Shabab. They seem to be working in concert to smuggle sugar. There’s also been charcoal smuggling in the region. So—and this is a force that the U.S. has been backing. And yeah, the U.S. has funded the Kenyans so that we wouldn’t have large numbers of troops on the ground.
Dr. Carson claims his own intelligence says that the Chinese are there. There really isn’t any evidence to that effect. He also has the opinion that—I think that many Americans have, that special operations forces are, in some ways, supermen. And we’ve seen this, you know, in mass media over the years, where SEAL Team 6 is lionized. They’re seen as, you know, so capable that just a small number of them placed anywhere in the world can turn the tide. You know, I won’t argue that they aren’t very skilled at what they do. What they haven’t been very skilled at is actually setting the stage for strategic victories. You know, the special operations forces carried out extremely large-scale operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. These were the hunting grounds of Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC, the forces that kick down doors in the middle of the night, conduct night raids. They conducted extensive operations in both countries, but, you know, as we can plainly see, it certainly wasn’t enough to stabilize these countries in any way. Special ops is exceptionally limited. They can do a lot of things tactically, but it doesn’t translate into strategic results.
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Special Ops ‘Successes’. The Army general in charge of the Pentagon’s failed $500 million program to train and equip Syrian rebels is leaving his job in the next few weeks, but is likely to be promoted and assigned a senior counterterrorism position here, American officials said on Monday. Major General Michael Nagata.
there’s a great tradition in the military of failing upwards. And I think you’ve seen it again and again during the global war on terror. You know, commanders who have overseen, at best, campaigns with checkered results have again and again been promoted to senior positions. You know, this has been endemic of these wars, I think, because we haven’t seen any victories in them. But if you can, you know, fight it out at the Pentagon, if you can win the bureaucratic wars, there’s really the only way to go: up.
the training of these rebels in Syria. this was another of the special operations forces’ training efforts around the world. This is generally what they do everywhere. And they were tasked to train, “moderate” Syrian rebels. This was a program worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And it was supposed to produce 5,000 vetted rebels this year and then thousands more in the years to come. They had to fold up this program and just abandon it this year, because while they were supposed to have 5,000, there were really five to 10 rebels that were actually on the ground.
you can count them on one hand. Those that were set down and just sent off into Syria were captured or killed immediately. Then a second batch was sent in, and they’ve promptly turned over their weapons and gear to the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda-affiliated terror group that operates in Syria. This is—again, it’s been endemic to special ops training programs that we’ve seen elsewhere around the world—Iraq, Afghanistan. You know, they’ve gone in, they tried to create proxy forces, but they’ve crashed and burned again and again.
part 3:
If you listen to U.S. Africa Command, AFRICOM, what they say is that there’s one U.S. base on the continent: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. And for years they’ve held to this. Earlier this year, the commander of AFRICOM, General David Rodriguez, admitted that there are also 11 what he calls CSLs, contingency security locations, on the continent. AFRICOM will not call these bases. They’re basically staging areas, in their mindset. And they’re prime for a rapid expansion. But beyond, you know, these sites, Africa Command says that there’s no other permanent U.S. presence on the continent. You know, for the last year, basically, I’ve dug into this. It’s something I’ve covered in the past, and I wanted to see exactly what the U.S. footprint in Africa looks like today. And what I was able to come up with was a list of a little more than 60 sites, outposts, access points, that have been set up all across the continent, north to south, east to west. We’re talking about small special ops bases, austere airfields that are used to fly drones out of, staging areas so that the U.S. can send rapid response forces from Europe onto the African continent. And, you know, this is going on all over.
there are outposts right now in Algeria, Botswana, Central African Republic, Chad. There was a small site in South Sudan, in Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, a couple of small drone bases in Somalia—not just Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, but another smaller airfield used to fly drones out of, called Chabelley Airfield. There’s an access point in Namibia. They’re basically continent-wide coverage, in one form or another, from port facilities that service U.S. ships to a major base like Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and all things in between.
It was a former French Foreign Legion outpost, actually. And when the U.S. moved in there, shortly after 9/11—it was in 2002—they set up a—you know, a very austere camp, and they said that it would be a temporary facility. Now, it’s expanded to almost 600 acres, from that original 88. They built up a very large special operations compound. Drone operations really outgrew the base, so they were moved elsewhere, but we have manned aircraft there flying out of there on a constant basis, surveillance aircraft, fighter jets, F-15s.
I think there’s always a real worry about blowback, to use an old CIA term of tradecraft. And what blowback traditionally was, was the U.S. special operatives conducting operations abroad unbeknownst to the American people, and then repercussions from them blowing back on America, but the U.S. public would be blind to it, because these operations went on unbeknownst to them, even though it was their government and their tax dollars paying for it. And I think this is—this is the problem with secret expansions of this type in Africa. We’ve gotten ourselves involved in all sorts of conflicts that were generally localized, to begin with, but we create enemies there. And we know that these enemies tend to spread, and then they tend to take the fight to U.S. interests elsewhere in the world, so people suffer.
we’ve seen a proliferation of transnational terror groups on the continent at the very time that the United States is trying to combat that, that we put in the money, put in the bases, we’ve put in the troops, all to stop the spread of terror, but, you know, at the very same time, we’ve seen terror groups spread all over the continent. Now, you know, correlation doesn’t mean causation, but it’s something that we really have to think about.
U.S. presence as a threat to these countries’ national security. people on the ground in these countries, they know what’s going on, generally, even if people in the United States are blind to it. And I think it creates a lot of ill will. If you look at the place where we have an avowed base, Djibouti, which is a Muslim nation, one reason that the drone operations were moved out of Camp Lemonnier to another site was that Djiboutian air traffic controllers controlled the airfield there, because it’s a civilian airport and a military airport. It’s the same runway. They were so incensed by the drone operations that were going on there, they were creating unsafe conditions for the U.S. military and for international flights that were coming in. So there are all these unseen repercussions that go on all around the world.
I think that if the U.S. wants a presence on the continent in some way, I think it has to be upfront, transparent about what it’s doing, and I think the military really needs to be de-emphasized. If you look back over the last decade, this hasn’t been successful in any way. You know, we talked about the Chinese influence on the continent with economics. The Chinese have brought projects, brought money, but, you know, they haven’t done much for labor rights there, they haven’t done much for the environment. These are things that we could do—sustainable development, that type of thing. If the U.S wants to be on the ground there, I think that would be a much better usage of funds.
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Nick Turse
fellow at The Nation Institute and the managing editor of TomDispatch.com. His most recent book is Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa.
— source democracynow.org