U.S. Army photo by Christopher Klutts
A U.S. Army special forces weapons sergeant observes a Niger Army soldier during marksmanship training.
While much of the media focuses on President Trump’s inept phone call to a grieving widow whose husband died in yet unexplained circumstances across the globe, a deeper question remains: What is the U.S. military doing in Niger anyway?
On Thursday, October 19, in a White House briefing room, Chief of Staff John F. Kelly told the press: “There’s thousands of them [U.S. military personnel] are in Europe acting as a deterrent. And they’re throughout Africa. And they’re doing the nation’s work there, and not making a lot of money, by the way, doing it. They love what they do.”
Kelly described the troops as working with local partners, “teaching them how to be better soldiers; teaching them how to respect human rights; teaching them how to fight ISIS so that we don’t have to send our soldiers and Marines there in [the] thousands.”
A week earlier, Pentagon spokesperson Dana White similarly said the U.S. military was in Niger to train and advise the country’s security forces. But questions remain about that mission, and the number of troops involved.
“The number of troops involved may not be large, but the breadth of commitments is considerable and continues to grow.” -Andrew Bacevich, retired U.S. Army Colonel and author
Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press on October 22, Senators Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, both said they were unaware that there were nearly 1,000 U.S. troops in Niger, as has been reported. Graham said he did know they were “fighting terrorists,” but was apparently unaware of the size of the deployment. Schumer went on to tell NBC’s Chuck Todd: “We need to reexamine this,” referring to the sixteen year old Authorization for Use of Military Force.
The “Authorization for Use of Military Force” resolution passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush within days of attacks on the September 11, 2001. According to a December 2016 White House, it grants Congressional authorization for the use of force against al-Qa’ida and other Islamic militant groups. Representative Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, was the lone opposing vote in the House in 2001, noting that the overly broad resolution would give the President the authority to wage war in perpetuity.
Thirty-seven years earlier, Congress approved a similarly broad measure known as the “Gulf of Tonkin” resolution. It, too, had almost no dissent—with no opposition in the House and only two “nay” votes in the Senate. While revelations in recent years show that this authorization was based on false pretense, it gave the President an almost blank check to pursue military action.
Quoted in The Progressive in September 1960, Representative Robert W. Kastenmeier, Democrat of Wisconsin, who voted for the resolution “with heavy heart,” said, “The haunting suspicion remains that Congress, acting on a slender volume of information, may endorse, as it did in 1898, a disproportionate response to a limited and ambiguous challenge.”
Between 1955 and 1960, the United States placed between 750 and 1,500 military advisors in Vietnam, to assist the South Vietnamese government and “establish an effective army.” At the time, the population of Vietnam was about 34.7 million. Niger, today, has a population of approximately 21.7 million, making the current 1,000 troop number similar in proportion.
Andrew Bacevich, a retired Colonel in the U.S. Army who served in Vietnam, Europe, and the Persian Gulf who has written numerous books on military history and policy including America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, is concerned about the ways in which the 2001 authorization has been applied.
“Over the past several years, U.S. military involvement in sub-Saharan Africa has increased appreciably,” Bacevich, now professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University, tells The Progressive. “The number of troops involved may not be large, but the breadth of commitments is considerable and continues to grow. The incident in Niger offers an opportunity for Americans to inquire into what exactly is being done in their name. Such an inquiry is long overdue.”
Joseph C. Wilson, former U.S. Ambassador to Gabon (1992-1995), was also Presidential Special Assistant and National Security Council Senior Director for African Affairs (1997–1998) at a time when U.S.-Africa policy was being re-envisioned, has a different view.
“There is a lot to say about the U.S. military presence in Niger and Africa generally, but comparisons to Vietnam, I believe, are not germane,” Wilson told The Progressive. “The objective, and I was intimately involved in developing the program, has been to provide African and allied troops the training to respond to situations like Rwanda.”
Wilson is perhaps best known for his 2003 op-ed in The New York Times, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” about a trip to Niger for the Bush Administration to investigate a story about yellowcake uranium being obtained by Saddam Hussein for use in Iraq. This in turn led to the outing of his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent by a top Bush Administration official, which ultimately led to a criminal conviction (and presidential pardon).
Marcos Elias de Oliveira Júnior
Niger.
Wilson had a hand in developing, the African Crisis Response Initiative, which has since been replaced by a broader program known as the African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance Program. This new program expanded participation from the original nine countries to twenty-five, including Niger.
Wilson explains that his program was “not about saving incumbent governments but rather about keeping insurgent radicals from overwhelming those fragile regimes by force.” This has been particularly true since the fall of Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi.
“The nomads from the north were often in Qaddafi’s employ,” said Wilson, “and have now been cut loose.” This had particular impact in Mali’s 2012 coup where Tuareg rebels had been staging a rebellion in the north of the country.
In his recent book, Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, investigative journalist Nick Turse notes that rebellions like this actually opened the door for an increased presence of Islamic State (ISIS) militants in the region. But, as he explained in a recent interview on the website Truthout, while the public face of the U.S. military in Africa is its humanitarian work, “a classified Pentagon investigation I obtained suggests that the humanitarian projects being pursued in these efforts may well be orphaned, ill-planned, and undocumented failures-in-the-making.”
Turse also obtained, through a Freedom of Information Act request, copies of a Pentagon war game scenario that anticipates a military invasion of western Africa in the coming decade.
Kathy Kelly, a longtime peace activist and co-founder of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, told The Progressive via email from Afghanistan that as many as twenty million people could yet die of starvation across the African continent. “Under these circumstances,” she asks, “why would the United States want to spend millions to further militarize the region?”