Tag: Africa

War in Somalia

I need to get smart on this

BILL ASTORE

AUG 07, 2025

With an ongoing genocide in Gaza and a dangerous war between Russia and Ukraine, who has the time to look to Africa? As we said when I was still in the military, I need to get smart on this.

Coverage of America’s military adventurism/fiascos in Africa is difficult to come by. Fortunately, there’s Nick Turse at The Intercept, whose latest article is entitled:

PENTAGON: U.S. COUNTERTERRORISM EFFORTS HAVE FAILED AFRICANS

A new Pentagon report sheds light on AFRICOM’s disastrous counterterrorism campaigns.

I know Nick Turse from his days at TomDispatch, so I sent him this note in response to his article:

Bombing worked so well to win the war in Indochina — so why not bomb in Africa?

It seems like the goal is permanent war — you throw gasoline on it with all the weapons exports and drone strikes. And they work — war continues.

I guess that’s my obvious take — pay no attention to their words, watch instead what they do. It’s just war and more war. Given that AFRICOM is a military command, should we be surprised that the “solutions” are always violent ones?

That seems to be the U.S. “strategy” in Africa: bomb the “terrorists” while exporting more weapons related to military “assistance” (the building of indigenous African forces ostensibly allied to the U.S.). Again, it’s a strategy that worked so well in Indochina in the early 1960s …

Unfortunately for Somalia, it occupies a strategic position in the Horn of Africa. The U.S. has a major military base in Djibouti.

Besides the perpetuation of war there, I don’t know what the U.S. government is up to in Africa. The mainstream media rarely discusses it. I assume control of scarce resources is a major goal. Also, the military-first AFRICOM approach to the area ensures higher profits for and more power to the military-industrial complex. Geographically, the Horn of Africa is vital to the control of sea and trade routes. Proximity to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the Red Sea is obvious. 

In short, I’m exposing my own ignorance as a way of encouraging all of us to get a bit smarter about what our government is up to in Africa. According to the Pentagon’s own sponsored report, it’s not going well. Here’s the kicker from Turse’s article:

“Africa has experienced roughly 155,000 militant Islamist group-linked deaths over the past decade,” reads a new report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. “Somalia and the Sahel have now experienced more militant Islamist-related fatalities over the past decade (each over 49,000) than any other region.”

“What many people don’t know is that the United States’ post-9/11 counterterrorism operations actually contributed to and intensified the present-day crisis and surge of violent deaths in the Sahel and Somalia,” Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, told The Intercept, referencing the frequent targeting of minority ethnic groups by U.S. partners during counterterrorism operations.

The U.S. provided tens of millions of dollars in weapons and training to the governments of countries like Burkina Faso and Niger, which are experiencing the worst spikes in violent deaths today, she said. “In those critical early years, those governments used the infusion of U.S. military funding, weapons, and training to target marginalized groups within their own borders, intensifying the cycle of violence we now see wreaking such a devastating human toll.”

Terrorist groups are also gaining ground at an exponential rate. “The past year has also seen militant Islamists [sic] groups in the Sahel and Somalia expand their hold on territory,” according to the Africa Center. “Across Africa, an estimated 950,000 square kilometers (367,000 square miles) of populated territories are outside government control due to militant Islamist insurgencies. This is equivalent to the size of Tanzania.” And as militant groups have expanded their reach, Africans have paid a grave price: a 60 percent increase in fatalities since 2023, compared with deaths from 2020 to 2022, according to the report.

As Turse notes, U.S. special forces deployed to Somalia soon after 9/11 as part of the global war on terror (or, if you prefer, the global war of terror). More than two decades of U.S. military strikes (and strife) in the area have only made matters worse. Can we as a nation stand for more of this “success”?

I think the U.S. strategy in Africa is to continue on the same course while suppressing the news of our failures there. Our influence in the region, such as it is, is military-driven, i.e. various African leaders want our weapons and money but little else (because we have little else to offer).

So, all our military leaders can boast of in the region is colossal air strikes. Did you know we used 60 tons of bombs to kill 14 militants in Somalia last February? Victory indeed will soon be ours … if you define “victory” as rising profits for the bomb-makers.

Readers, help me out. If any of you are following America’s war in Africa, I welcome your insights.

Ukraine, Gaza, and Elsewhere

W.J. Astore

There Will Be Wars and Rumors of Wars

Checking my daily email from Reuters this past Thursday revealed these two stories:

“Diplomacy falters” is one of the sub-headings, which is assuredly the case, assuming diplomacy was even tried.

The BLUF, or bottom-line upfront, to use an Army acronym, is more death, dying, and destruction in Ukraine and Gaza.

Reuters still refers to Israeli ethnic cleaning in Gaza as the “Gaza war,” but only one side has tanks, combat aircraft, 2000-pound bombs, heavy artillery, bulldozers, and even nuclear weapons. It’s not exactly a fair fight, is it? The Israeli government says it’s out to destroy Hamas, but what it’s really after is the destruction of Gaza and the forced relocation of Palestinians there, after which Gaza will be annexed and assimilated into Israel.

What Israel has done and is doing to Gaza

Turning to the Ukraine War, the longer it lasts, the greater the suffering, and the higher the risk of further escalation. Yet the focus is always on deterring Russia and defeating Putin, as if it’s 1938 yet again, with Putin as Hitler and Ukraine as Czechoslovakia. Any diplomatic settlement with Russia will be the equivalent of appeasement, another Munich Agreement, so the war must go on, I guess until one side or the other collapses from the strain. Perhaps 1918 and the chaotic end of World War I is a better year to think about than 1938.

Meanwhile, Reuters tells me there are “challenges” in Africa and that China must be corralled and contained. Poor Africa. European nations (and the United States) are always offering answers to Africa’s “challenges,” but those answers address the interests of the West, not of African peoples. The U.S. has a whole military command, AFRICOM, to address those “challenges,” mainly in the form of U.S. weapons sales and “security assistance.”

Finally, resurrecting the racist “yellow peril” trope with regards to China is only driving that country into closer contact with Russia, which has the added benefit of justifying immense Pentagon spending due to the dual threat of Russia-China. (Democrats tend to stress Russia as the big threat; Republicans prefer China.). Thus we hear of a new Cold War, which of course necessitates colossal military spending, because do you want China and Russia to rule the world?

There will be wars and rumors of wars: And so it goes with U.S. foreign relations, in perpetuity, seemingly.

State of (Military) Failure

turse

Tom Engelhardt

Reposted from TomDispatch.com and used by permission.

Someday, someone will write a history of the U.S. national security state in the twenty-first century and, if the first decade and a half are any yardstick, it will be called something like State of Failure.  After all, almost 15 years after the U.S. invaded the Taliban’s Afghanistan, launching the second American Afghan War of the past half-century, U.S. troops are still there, their “withdrawal” halted, their rules of engagement once again widened to allow American troops and air power to accompany allied Afghan forces into battle, and the Taliban on the rise, having taken more territory (and briefly one northern provincial capital) than at any time since that movement was crushed in the invasion of 2001.

Thirteen years after George W. Bush and his top officials, dreaming of controlling the oil heartlands, launched the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (the second Iraq War of our era), Washington is now in the third iteration of the same, with 6,000 troops (and thousands of private contractors) back in that country and a vast air campaign underway to destroy the Islamic State.  With modest numbers of special operations troops on the ground and another major air campaign, Washington is also now enmeshed in a complex and so far disastrous war in Syria.  And if you haven’t been counting, that’s three wars gone wrong.

Then, of course, there was the American (and NATO) intervention in Libya in 2011, which cracked that autocratic country open and made way for the rise of Islamic extremist movements there, as well as the most powerful Islamic State franchise outside Syria and Iraq.  Today, plans are evidently being drawn up for yet more air strikes, special operations raids, and the like there.  Toss in as well Washington’s never-ending drone war in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, its disastrous attempt to corral al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen (leading to a grim and horrifying Saudi-led, American-supported internecine conflict in that country), and the unending attempt to destroy al-Shabaab in Somalia, and you have at least seven wars and conflicts in the Greater Middle East, all about to be handed on by President Obama to the next president with no end in sight, no real successes, nothing.  In these same years Islamic terror movements have only spread and grown stronger under the pressure of the American war machine.

It’s not as if Washington doesn’t know this. It’s quite obvious and, as TomDispatch Managing Editor Nick Turse, author of the highly praised Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, points out today in his latest report on the U.S. military’s pivot to Africa, the pattern is only intensifying, something clearly recognized by key American commanders. What’s strange, however, is that none of this seems to have caused anyone in the national security state or the military to reconsider the last 15 years of military-first policies, of bombs dropped, troops dispatched, drones sent in, and what the results were across the Greater Middle East and now Africa. There is no serious recalibration, no real rethinking. The response to 15 years of striking failure in a vast region remains more of the same. State of failure indeed!

Be sure to read Nick Turse on how U.S. military efforts in Africa show more regress than progress.

I Had A Base in Africa: Nick Turse on the U.S. Military and AFRICOM

turse

W.J. Astore

In the movie Out of Africa, Meryl Streep (playing Karen Blixen, who used the pen name of Isak Dinesen) wistfully intones, “I had a farm in Africa.” It’s a considerable understatement given her character’s ambition and energy and drive.  Rather than out of Africa, the U.S. military’s new motto is Into Africa, and like those cocky European colonialists of old, the military has plenty of ambition and energy and drive.  So notes Nick Turse in his latest book, “Tomorrow’s Battlefield: US Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa.”  Turse, the prize-winning author of “Kill Anything that Moves,” a searing examination of America’s war against Vietnam, turns his sharp eye to yet another misguided U.S. military adventure, this time within and across the continent of Africa.  What he finds is disturbing.

The U.S. Army likes to talk about BLUF, or giving the bottom line up front, and Turse has a doozy on America’s militarized designs on Africa:

Over the course of the Obama presidency, American efforts on the [African] continent have become ever more militarized in terms of troops and bases, missions and money.  And yet from Libya to the Gulf of Guinea, Mali to this camp in South Sudan, the results have been dismal.  Countless military exercises, counterterrorism operations, humanitarian projects, and training missions, backed by billions of dollars of taxpayer money, have all evaporated in the face of coups, civil wars, human rights abuses, terror attacks, and poorly coordinated aid efforts.  The human toll is incalculable.  And there appears to be no end in sight.” (184)

A grim BLUF indeed.  Perhaps that explains why the U.S. military is so reluctant to give Turse any information, even seemingly innocuous data such as the number of bases the U.S. has in Africa.  Turse, who happily has a sense of humor, recounts tedious and frustrating battles with military public affairs officers as the latter employ various delaying tactics to stymie him.  Indeed, if the U.S. military was as effective at winning wars as it is at fighting reporters, we might truly have a military that’s second to none.  Turse perseveres through all this, relying on public sources, freedom of information requests, interviews, and other creative means to tease out the numerous ways AFRICOM is seeking to penetrate the continent.

(As an aside, it’s worth noting that reporters who pay fawning tribute to U.S. efforts in Africa are happily accommodated by military public affairs.  Turse, an old-school investigative reporter who’s not into fawning, gets stonewalled, his reward for having integrity.)

Though AFRICOM is eager to deny or minimize its “footprint” in Africa to Turse, the story is different when the military talks among themselves.  Turse begins by cleverly recounting a military change of command ceremony he attended in Germany in 2013.  At that ceremony, speaking freely to one another, U.S. military commanders were not reticent at all.  One military commander obsequiously praised his boss in these words: “General Linder has been saying, ‘Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today.’ And, sir, I couldn’t agree more.  This new battlefield is custom made for SOC [the Special Operations community], and we’ll thrive in it.  It’s exactly where we need to be today and I expect we’ll be for some time in the future.” (3)

Sir, I couldn’t agree more that Africa is already becoming a battlefield for U.S. special ops, now and in the future.  And it’s “custom made” for us — we’re going to thrive there!  Mark those words, America.  We’ve heard their like before in the jungles of Vietnam in the early 1960s, when America’s fledgling special ops community boasted then that Vietnam was tailor made for the counterinsurgency skills of U.S. elite warriors.  We were going to thrive there too.  And look where that got us!

Turse’s knowledge of Vietnam makes him sensitive to the perils of mission creep in Africa, the problems of winning hearts and minds in cultures poorly understand by American troops, the dilemma of overthrowing less-than-tractable leaders (long ago, Diem in South Vietnam; more recently, Gaddafi in Libya) and the chaos that often results when the “bad man” is gone, the proliferation of U.S. weaponry that often accelerates regional violence, and so on.  Rather than give an honest accounting of these difficulties, the U.S. military often prefers simply to declare victory, or at least to take credit for success, however partial or fleeting.  Indeed, as Turse tartly observes, when it comes to Africa and America’s military missions there, “it’s so much easier to claim success than to achieve it.” (168)

For anyone interested in the U.S. military and especially AFRICOM, Turse’s honest, no-BS account makes for cautionary reading.  It should be required reading for all U.S. military personnel assigned to Africa, who deserve to read honest criticism while being exposed to critical thinking.  It’s a helluva lot better than hearing “I couldn’t agree more, sir.”  And perhaps it’ll save the U.S. military from having to intone, tragically this time, “I had a base in Africa.”