Going to Sahel in a Sandbasket

The Curtain Falls on US Role in GWOT's Deadliest Theater

“No base is worth much of it is situated in potentially hostile territory” - Traditional military axiom [cited by John Gunther in Inside Africa, 5]

“A fortress cannot be more useless to hold one’s citizens in check…because they make you more ready and less hesitant to oppress your subjects, and this oppression makes them so disposed to seek your ruin that inflames them to the degree that such a fortress, which is the cause of all of this, can no longer defend you.” - Machiavelli [Discourses, II.24]

A crowd demanding the US withdraw from Niger.

The US Sahel policy has reached its ignominious end. Around 1000 US troops will be leaving Niger less than a year after the coup, abandoning a $100 million drone base on which they only began construction in 2016. A small contingent of troops are also leaving Chad, which remains nominally Western-aligned but has a sham election to solidify Mahamet Deby’s power on Monday; it is unknown what he may do after that. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, all three under military governments, have formed an Alliance of Sahel States [AES] which could fairly be described as Russia-aligned. The Sudanese Civil War is a no man’s land, with Russia on decent terms with both sides and neither side palatable for the US to support because the Rapid Support Forces are accused of genocide whereas the Sudanese Armed Forces have received weapons from Iran and refuse to let aid in to rebel held areas- and themselves are guilty of causing mass civilian deaths. Eritrea, the Sparta of Africa¹, is one of Russia’s closest allies and hosts a Russian base. Senegal on the west coast remains solidly “Western aligned” but even so, appears that it will pursue an increasingly independent course under the new President Bassirou Faye and is unlikely to be used as a French or American vassal. Of the main Sahel states, only the sparsely populated Mauritania remains in play, and it seems to have begun to lean towards Russia. This round of the struggle for the Sahel has ended in a total Russian victory. The US Global War on Terror is over in the world’s most terrorism-plagued region. Not having taken the semi-honorable exit offered to them by Rand Paul last fall, the US military leaves in disgrace. If not chased out, at least with Russia already present at one of its Nigerien bases. It is back to the drawing board to see if there is any way to remain relevant in this region. We should expect the usual amount of wisdom and reflection from the US empire managers, which is to say they will have learned nothing from this costly and humiliating misadventure.

Readers of this newsletter will be familiar with the challenges to the American and French Sahel policies, so I am going to avoid an in-depth review, as this article is more of a post-mortem. For those who want more information, I wrote a thorough background last year, and have written several articles about the Sahel since:

The very short story is that the Sahel is a region on the edge of the Sahara Desert, most of which was formerly part of the French Empire. It has always been impoverished and, since independence, unstable. A little over 10 years ago terrorism exploded across the region, with sub-Saharan Africa accounting for almost 50% of global terrorism deaths by 2021, with 35% of those in the Sahel, a trend that continues to get worse all the time. For most of the independence era the US has been willing to follow France’s lead in its former empire, and France has been the most willing of any former imperial powers to use a strong arm on the African continent. As things went sour the US made some efforts to separate from French policy, but instead fell with them, though there is much less anti-American sentiment. French and American counter-terror operations proved unsuccessful, which undermined the allied governments and lead to a series of coups, culminating in the civilian government of Niger being overthrown last summer, something that many, including myself, referring to as the “last domino” falling. If a person starts in Guinea [which isn’t a Sahel state but was part of French West Africa] one can travel across the African continent- an area roughly the width of Russia- without ever entering the territory of an even nominally elected civilian government, though this will change after Chad’s elections.

In the year prior to the coup in Niger, the French had been made to withdraw from Mali and then Burkina Faso. This ended US or allied access to those countries and when civilian government fell in Niger things became much worse. The US waited some time to declare a coup as they decided what to do, because that recognition prevents the United States from continuing to provide aid unless they issue a waiver, which was not forthcoming. The French were kicked out first, and have already evacuated the country, including closing their embassy. French troop levels in Niger had increased over the year prior to the coup simply because they had nowhere else in the region to put the troops who had already been expelled from Mali and Burkina Faso. Niger’s increasing cooperation with the pro-Russian regimes in Mali and Burkina Faso put the writing on the wall for the American presence in the country. It was actually Niger which pursued a partnership with Russia; the nations had almost no pre-existing relationship, while Niger had decades of security partnership with France and the United States.

The incompetent Biden Administration tried to staunch the bleeding by sending a delegation in March, but were unable to get a meeting with the ruler General Abdourahmane Tchiani. The Sahel security expert Alex Thurston, writing for Responsible Statecraft, describes that they made the classic mistake of thinking an Undersecretary of State was an equivalent position to an African Head of State, an arrogance that African countries have commonly tolerated in the past. What they didn’t know or care about is that these coup leaders have a brand of nationalism that demands to be taken seriously. On top of this, the AFRICOM Commander General Michael Langley is an archetypal drone, and simply doesn’t have the competence to deal with such difficult matters. In fact, Langley’s main qualification seems to be that he is black. This is common when choosing officials to oversee Africa policy because the optics are necessary for Western audiences, but it doesn’t impress Africans who have a long history of dealing with white officials, know about the US’s history of racial oppression, and further, don’t actually have any more in common with a black American than they do a white American. You perhaps remember his ridiculous interrogation by Representative Matt Gaetz- the House’s leading opponent of our militarized Africa policy- a year ago. When asked why people trained by the US keep being involved in coups, which later again happened in Niger, he just blathered on about our “curriculum.” If you never saw this video, it’s a pretty incredible demonstration of the lack of thought which goes into setting our Africa policies and choosing men to lead them:

Within weeks of the disastrous attempt at reconciliation, Niger demanded the US leave the country. At around the same time, Chad ordered the US to halt operations in that country and later ordered US troops to leave. As this was going on, the Niger policy also ran into trouble at home. A letter to Congress from a whistleblower in Niamey, the capital of Niger, was obtained by The Washington Post detailing how US troops were functionally trapped at the bases in Niger. Kelley Beaucar Vlahos at Responsible Statecraft was then able to speak to the wife of a service member who reported that her husband was there beyond the length of his deployment because Niger would not issue entrance visas for soldiers to rotate them out. This got a fair amount of coverage, though Africa is rarely a matter of much interest unless American troops are killed.

US troops are practically alone in a hostile sea and unless the withdrawal can be completed soon, it may be a matter of time before there is a deadly incident. It is not actually clear how well defended the Agadez base is from a ground attack by jihadists, and the fact that a cash truck headed for the base was robbed in late 2022 would imply that security is not great. Still, no one wants to leave this base which cost over $100 million, the US Air Force’s most expensive construction project in history, and which gives access to a huge chunk of the central Sahel region and the Sahara. You can see what I believe to be the two way range of drones from Agadez on a graphic I made, and it really is irreplaceable, especially considering the nearest place one could realistically build a comparable base is northern Nigeria which has its own extreme stability problems and is heavily populated. There is no new “turf” available in the region no matter how hard they should look.

The two-way maximum range of drones leaving Niger Air Base 201, based on publicly available data bout drone range.

The Nigerien public also began protesting the US presence, something we can assume had the tacit support of the junta. The Agadez Drone Base is not like the long-running drone war in Pakistan’s North Waziristan province where the entire region lives in fear, but it is unpopular for a few reasons. Journalist Nick Turse explained what the public sees of the base in colorful terms when he reported on the robbery:

“Few in Agadez understand the purpose of the drone base or what Americans do there. They know only what they see, smell, and hear: the towers, walls, and fences; clouds of dust from speeding military vehicles; smoke from the burn pit; and the buzz of drones above their heads. The rest is a mystery.”

Agadez is the largest city in the northern 2/3rds of the country, so it is understandable that this drives a great deal of curiosity. The base is under 2 miles from several residential districts. At no time was the base “out of sight, out of mind.” Niger is also one of the world’s least developed countries, and it is a bad look to see this fancy military equipment while the general public suffers from severe hardship. Further, the continued growth of terrorism gives Nigeriens no reason to believe that the US presence is helping them. Perhaps the greatest cause of resentment is that Nigeriens live in great danger of terrorism, whereas the US presence is of such a type that US troops rarely brave danger themselves. They say this is in partnership with Niger’s military, but it never seemed to involve them working together in a meaningful way. In short, from inside their base the US saw little reason to discover or care what the public thought.

Most of all, much of the public simply doesn’t want to be used as a base of a foreign power, even if some people in the country have grown increasingly pro-Russia. Russia at least presents a different kind of partnership, even if all that happens is that Russia profits off of arms sales or Wagner gets paid from their mineral profits. One way or another, it has came to such a pass that we learned the Americans and Russians are sharing an airbase and have been for weeks, though it is what is called Niger Air Base 101 at the airport in the capital Niamey, not the US’s Agadez compound [201] as many assumed when they saw the news. [There is also said to be a CIA airbase in Niger outside of the oasis town of Dirkou, you can easily find it on Google Maps, but it has not been mentioned in any of the withdrawal discourse.]

There are many reasons that the US Sahel policy failed, perhaps the most prominent of which is that it was a lack of purpose. With the US withdrawal from Niger many will be asking what were the US’s Sahel policies, and why did they need an enormous drone base in one of the world’s poorest and most remote regions? Well, it seems to have started something like this:

In seriousness, besides countering Russia, which we will get to last, the surface level of the US Sahel policy could broadly be described as to fight terrorism, support friendly democratic governments, and to monitor and reduce illegal migration and smuggling crossing the Sahara en route to Europe. On all accounts this has been a drastic failure. Nick Turse has repeatedly highlighted the shocking increase in terrorism since the US began serious counter-terror operations on the continent 20 years ago, and further US-trained soldiers have been heavily involved in a string of coups. However, in this instance, Turse does a better job of reporting the facts than faithfully contextualizing them, most of all as it relates to causality. He has a tendency to leave the implication hanging that the coups in this region are US backed, instead of against US-allied governments. No one who follows the situation at all would believe that, but it would be easy to incorrectly draw that conclusion from the way he writes it if you know about modern US history but not contemporary Africa.

I discussed this on Twitter with Nathan Powell, who is one of the best modern historians of Francophone Africa, some time ago. Though the US has most certainly failed at its goals, there is a serious causality problem in blaming the US for things getting worse. In the case of coups, the United States trains a lot of officers, and the ones they would identify as being worth training are also the most likely to be capable of a successful coup.

More importantly, there isn’t an obvious connection between the US presence in the Sahel and the explosion of terrorism [though there are strong connections to US actions elsewhere]. Powell correctly notes that it is a mistake to call these operations counter-terrorism when they are more accurately anti-insurgency. This, in fact, is what is ridiculous about the whole thing: these terrorist organizations have few connections to global radical Islamic terrorism, and are more like bandits on motorcycles raiding villages. There is a terrible human cost to the people of the central Sahel, but the reality is that there is no evidence that even if these groups call themselves Al Qaeda or The Islamic State that they have the ability or desire to launch terrorist attacks in the United States or Europe. They don’t even seem all that closely related and may just be using the names of famous terrorist groups credibility, but don’t take direction from anyone. One way or another, the fact is that security and coups only got worse, undermining civilian government across the Sahel, and making the French and US presence increasingly unpopular.

Despite the large range of Agadez, it is hard to determine what the base has been accomplishing this whole time. Notably, though there were many stories around 2018 about the US deploying armed drones to Niger, there are none about them striking anyone with them, though France killed an IS leader with a drone strike Mali in 2021. There are presumably some known instances of lethal US drone strikes but none I can find easily. One assumes that either they aren’t doing as much as you would think, or perhaps more likely no one finds out if they launch a drone strike in the middle of the Sahara Desert, which is where these gangs often hide out. These jihadists are not tech savvy with an international internet presence and propaganda arm like we often see in the Middle East, they are desert raiders. Further, they don’t have families with them, nor a lot of permanent structures, so lethal drone strikes have probably largely been unreported. Alternately, it could be the case that whole time this large base has been accomplishing nothing but wasting US taxpayer money and antagonizing Nigeriens for no good reason.

The other primary purpose of the drone base is to monitor traffic across the Sahara. The problem with this is that such traffic of men and smuggled items goes into Libya and Algeria, neither of which are countries where it is possible to track these men until the Mediterranean so at best they were reporting human traffickers to Nigerien authorities. The EU had previously given Niger hundreds of millions of dollars of various kinds of assistance to prohibit the traffick of migrants, but this aid was cut off following the coup. This prohibition was very unpopular, as Agadez is the starting point for the treacherous trek across the Sahara and hopefully to Europe. The people of Agadez- and you must remember that Niger is extremely poor- were making a fair amount of money selling supplies to migrants and also either acting as guides or providing transportation. On top of the lost income, this created a major humanitarian issue, because few people who have made the already difficult journey to Agadez are turning back, and a human crossing the Sahara on foot is as dangerous as you would imagine, which is to say if people don’t aid them they may die. The junta government of Niger re-legalized assisting migrants, and Agadez has again experienced a sort of boom in this industry. This seems to have been one of the more unpopular things about the prior civilian government whose last President was Mohamed Bazoum.

Migrants prepare to travel into Libya from an outpost near Agadez, Niger in late 2023.

In terms of natural resources, which many people assume is the real driving factor behind Western foreign policy, this level of involvement in the Sahel doesn’t make a lot more sense. Though the French never stopped looting Africa, the truth is that in these very poor countries they benefit the most from selling goods and then acting as a bank under the CFA Franc system, which is paternalistic and somewhat unfair but has also saved the member countries from hyperinflation and the miseries of having a non-convertible currency [in immediate post-independence Africa it was commonly the case that currencies were so worthless that the issuing government would itself not accept them, but CFA Francs have a fixed exchange rate.] There are limited strategic resources in the Sahel. The most important is that while Mali is a traditional gold producer, there has been an “artisanal” gold mining boom across the region, driven by access to cheap Chinese metal detectors. The biggest production increase have been in Sudan and Burkina Faso. However there is much talk of gold being trafficked to the UAE to be brokered to Russia. Niger and Chad both produce some oil, but not enough to make it a major strategic asset. However, Chad did nationalize Exxon-Mobile’s oil operations in the country last year, which always upsets people. The big thing in this regard is a long-planned Trans-Sahara pipeline, moving plentiful oil from the Niger Delta in Nigeria to the Mediterranean through Niger and Algeria. Europe would love to diversify oil away from Russia, but this has been perpetually stalled due to general instability and lack of funding.

The main strategic resource in the Sahel that everyone thinks about is Niger’s uranium, which has long been controlled by a French state-owned corporation. Though this is would have some impact on France which is heavily reliant on nuclear power, it is not such a big deal to Niger as it produces less money for them than you would think, partly due to an unequal trade agreement. One Nigerien I have spoken to [who I should mention is clearly from the upper class, and is a supporter of the deposed civilian government] told me he wished they didn’t mine the uranium at all because the income is not worth the environmental damage and health problems. The reason Americans think of uranium when Niger is mentioned is the famed “yellowcake forgeries” which were used as evidence that Saddam Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction over 20 years ago. Still, though Niger produces a small amount of the world’s total uranium supply, it is of the highest grade. There was a lot of wild speculation from the usual suspects about Niger selling uranium to Iran, and for some reason the US chose to accuse them of working towards an arrangement to do so, which we learned was a key aspect of Niger ending all cooperation with the United States.

In terms of geographic location, most of the Sahel states lack geostrategic importance besides the concern about migrants crossing the Sahara. On all counts Sudan is a different matter from the former French Empire. For one thing, under Omar Bashir the country was heavily sanctioned and as such has limited outside involvement and developed a great deal of self-sufficiency and has mostly been outside of the range of European powers for some time. Unfortunately, currently the civil war has created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Sudan is quite strategically important due to the Red Sea coast, something which is especially true in light of attacks by Yemen’s Houthis shutting down most shipping through that vital sea lane. Before the war broke out, it appeared that Russia would be building a naval base there, though this has been on hold. Further, as well as gold production, the UAE has enormous investments in industrial farming irrigated by the Nile, part of a pattern among Gulf States of trying to increase their food security. Though as I have detailed before many are making up whatever they want about the war in Sudan and it is not generally a proxy conflict, it is widely believed [with a good deal of evidence] that the UAE is supporting the Rapid Support Forces by trafficking arms to Darfur out of airstrips in Chad, and are also providing medical care to injured RSF soldiers under the guise of humanitarian aid. Though the world has primarily avoided taking sides in the war in Sudan [a conflict where there is not any easy solution,] with the RSF accused of ethnic cleansing, if French and American influence was not reduced in Chad, we can assume they would be trying to stop Deby from allowing this. However, neither France nor the United States are currently in the position to get that concession from Chad nor from the UAE.

Large industrial agriculture southeast of Khartoum, Sudan, next to traditional fields. Many of these large agriculture projects are owned by businesses from Gulf Countries such as the UAE. The food is all for export while the Sudanese starve.

It didn’t start this way, but as the American military perhaps leaves the Sahel for good, it had become the case that their biggest interest was countering the expansion of Russian influence in the region. Russia’s gains in this regard have been incredible. For one example, though Russia has overwhelming lost every vote on Ukraine at the UN, Mali is one of two countries to have flipped all the way in Russia’s favor, while in return Russia has used its veto as a Security Council member in defense of Mali’s regime. The weapons are flowing to Mali and Burkina Faso, and surely soon Niger. Though the activities of the Wagner PMC are always hard to verify, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has confirmed their general presence in Mali. Strangely though, as said above, Niger had no meaningful prior relationship to Russia. A Responsible Statecraft article by John Lechner and Sergey Eledinov titled, “What Washington Got Wrong about Niger and Russia” outlines how it is they did this bad. It notes,

“Outsized focus on Russia misunderstands the scale and scope of Moscow’s presence. More importantly, it ignores longstanding patterns of governance and denies the role of Africans in emerging pro-sovereignty movements and political blocs.Neither the U.S. nor Russia are in a position to force Africans to choose sides, efforts to do so will only result in rebuke.”

This is a symptom of the broader trend I have written about over and over again where people are terribly governed and if they should happen to notice it is called “Russian disinformation.” There was no Russian influence campaign in Niger, and they didn’t expect the coup any more than the United States did. Lechner and Eledinov report that when Niger’s junta sent a delegation to Moscow in January they could not meet either Putin or Lavrov.

Using Africa as a chess piece does not work any longer and it shouldn’t. African countries have their own problems and for the most part do not want to be part of this. It is important to step back and consider that Russia is not the primary cause of anything which has happened. The fact is that terrorism keeps increasing in these countries. Villages are wiped out, and the cities are flooded with refugees from the countryside seeking safety. French and American security assistance didn’t work, that undermined civil governments, and created an opening for coups. Those coup governments were cut off from French and American assistance, and so turned to Russia for arms and other support. This is not complex, and Russia, despite some signs of respect like holding an Africa conference in Moscow, forgiving debt, and food aid, did not even play its cards particularly well. The reality is that the people of the Sahel have low education levels and limited access to media, most of all they know what they see around them. Further, they get a lot of their news from the BBC’s Hausa language service and French state radio stations. The Western powers had a massive advantage in terms of information, but there was no hiding failures that the public live every day.

Where does this leave the United States? The militarized Sahel policy is clearly over. Alex Thurston, again for Responsible Statecraft, covered where this leaves the US in an article titled, “Americans go home: Both Niger and Chad yank the welcome mat.” Thurston is less of a cynic than I am about the value of democracy as it relates to the US choosing foreign partners, but has a point in noting that trying to cozy up to these regimes didn’t work either, writing, “Yet the growing rejection of the American military in Africa’s Sahel region shows that the U.S., blatantly sacrificing democratic principles on the altar of supposed security ties, ultimately wound up with neither.” As he points out, every aspect of the US policy was incoherent, as they tried to flatter and threaten the military regimes at the same time, acting quite literally like a narcissistic and abusive spouse. Further, neither the French and US strategy of high level of assassinations and other targeted attacks is effective, nor is the method of brute force the juntas prefer, but they want body counts. What is crazy about this is that the worst of the terrorism is centered on the nexus of Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso, and of course the terrorists don’t care about the borders. The US was preventing Niger’s civilian government from working with the coup regimes in Mali and Burkina Faso, which absolutely crippled any ability to fight them. One advantage of this new AES is the ability for all sides to cross borders. Regardless, Thurston’s prescription for where the US finds itself after a multitude of errors I wholly agree with and want to expand upon. He writes, “The best thing Washington could do now would be to pull out troops, wait for the political situation in the Sahel to evolve, and then consider what kinds of non-security partnerships might be beneficial for all sides.”

There are a few things one needs to understand about the current situation in the Sahel. There is a sort of growing malign “neo pan-Africanism,” as some call it, which amounts to little but a hatred of France and an admiration of military regimes and Russia. This has grown popular among both Africans and supposed “anti-imperialists” on the internet. A key factor to this is that the people of the Sahel are very young, and young people are irresponsible. Look at this age distribution chart of Burkina Faso, which I chose to feature because it has a substantially lower birth rate than Niger [which currently has the highest birth rate in the world.] This is not an outlier in the region.

Around 44% of the population is 14 or younger, whereas only 3% is over 65. Almost 64% of the population is 24 or younger. The median age is 17.9 In Niger just over half the population is under 14 and the median age is 14.8. We could talk all day about what this means, but for our purposes, it is that most of the population doesn’t even remember the beginning of the US’s Global War on Terror, much less the Cold War. What they know is that there are violent and terrifying men threatening their families, and they are going to beat them or join them. A political body of adults overwhelmingly dominated by people under 35 will have a tendency towards being even more irresponsible and unwise than publics usually are.

Further, this goes far in explaining the positive attitude many have towards Russia. Despite its many problems, Francafrique had an enormous cultural impact on the African colonies and their policy of assimilation made Francophone Africans more French than is usually true of the Africans and their former colonial powers [perhaps having been Francized explains why they are so restive.] However, the young people do not have the same connection to France, and even their parents barely remember the Cold War, if at all, and if their grandparents should happen to be alive, even they would be brought up around the end of the French African Empire. What the young people see is that there is a historic shame in having this paternalistic foreign power over them, they are poor, and it is violent. Throughout the Cold War the USSR had an in with Africans in that they weren’t a historic imperial power in Africa and were seen as less meddlesome. At the same time, they were even more egregious about resource acquisition than most of the conventional empires and rarely even presented the pretense of building anything which would benefit Africans². Most of all, they traded resources for weapons which propped up brutal regimes, though they did make some effort of indoctrinating or educating people. The Russians are fundamentally acting the same way now, but it seems people will have to see it for themselves. Regardless, the role of Russia in Africa tends to be viewed negatively by most people with substantial experience on the continent, and this is not just true of hacks from the big Western NGOs.

To young and immature publics, when faced with a severe security problems, putting the military in charge makes sense. I am not ideological about forms of government, I care about what can make the lives of people as decent as can be expected and undue oppression is avoided. The truth is that the Sahel is a naturally poor region that is also vast and diverse, so one cannot expect miracles out of the government. A military government may have a wise leader- Idriss Deby in Chad wasn’t terrible- but usually in that case they will at least go through the motions of elections as Deby and now his son have done. More commonly, a junta is incompetent, and responds to people noticing and saying something about it with brutality [which I suppose is at least less condescending than claiming that you only noticed because of Russian propaganda, though they kind of play that card as well.] There is no reason to believe the governments of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, and if there is ever a winner, Sudan, will not follow this pattern to a greater or lesser degree. Of all of them, perhaps Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso, who styles himself as a revolutionary in the model of Thomas Sankara, the one renamed the country to Burkina Faso, has the best chance of success, but I am not optimistic.

At 36 Ibrahim Traore, the military ruler of Burkina Faso is the world’s youngest Head of State. He is strongly anti-French and has welcomed cooperation with Russia, though speaks of making the country self-sufficient.

The problems with the coup regimes have already started. It is hard to trust the information that comes out because the Western media and NGOs which cover this sort of thing are so overwhelmingly hostile to both military government and Russia. Talking to Africans one would find on Twitter is rarely helpful, as usually they are either one of these “neo pan-Africanists” who love coup governments and hate the French, or they are have advanced degrees from elite Western Universities and haven’t entered their country of origin in years and are just reading reports from the Atlantic Council and other such organizations. Still, there have been credible seeming reports about large-scale massacres by the military in both Mali and Burkina Faso. The Niger junta is lead by an older man and perhaps more moderate, or they’re waiting for the US to leave to make any serious moves. Chad is at least mostly the status quo, if Mahamat Deby can hold on at a distance from the French, who are now politically toxic in the Sahel. Regardless, nothing is being fixed, and there is no indication these military governments can fix it nor that they will bring in civilian governments able to do so. It is not clear how any of these countries can defeat the bandit clans masquerading as jihadists, but for now it gets ever worse.

There are a few ways the situation in the central Sahel can play out. Either the military governments don’t work and fall, they do work and are stable enough to recognize and work with [and ideally go through some sort of election to “legitimize” their power,] or these states become fully despotic under rulers who maintain power while doing a bad job. Russia has little to gain from its victory here. The Sahel only matters to US interests because the US chose to contest it and it looks bad to lose. Russia getting 10 votes in its favor at the UN instead of 7 is not a significant change, especially coming from some of the poorest and least stable countries on earth. Russian methods are unlikely to help these countries any more than for the military regimes to stay in power, though as well as the weapons Russia does have a lot of fertilizer and grain and fuel to sell. The anti-American sentiment in the Sahel is not that strong, more than anything they want to be treated with a degree of respect and like their problems matter for reasons besides to contest Russia. The Russians primarily frame their involvement as saving the people of the Sahel from terrorism, whereas the United States began to frame it as saving them from the Russians. The article cited above from Lechner and Eldinov includes a quote from a Nigerien official who gets to the heart of the matter,

“If the United States does not participate in the fight against terrorists, then why are they here? To track and contain the Russians? This is not their business. We respect America, we need their help. But this does not mean that we are ready listen to reproaches and accusations from incompetent people.”

Even by the standards of a declining global power that cannot stop losing, the failure of the Sahel policy has been an absolute disgrace. One more in a long line of humiliations. Every problem the US set out to solve has gotten worse, generally a great deal worse. US involvement was probably counterproductive but not the driving force of deteriorating conditions, but it very clearly didn’t achieve its goals. There is plenty of blame to go around, and a lot of it goes to the French. It is also just changing times, and the French and American post-colonial models are not working anymore. Africa is not a chess piece, and doesn’t want to be used as a battle ground in a new Cold War. It is understandable that the people of the region grew tired of civilian governments that weren’t accomplishing anything and outside powers who lectured them and treated them like low-level employees yet were themselves incompetent. Unfortunately they will find that military governments and the Russians won’t fix anything either. Thurston is, as I said above, entirely correct that the best move here is to leave and wait until they want us back in a non-military capacity. If the United States policy class can behave reasonably- something it rarely, if ever, does- it may not be that long before we are again working with the governments in the Sahel. Hopefully, next time that cooperation comes in a form that benefits both sides, not one which benefits neither. Also, perhaps the next time our government sets out to spend $100 million on a base it will remember the axiom cited in the epigraph: “No base is worth much if it is situated in potentially hostile territory.”

Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles will always be free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. I am now writing regularly for The Libertarian Institute. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.

1. This is a reference to Eritrea’s form of government, which I describe as “barracks communism,” not its military strength.

2. The Portuguese were even worse in this regard. They did absolutely nothing to build anything for or educate the Africans in their colonies, while dumping a large number of colonists in Mozambique and Angola, but this has little relevance to the broader point.