This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
TomDispatch is distinctly a forever-war creation. When I began it almost 23 years ago, the U.S. had just invaded Afghanistan and, of course, there wasn't the faintest sense that what had been launched then, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on this country, would still be going on globally so many years later, or that, in all those years, the best-funded military on the planet would achieve so remarkably little (except perhaps in getting itself funded at ever more astronomical levels).
If, in fact, you had told me then that, by March 2024, the U.S. military would have been decisively defeated in Afghanistan, largely defeated in Iraq, and would never have managed to come anywhere close to eradicating the still-expanding terror groups on this planet in what was already (all too ominously) known then as the Global War on Terror, I doubt I would have believed you. If you had told me that, in March 2024, a newly formed junta in Niger (a country I then knew nothing about), five of whose members had been trained by the U.S. military, would be threatening to kick our forces out of their country because our war on terror had failed so dismally in the region, leaving behind an airbase built there for a genuine fortune, I would have thought you nuts.
And yet, here we are. As TomDispatch's Nick Turse -- who, in all these years, has followed the grim war on terror into Africa in a way no other journalist has -- suggests, it's another one down for the home team (which has been all too far from home all too regularly since September 11, 2001). Consider his striking report just one more nightmare in the Global War That Never Ends, or GWTNE. Tom
Epic Fail
The New Junta in Niger Tells the United States to Pack Up Its War and Go Home
By Nick Turse
Dressed in green military fatigues and a blue garrison cap, Colonel Major Amadou Abdramane, a spokesperson for Niger's ruling junta, took to local television last month to criticize the United States and sever the long-standing military partnership between the two countries. "The government of Niger, taking into account the aspirations and interests of its people, revokes, with immediate effect, the agreement concerning the status of United States military personnel and civilian Defense Department employees," he said, insisting that their 12-year-old security pact violated Niger's constitution.
Another sometime Nigerien spokesperson, Insa Garba Saidou, put it in blunter terms: "The American bases and civilian personnel cannot stay on Nigerien soil any longer."
The announcements came as terrorism in the West African Sahel has spiked and in the wake of a visit to Niger by a high-level American delegation, including Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee and General Michael Langley, chief of U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM. Niger's repudiation of its ally is just the latest blow to Washington's sputtering counterterrorism efforts in the region. In recent years, longstanding U.S. military partnerships with Burkina Faso and Mali have also been curtailed following coups by U.S.-trained officers. Niger was, in fact, the last major bastion of American military influence in the West African Sahel.
Such setbacks there are just the latest in a series of stalemates, fiascos, or outright defeats that have come to typify America's Global War on Terror. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This maelstrom of U.S. defeat and retreat has left at least 4.5 million people dead, including an estimated 940,000 from direct violence, more than 432,000 of them civilians, according to Brown University's Costs of War Project. As many as 60 million people have also been displaced due to the violence stoked by America's "forever wars."
President Biden has both claimed that he's ended those wars and that the United States will continue to fight them for the foreseeable future -- possibly forever -- "to protect the people and interests of the United States." The toll has been devastating, particularly in the Sahel, but Washington has largely ignored the costs borne by the people most affected by its failing counterterrorism efforts.
"Reducing Terrorism" Leads to a 50,000% Increase in" Yes!" Terrorism
Roughly 1,000 U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors are deployed to Niger, most of them near the town of Agadez at Air Base 201 on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Known to locals as "Base Americaine," that outpost has been the cornerstone of an archipelago of U.S. military bases in the region and is the key to America's military power projection and surveillance efforts in North and West Africa. Since the 2010s, the U.S. has sunk roughly a quarter-billion dollars into that outpost alone.
Washington has been focused on Niger and its neighbors since the opening days of the Global War on Terror, pouring military aid into the nations of West Africa through dozens of "security cooperation" efforts, among them the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, a program designed to "counter and prevent violent extremism" in the region. Training and assistance to local militaries offered through that partnership has alone cost America more than $1 billion.
Just prior to his recent visit to Niger, AFRICOM's General Langley went before the Senate Armed Services Committee to rebuke America's longtime West African partners. "During the past three years, national defense forces turned their guns against their own elected governments in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Niger," he said. "These juntas avoid accountability to the peoples they claim to serve."
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