Suchergebnisse

The U.S. government is compromising democratic values for the sake of maintaining an expensive and ineffective drone base in the West African country of Niger — all while exploring new drone bases in three nearby coastal countries: Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Benin.The rationale for both the existing base and the aspirational ones is to constrain jihadist insurgencies. The problem is, there's no publicly available evidence that the base in Niger has done any good. In fact, regional trends — in terms of political violence, but also in terms of overall political instability — suggest that expeditionary counterterrorism does more harm than good.The U.S. military's Air Base 201 is situated outside Agadez, northern Niger, and was built in the late 2010s at a cost of some $110 million or more (and upwards of $30 million per year to operate and maintain). Operations began at the site in 2019, involving "intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance" (ISR) drone flights. The New York Times calls it "vital" but it has yet to demonstrate its worth to the public.During the 2010s, Niger was considered the most reliable Sahelian country in the eyes of Washington, Paris, Berlin, and others. Ruled by an elected civilian, Mahamadou Issoufou (in office 2011-2021), Niger had seemed to be entering a new chapter, leaving behind the coups and rebellions that still plagued neighboring Mali. As crises grew in virtually all of Niger's neighbors — especially in Libya, Mali, Nigeria, and soon Burkina Faso as well — Niger appeared to be more a victim of spillover violence than of its own homegrown insurgencies.By 2019, however, it should already have been clear that Niger was brittle — and that France's assertive counterterrorism operations in Mali were yielding only fleeting gains. In Niger, the 2016 election had been lopsided at best and farcical at worst, with Issoufou's main opponent, Hama Amadou, spending much of the campaign in detention on shaky charges connected to human trafficking. Niger was also beginning to produce its own militants — and its own spate of human rights abuses by the military. In Mali, France had killed many top jihadist leaders, but violence was only growing. If American airpower was meant to support the tracking of top targets, and if removing those targets did not fundamentally disrupt the insurgencies, then what good was all that surveillance capacity?Starting in 2020, coup after coup struck the countries of central Sahel. In Mali and soon after in Burkina Faso, coup-makers both channeled and stoked anti-French sentiment, eventually expelling French troops and other Western-backed security missions, such as the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali. French counterterrorism ran aground not just at the level of strategy, but also politically. The French failed to maintain the goodwill of populations who cared little if Abdelmalek Droukdel or Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi had been killed when that did nothing against the grassroots fighters, bandits, and ethnic militias that made ordinary people's lives hellish. Surveillance capacity, moreover, is even less effective when it comes to sorting out who is who at the level of ordinary fighters — just ask the French, who horrified Malians by striking a wedding party at the town of Bounti in January 2019, believing the targets were terrorists.Niger's government has been the most recent to fall to a coup, in July 2023. The combination of the coup and the U.S. military's assets triggered an awkward dance in Washington, as the administration sought — and continues to seek — an impossible balance. On the one hand, there is the imperative to uphold the plain meaning of legal restrictions on U.S. assistance to junta-run countries (a determination the U.S. finally reached in Niger's case in October). On the other hand, the administration seems to feel compelled to engage the junta with an eye to protecting the drone base. Administration officials have hinted to the junta that if it puts forward even a minimally credible transition plan, the administration will explore ways to restore military cooperation.The sunk costs of the Niger base appear to be one of the primary arguments in its favor, as well as the argument that the base is vital for counterterrorism success. Yet throwing good money after bad makes little sense, and the argument about counterterrorism is impossible to falsify, given classification practices — and even if all the data were out in the open, backers of unlimited counterterrorism budgets often make the equally unfalsifiable claim that things would be worse without those expenditures. Meanwhile, there is a circularity involved in the logic of the U.S. military presence in Niger as well. As the New York Times puts it, "The American military is still flying unarmed drone surveillance missions to protect its troops posted in Niamey and Agadez" — in other words, the drone base becomes its own justification.Meanwhile, the U.S. government appears to be simultaneously considering the possibility of maintaining the Niger base and the possibility of shifting resources elsewhere; namely, to Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Benin. The Wall Street Journal reports on "preliminary talks" about opening bases in those countries. The logic, in the Journal's own words, is as follows: "Drones would allow U.S. forces to conduct aerial surveillance of militant movements along the coast and provide over-the-shoulder tactical advice to local troops during combat operations."This logic should sound awfully familiar, as it was the same thinking that has now failed in Niger and beyond. None of the core problems have been solved: whether tracking and killing top leaders translates into wider gains; whether it is possible to distinguish insurgents from non-combatants at the level of rank-and-file fighters; and what the wider theory of change and success is.Nor has the fundamental political problem been solved or, it seems, even acknowledged: the reference to "over-the-shoulder tactical advice" is very telling. What might seem like a simple military matter is in fact a political one: again and again in the Sahel, it became evident that soldiers often dislike having someone else peering over their shoulder and telling them what to do. All that assistance and advice can also have unintended consequences, as occurred in Niger. It's not that establishing drone bases in coastal West African countries will inexorably lead to coups — but securitizing the relationship and militarizing those countries' response to insurgency will only hurt. Cote d'Ivoire has won some acclaim for its response to a nascent insurgency, for example, but more for its social programs than for its combat operations.And, finally, for U.S. forces, the temptation to do more than peer over the shoulder and whisper into the ear is always there. Best of all would be to wind down the base in Niger, avoid making the same mistakes elsewhere in the region, and keep the Sahel's juntas at arm's length.

Prospects for democratic gains in West Africa have taken two major hits so far in 2024. First, on January 28, the military-ruled Sahelian countries Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger announced their withdrawal from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a regional economic and diplomatic bloc. Second, on February 3, Senegal's term-limited President Macky Sall unilaterally postponed the country's presidential elections, scheduled for February 25; a pliant legislature voted two days later to place the new election date on December 15.The U.S., which has looked to ECOWAS as the key front-line diplomatic actor in responding to West Africa's crises, has cause for concern as well as reasons for reflection — especially about how its aversion to seriously criticizing civilian incumbents has helped lead to this juncture.The crises in Senegal and within ECOWAS are interrelated in several ways. ECOWAS has been vocal but severely inconsistent in attempting to uphold democratic norms in the region. ECOWAS intervened militarily to oust longtime Gambian President Yahaya Jammeh after he conceded his country's 2016 elections but then tried to reverse that decision; the intervention represented the high-water mark of ECOWAS's enforcement power in recent years. Before and after, however, ECOWAS reacted tepidly to relatively blatant power grabs and executive overreach by West African leaders, setting the stage for coups and other forms of upheaval.Civilian presidents' overreach included several instances in which legal systems targeted prominent opposition figures at moments that were highly politically convenient for incumbents; for example, in Niger under President Mahamadou Issoufou and in Senegal under Sall. ECOWAS had little criticism to make of those maneuvers, or of dubious third term bids by leaders in Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire, or of a deeply flawed legislative election in Mali, all of which took place in 2020.Post-election discontent contributed directly to coups in Mali (2020) and Guinea (2021), suggesting that ECOWAS's (and Western powers') reluctance to criticize civilian incumbents can actually feed, rather than tamp down, political instability. ECOWAS's tolerance of civilian overreach also weakened its credibility when negotiating with coup-makers in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Niger, and that same tolerance has also likely been one factor emboldening Sall in his recent decision to postpone Senegal's elections. ECOWAS has also lost face through its unsuccessful sanctions regime against Mali in 2022, which failed to bring that country's junta to heel, and through some members' threats to invade Niger after the 2023 coup (and subsequent and ongoing detention of president Mohamed Bazoum and his family) there. Those threats were both reckless to make and embarrassing to abandon.The Sahelian juntas' decision to leave ECOWAS has raised numerous questions about the bloc's future, as well as the future of other West African regional organizations, such as the West African Monetary Union (a group of Francophone countries with a common currency); so far, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso have not left the latter organization. Nonetheless, the three Sahelian states' departures takes a substantial swath of territory out of ECOWAS's zone, although the economic impact could be felt more in the Sahel than in the rest of West Africa, given that the former relies upon the latter (for ports and migrant workers' remittances, among other things) more than West Africa relies upon the Sahel. Pulling out of ECOWAS also lets the juntas delay transitions to civilian rule even longer, and saps ECOWAS's influence over its remaining member states.The disruptions to Senegal's electoral calendar, meanwhile, threaten to set that country back significantly. Senegal's democracy has been imperfect, to say the least: the country experienced de facto (and, for a time, de jure) single-party rule for its first 40 years, and, following the unprecedented opposition victory by Abdoulaye Wade in 2000, it took a massive popular mobilization to ensure that Wade ultimately conceded the 2012 election when his own time was up.Sall's tenure has been marked, as noted above, by a series of aggressive court cases against whoever the president's key rival happened to be at a given moment, with three prominent figures at various times banned from contesting elections. Nevertheless, Senegal's democracy is no sham, and the country enjoys several rare distinctions in the region, notably the lack of a successful military coup — and until 2024, no presidential election had been postponed there.Sall had already, with apparent reluctance, pledged not to seek a third term, and the 2024 election was expected to be (and perhaps still will be) a coronation of his hand-picked successor, Prime Minister Amadou Ba. Yet the postponement raises fears that Sall may have other maneuvers planned. It also establishes the precedent of putting the president above institutional rules.The United States government issued a fairly firm statement raising concerns about the postponement, the security forces' harsh treatment of opposition politicians, and the government's clampdown on internet access. The statement could have gone further by naming Sall, rather than referring amorphously to "the Government of Senegal." Presumably American officials are also working behind the scenes to pressure Sall to hold the election and not let the date slip any further than December 15. And hopefully officials are threatening actual consequences if that doesn't happen.This moment should also invite reflection, however, on how events reached this point. The full diplomatic record is not available to the public, of course, but if American officials did not earlier make pointed criticisms regarding the legal system's treatment of Sall's opponents, then they missed a key opportunity to prevent the scenario that is unfolding now. From what this outside observer can tell, American officials have typically contented themselves with a superficial stability in various West African countries, and have elevated some countries (Senegal and Niger, in recent years, and even more recently, Cote d'Ivoire) to "darling" status — with a correspondingly gentle approach to leaders there.As the Sahel dives into an even darker political period, with juntas arresting dissidents and independent voices right and left, and as Senegal teeters, American officials should be even quicker to offer constructive criticism to their remaining friends in the region — lest things deteriorate further.