[RollingStone] The U.S. Is Losing Yet Another ‘War on Terror’: The Pentagon last month quietly released a report revealing that — despite sending forces to at least 22 countries in Africa — the U.S. isn't reaching its objectives.
The security situation in the African Sahel — where U.S. commandos have trained, fought, and died in a “shadow war” for the past 20 years — is a nightmare, according to a Pentagon report quietly released late last month. It’s just the latest evidence of systemic American military failures across the continent, including two decades of deployments, drone strikes, and commando raids in Somalia that have resulted in a wheel-spinning stalemate and an ongoing spate of coups by U.S.-trained officers across West Africa that the chief of U.S. commandos on the continent said was due to U.S. alliances with repressive regimes.
“The western Sahel has seen a quadrupling in the number of militant Islamist group events since 2019,” reads the new analysis by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, the Pentagon’s foremost research institution devoted to the continent. “The 2,800 violent events projected for 2022 represent a doubling in the past year. This violence has expanded in intensity and geographic reach.”
The worsening security situation reflects most poorly on Special Operations Command Africa or SOCAFRICA — which oversees elite U.S. troops on the continent and has played an outsized role in U.S. military efforts to counter terrorist groups or, in military parlance, violent extremist organizations (VEOs), from Jama’at Nurat al Islam wal Muslimin in Burkina Faso to Ahlu Sunnah wa Jama’a in Mozambique.
“SOCAFRICA, by, with, and through African partners must degrade and disrupt VEOs in order to advance U.S. security interests,” according to formerly secret plans, covering the years from 2019 to 2023, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by Rolling Stone. “To achieve the greatest gains, SOCAFRICA focuses its efforts on four major areas: East Africa, the Lake Chad Basin, the Sahel, and the Maghreb.”
As a result, the U.S. has consistently sent its most elite troops — Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and Marines — to such African hotspots. According to a list provided by U.S. Special Operations Command to Rolling Stone, America’s commandos deployed to 17 African nations — Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Chad, Côte D’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Tunisia — in 2021.
But that isn’t the whole story.
An investigation by Rolling Stone found U.S. special operators were sent to at least five additional African countries — the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal, and Somalia — last year. And this is in addition to myriad engagements by conventional U.S. troops across the continent — from Naval maneuvers alongside forces from Madagascar, Mauritius, and the Seychelles to National Guard deployments to Morocco, Kenya, and Somalia.
“The U.S. government consistently lacks transparency in disclosing the scope and locations of its military operations across Africa. The Department of Defense does not acknowledge the full extent of its ‘training’ and ‘cooperation’ activities — oftentimes euphemisms for operations that look very much like combat,” Stephanie Savell, co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, tells Rolling Stone.
The deployments to these 22 African nations account for a significant proportion of U.S. Special Operations forces’ global activity. Approximately 14 percent of U.S. commandos dispatched overseas in 2021 were sent to Africa, the largest percentage of any region in the world except for the Greater Middle East.
Since the early 2000s, U.S. special operators have deployed on missions that run the gamut from training efforts like SOCAFRICA’s annual Flintlock exercise — which is “designed to strengthen the ability of key partner nations in the region to counter violent extremist organizations” — to “advise, assist, and accompany” missions alongside local troops that can involve U.S. Special Operations forces in combat. The latter are conducted in secret, far from the prying eyes of the press. The former, Flintlock, has become an annual PR camo-wash that affords the U.S. a patina of transparency and a plethora of publicity as cherry-picked reporters provide mostly favorable, sometimes breathless cookie-cutter coverage of tough-talking American commandos barking orders at “raw,” African troops or “muscle-bound twentysomethings nervously watching their African protégés” or “regional forces learning from grizzled Western commandos”; all of it “under the pewter sun” in the “suffocating heat” of a “dusty training ground” of “fine Saharan sand” in the “harsh desert terrain” and “vast choking dustlands” of the Sahel.
Despite substantial engagement by American commandos, terrorism trends across the continent are dismal, according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center. “Militant Islamist group violence in Africa has risen inexorably over the past decade, expanding by 300 percent during this time,” reads an August assessment of the entire continent. “Violent events linked to militant Islamist groups have doubled since 2019.”
Earlier this year, Rolling Stone’s Kevin Maurer accompanied Green Berets on a training mission in the Sahelian nation of Niger, where four U.S. troops were killed in an Islamic-state ambush in 2017. “It is hard to see how a dozen Special Forces soldiers and roughly 120 Nigérien commandos covering 200,000 square miles make a difference against an estimated 2,500 fighters aligned with either ISIS or Al Qaeda,” he wrote. The numbers bear out his skepticism.
Militant Islamist violence in the Sahel has quadrupled since 2019. The 2,612 attacks by terrorist groups in the region over the past year outpaced even Somalia. And the 7,052 resulting fatalities account for almost half of all such deaths reported on the continent, according to the Africa Center. A quarter of those fatalities resulted from attacks on civilians — a 67 percent jump from 2021.
At the same time, West African officers trained and advised by U.S. special operators keep overthrowing the governments the United States is trying to prop up — including four coups by Flintlock attendees since 2020. SOCAFRICA’s chief, Rear Adm. Milton “Jamie” Sands, tells Rolling Stone that the United States was not responsible for the rebellions, was powerless to prevent them, and suggested a major reason for the coups was popular dissatisfaction with U.S. partners on the continent who suppress the will of their own peoples. 
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