America
Is Expanding Its War in Niger Because That’s
What America Does
By Joshua
Keating
October
27, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-
The deaths of four
U.S. Green Berets in Niger and the ensuing
controversy have shined a rare spotlight on an
obscure corner of America’s Global War on
Terrorism. There have been calls, including here
on Slate, to use this
moment to reassess the
hazy strategic objectives
of our military operations in West Africa, and
even to reflect more broadly on what we gain
from our
ever-expanding international counterterrorism
campaign. But
the much more likely response is that we’ll
simply throw more guns, money, and manpower at
the problem in hopes that it will improve, a
continuation of the same impulse behind the
recent escalation of U.S. involvement in
Afghanistan and loosened restrictions on deadly
strikes outside of conventional battlefields.
\“In the wake of the attack,”
NBC reported
Thursday, “the U.S. has been pressing the
government of Niger to allow armed drones at the
U.S. bases in that country.” This would be “a
significant escalation in American
counterterrorism operations” in a part of the
world that has not previously seen drone
strikes. As former National Security Council
staffer Aaron O’Connell
recently explained
on Slate, the U.S.
military is conducting at least five separate
missions in Niger combating various jihadi
groups, including Boko Haram and the ISIS-linked
group suspected of this month’s attack. The
ventures involve varying degrees of violence,
but none is technically considered a combat
mission, and the Obama administration stopped
short of using armed drones in the region.
Amping up the war in Niger would be the latest
example of Trump’s moves to expand the global
battlefield. The current global covert war
conducted via drones and Special Operations
raids was born under George W. Bush and
dramatically expanded by Barack Obama, but under
rules in place since 2013,
strikes conducted outside “areas of active
hostilities”—war zones like Afghanistan, Iraq,
and Syria—have been subjected to much higher
levels of scrutiny and oversight, meant to
prevent civilian casualties.
Trump has watered down these restrictions, first
by designating parts of
Somalia and
Yemen as areas of active hostilities. He is also
reportedly poised to
dismantle some of the rules
on strikes by the military and CIA outside of
those areas, including requirements for
high-level vetting of targets and a limiting of
targets to only high-level terrorists rather
than foot soldiers. In September, the U.S.
military
carried out an
airstrike against an ISIS target in Libya,
outside of an area of active hostilities, that
reportedly was not explicitly approved by the
White House—a dramatic sign of more relaxed
rules.
According to Micah Zenko
of the Council on Foreign Relations, there were
102 lethal counterterrorism operations in the
first 193 days of the Trump administration in
Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan (the vast majority
in Yemen), compared with 21 during the same
amount of time at the end of the Obama
administration.
As with Trump’s
moves to cut out oversight
of strikes in Iraq and Syria and put the CIA
back in the targeted-killing business
in Afghanistan, these moves are likely to put
more civilians at risk. According to the
New York Times,
officials plan to keep the requirement that
strikes conducted outside of battlefields only
be carried out where there’s a “near certainty”
that no civilians will be killed, but accidents
can still happen . Military commanders
said in June
that standard is still in place in Somalia,
despite its “active hostilities” designation,
but a joint U.S.-Somali raid in August
killed 10 civilians,
including three children.
Beyond the risk to civilians, there’s also a
reason for concern about the perpetual mission
creep pushing U.S. counterterrorism operations
deeper into Africa. An Authorization for the Use
of Military Force passed in 2001 to combat the
perpetrators of 9/11 is not only still in effect
today, it also is the legal basis to go after
African militant groups that didn’t even exist
at the time. The lack of public or congressional
scrutiny of these missions is such that many
senators seemed surprised to learn about the
Niger mission this month. “I didn't know there
was 1,000 troops in Niger,” Lindsey Graham, the
Senate’s leading proponent of large troop
deployments,
told Meet the Press
Sunday. (The actual number is around
800.)
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Which is not to say that the president himself
was all that aware of it either. Trump
told reporters
this week that he did not “specifically” order
the Niger mission, adding, “I have generals—they
are great generals. I gave them the authority to
do what’s right so that we win.” There’s no
reason to doubt that this is true. The overall
troop presence in Niger predated Trump, and he’s
made very clear
that he has no interest in being consulted on
specific military operations.
Under Obama, military commanders chafed under
what they saw as micromanagement from an overly
cautious White House, and there are times, no
doubt, when Trump’s laissez-faire approach is
more efficient. But Trump’s deference to the
generals also lets him
pass the buck
to the military whenever an operation goes
badly, while taking credit for successes. It
also virtually guarantees that the scope of
America’s military activities continue to
expand, and that U.S. foreign policy will
continue to be ever more militarized. (Trump has
nominated ambassadors to only
15 out of 54 countries
in Africa, and only five have been confirmed.)
This isn’t an indictment of the military in
particular: Virtually any institution will
continue to ask for more authority and resources
if they know they’re likely to get them.