Forget ‘America First’—Donald Trump’s Policy Is Drones First
In Niger and elsewhere, Washington is using drones to expand the “War on Terror.”
They are like the camel’s nose, lifting a corner of the tent. Don’t be fooled, though. It won’t take long until the whole animal is sitting inside, sipping your tea and eating your sweets. In countries around the world—in the Middle East, Asia Minor, Central Asia, Africa, even the Philippines—the appearance of US drones in the sky (and on the ground) is often Washington’s equivalent of the camel’s nose entering a new theater of operations in this country’s forever war against “terror.” Sometimes, however, the drones are more like the camel’s tail, arriving after less visible US military forces have been in an area for a while.
SCRAMBLING FOR AFRICA
AFRICOM, the Pentagon’s Africa Command, is building Air Base 201 in Agadez, a town in the nation of Niger. The
$110 million installation, which officially opens later this year, will be able to house both C-17 transport planes and MQ-9 Reaper armed drones. It will soon become the new centerpiece in an undeclared US war in West Africa. Even before the base opens,
armed US drones are already flying from Niger’s capital, Niamey, having received permission from the Nigerien government to do so last November.
Despite crucial reporting by Nick Turse and others, most people in this country only learned of US military activities in Niger in 2017 (and had no idea that about 800 US military personnel were already stationed in the country) when news broke that four US soldiers had died in an October ambush there. It turns out, however, that they weren’t the only US soldiers involved in firefights in Niger. This March, the Pentagon acknowledged that another clash took place last December between Green Berets and a previously unknown group identified as ISIS-West Africa. For those keeping score at home on the ever-expanding enemies list in Washington’s war on terror, this is a different group from the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), responsible for the October ambush. Across Africa, there have been at least eight other incidents, most of them in Somalia.
What are US forces doing in Niger? Ostensibly, they are training Nigerien soldiers to fight the insurgent groups rapidly multiplying in and around their country. Apart from the uranium that accounts for over 70% of Niger’s exports, there’s little of economic interest to the United States there. The real appeal is location, location, location. Landlocked Niger sits in the middle of Africa’s Sahel region, bordered by Mali and Burkina Faso on the west, Chad on the east, Algeria and Libya to the north, and Benin and Nigeria to the south. In other words, Niger has the misfortune to straddle a part of Africa of increasing strategic interest to the United States.
In addition to ISIS–West Africa and ISGS,
actual or potential US targets there include Boko Haram (born in Nigeria and now spread to Mali and Chad), ISIS and Al Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in Libya, and Al Mourabitoun, based primarily in Mali.
At the moment, for instance,
US drone strikes on Libya, which have increased under the Trump administration, are generally launched from a base in Sicily. However, drones at the new air base in Agadez will be able to strike targets in all these countries.
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