America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (55 page)

The specific battlefields to which AFRICOM devoted priority attention lay in countries where radical Islamists had gained a toehold, among them Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon. The enemy in this case consisted of groups such as Ansar Dine, Boko Haram, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and the Lord’s Resistance Army. With the exception of the latter, all were offspring of the original Al Qaeda.

Since the onset of the War for the Greater Middle East, the United States had been of two minds about stability, seeking to undermine it in some instances while shoring it up in others. This ambivalence had led Washington to side with Islamists putting a torch to Afghanistan in the 1980s even as it helped Saddam Hussein assail Iranian revolutionaries seeking to put a torch to the Persian Gulf. With regard to Al Qaeda, however, the events of 9/11 had cured Washington of any ambivalence. Here was a disease deemed acutely lethal. Yet the treatment administered by the United States to reduce the presence of the disease in certain organs had accelerated its spread to others. In Africa, the infection appeared rampant.

The Pentagon might have called its response Operation Big Pharma. If the American advertising-pharmaceutical complex believes anything, it’s that whatever the complaint, there’s some drug that can alleviate it. If the American military-industrial complex believes anything, it’s that for any problem there exists a military remedy. It’s just a matter of identifying the right prescription and the optimum means of delivery. In Africa, the United States opted for a low-dose regimen, dispensed partly over and partly under the counter.

In contrast to the other major U.S. regional commands, AFRICOM established only a single officially acknowledged, quasi-permanent base within its AOR. This was Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. Yet this “small footprint” approach did not prevent AFRICOM from maintaining a constellation of bases-by-other-names, variously known as “forward operating sites,” “contingency security locations,” and “contingency locations.” An approving report in
The Wall Street Journal
deciphered the implications. In Africa, the United States had devised a new way “to maintain its global dominance.” Rather than “maintaining large forces in a few” places, the Pentagon “scattered small, nimble teams in many.”
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In this sense, characterizing AFRICOM’s presence as a “small footprint” was a misnomer. A more accurate description would have been “few feet but in many places.”

Yet even without fixed facilities and a large-scale standing presence, the U.S. military during the Obama era transformed Africa into a beehive of activity, with between five thousand and eight thousand American soldiers or Defense Department contractors present in the theater on any given day. In a novel twist, AFRICOM negotiated “partnerships” between state-level National Guard establishments and individual African nations. Guardsmen from North Carolina were to mentor Botswana’s army, with North Dakota charged with Ghana, Michigan with Liberia, Utah with Morocco, Vermont with Senegal, Wyoming with Tunisia, Kentucky with Djibouti, New York with South Africa, and California with Nigeria.
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As trainers and models for local forces, teams of U.S. soldiers, both regulars and reservists, were constantly rotating through the continent’s central and western reaches, offering instruction in weaponry, fieldcraft, and small-unit tactics while also employing UAVs and other means to provide intelligence support.
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Meanwhile, largely hidden from sight, special operators collaborated with local partners in attempting to ferret out the enemies of order.
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The establishment media took notice and signaled its approval. Back in 1984 the
New York Times
reporter sent to take CENTCOM’s measure had come away impressed. Now in 2014 the
Times
correspondent sent to evaluate AFRICOM reached a similar conclusion. Here was an outfit rapidly getting its act together.

The journalist, Eliza Griswold, pegged her story to the formidable and energetic General Linder. Indeed, she all but handed him her laptop. “My job is to look at Africa and see where the threat to the United States is,” Linder told her. A South Carolinian, the special operations veteran spoke “with a drawl that does little to soften the blade of his critical intelligence,” Griswold swooned. What interested Linder were not local problems but the “connective tissue” that provided context and perspective. Perhaps not surprisingly, the general found precisely what he was looking for—not simply radical Islamism but also drug smuggling, human trafficking, pandemics, desertification, and deep-seated tribal and sectarian rivalries. The list of concerns went on and on. Everything connected to everything else. “We have a real global threat,” he insisted to Griswold in driving the point home. “The problems in Africa are going to land on our doorstep if we’re not careful.”

For Linder, preeminent among those problems was the existence of what he called “ungoverned spaces” beyond the reach of effective state power. AFRICOM’s solution was to render these ungoverned spaces governable. Creating local militaries able to provide security was a first step toward doing just that, but only a first step. The overall U.S. military goal in Africa, Griswold concluded, “was to build a society faster than the enemy can take it apart.”

Of course, the United States military had recently attempted to do much the same thing elsewhere in the Islamic world, without notable success. Results in Iraq and Afghanistan, where efforts were “poorly planned and poorly placed,” had proven disappointing, one of Linder’s subordinates, identified only as “Patrick,” admitted. But Patrick, a lieutenant colonel and PhD candidate in anthropology to boot, professed optimism. (The field of study was not incidental. In the third decade of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, anthropology, along with its cousin sociology, had become a hot discipline. While its infatuation with information technology remained undiminished, the officer corps initiated an intense flirtation with concepts like “mapping human terrain,” said to hold the secrets of future victories.)
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Patrick believed that the United States had learned from its mistakes. Africa was going to be different. “We have to do this right this time.” The key was take a deliberate approach. “Give me six weeks, I can make a mess.” Patrick said. “Give me a year, I can do something.”
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Based on the early returns, doing something that actually stuck was going to take much longer than a year. Whatever the benefits of U.S. military tutelage, African armies continued to disappoint. In March 2012, for example, U.S.-schooled Malian officers overthrew their country’s democratically elected government.
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In Nigeria, even with U.S. training, security forces posed a greater danger to their own people than to Boko Haram. In April 2013, as retribution for the killing of one of their own, Nigerian troops sacked the town of Baga, destroying two thousand homes and murdering nearly two hundred residents. The Baga massacre drew a rebuke from Secretary of State Kerry, who charged that “Nigerian security forces are committing gross human rights violations, which, in turn, only escalate the violence and fuel extremism.”
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That summer, a U.S.-sponsored effort to build a Libyan counterterrorism unit got off to an unfortunate start when parties unknown simply walked off with the pistols, assault rifles, and night vision goggles the Americans had provided the trainees.
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AFRICOM’s engagement with Burkina Faso, designed “to promote continued democratization and greater respect for human rights and to encourage sustainable economic development,” did nothing to dissuade parts of that country’s army from mounting a coup in favor of the deposed dictator in 2015.
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Was the U.S. military enterprise in Africa headed in the right direction? The question was a difficult one to answer. While it was easy enough to measure inputs—no one could doubt that AFRICOM was hard at it—results tended to come in the form of promissory notes rather than bankable checks. Clear-cut successes were few in number. Many challenges persisted. In some respects the situation was worsening. As one informed observer remarked in 2013, “The continent is certainly more unstable today than it was in the early 2000s, when the U.S. started to intervene more directly.”
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Taken seriously, the judgment might have sufficed to give policymakers pause. Instead, U.S. military and civilian leaders persuaded themselves that they had no choice except to press on.

This too had become an abiding theme of America’s War for the Greater Middle East.

In the First Gulf War of 1980–1988, the United States had thrown its support behind Saddam Hussein, thereby emboldening him. In the Second Gulf War, it punished Saddam for overstepping his bounds and then, through a policy of containment, sought to prevent him from causing further trouble. In the Third Gulf War, the United States abandoned containment and forcibly ejected Saddam from power. It then sought to create a new Iraqi political order capable of governing and a new Iraqi army capable of defending the Iraqi people. A Fourth Gulf War, dating from 2013, rendered a definitive verdict on the Third: When tested, the new Iraqi order proved itself unable to stand on its own, its manifest deficiencies drawing the United States into another round of fighting.

Further complicating the situation was the evolving situation in neighboring Syria. There, the ongoing civil war to which the Obama administration had reacted with such inconstancy morphed into a multisided affair involving not only the Assad regime and rebel groups of various stripes seeking to overthrow Assad but also a new entity bent on carving out of both Syria and Iraq the beginnings of new pan-Islamic caliphate. The Fourth Gulf War gave new meaning to the term
convoluted
.

This new entity, variously referred to as Daesh, ISIS, ISIL, or simply the Islamic State, was not really a state but an anti-state. It aimed to demolish the state system created by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europeans who had reconfigured the Greater Middle East to suit their own imperial purposes. By the twenty-first century, however, the principal architects of this order, above all Great Britain but also France and Italy, retained neither the will nor the wherewithal to prevent its collapse. Europeans looked to the United States, still fancying that it owned the mantle of global leadership, to do just that. Propping up the legacy of empire, despite its manifold defects, seemed to hold out the best chance of stopping the new caliphate in its tracks. Viewed from this perspective, preserving the territorial integrity of Iraq and its neighbors ranked as an urgent priority.

By President Obama’s second term in office, however, few Americans could work up much enthusiasm for trying yet again to rescue Iraq. Furthermore, it was not self-evident that ISIS posed an immediate danger to the United States itself. However vile and vicious—qualities proudly displayed by beheadings and other atrocities posted on social media—ISIS possessed limited capacity to project power beyond the Middle East. It lacked an air force and a navy. Its small land forces possessed few heavy weapons. Internationally, apart from other outlawed groups, it had neither allies nor patrons. Even if homegrown terrorists cited ISIS as a source of inspiration, the organization lagged well behind climate change and Chinese hackers as a proximate threat to the United States.

On the other hand, the famous “Pottery Barn Rule” attributed to Secretary of State Colin Powell—“If you break it, you own it”—still lingered to haunt whatever passed for conscience in the inner sanctums of American power. Back in 2003, the George W. Bush administration had indubitably broken Iraq. Subsequent efforts to restore that country had proven a bust, the very existence of ISIS testifying to that fact. Here was the second harvest of poisonous fruit resulting from Operation Iraqi Freedom, the first harvest having produced Al Qaeda in Iraq. While General McChrystal’s counterterrorism campaign had depleted AQI, ISIS had emerged as its successor.

Yet what drew the United States into the Fourth Gulf War was less a sense of moral responsibility than sheer monomania. By now, the entire national security apparatus had become so accustomed to seeing the Greater Middle East as a domain of U.S. military action that its ability to think otherwise had withered to the point of nonexistence. Why did Washington choose to reengage militarily in Iraq? Because it couldn’t think of anything better to do.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria came into existence in April 2013. At that time, the term
ISIS
already applied to a large multinational pharmaceutical company; a 1990s American rock band; the California-based International Self-Improvement Society, offering “religion for the irreligious”; a “mobile wallet platform” supported by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon; the Iowa Student Information System at the University of Iowa; and strangely enough, the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society.