There have been at least seven coups led by soldiers who trained with Americans forces in Africa in recent years and the security situation only seems to be getting worse.
\nOne year ago, Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Damiba was a military leader on the rise. The 41-year-old officer had just overthrown Burkina Faso\u2019s democratically-elected government and was about to be sworn in as the West Africa\u2019s nation\u2019s new president. Wearing a red beret and military fatigues, he appeared on TV and threw down a gauntlet. \u201cTo\u2026gain the upper hand over the enemy, it will be necessary\u2026 to rise up and convince ourselves that as a nation we have more than what it takes to win this war,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Just nine months later, an upstart underling\u201434-year-old Captain Ibrahim Traore\u2014decided Damiba did not have what it takes to win the war and toppled him. Traore, now the youngest world leader, recently shored up his popularity by ordering a withdrawal of French forces fighting a long-running Islamist insurgency by groups linked to al-Qaeda and Islamic State in Burkina Faso. <\/p>\n
When Damiba seized power last year, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) admitted that the United States had mentored him over many years. Damiba\u2019s putsch was just the latest in a recent spate of coups in West Africa by U.S.-trained officers. But when Rolling Stone asked AFRICOM if Traore was the latest to follow in this tradition, they couldn\u2019t say. \u201cWe are looking into this,\u201d said Africa Command spokesperson Kelly Cahalan, noting the command needed to \u201cresearch\u201d it. \u201cI will let you know when I have an answer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Four months later, AFRICOM still hasn\u2019t provided an answer. In fact, the U.S. government appears unwilling to address its role in mentoring military officers who have sown chaos in the region; men who have repeatedly overthrown the governments the U.S. trains them to prop up. <\/p>\n
For decades, U.S.-trained officers \u2014from Haiti\u2019s Philippe Biamby and Romeo Vasquez of Honduras to Egypt\u2019s Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi and Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan\u2014 have overthrown U.S.-allied governments all over the world. Rarely, however, have so many coups been so concentrated in a region over such a short period of time. <\/p>\n
Last fall, after returning from a trip, alongside other top State Department and Pentagon officials to the Sahelian states of Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, Ambassador Victoria Nuland was upbeat. \u201cWe went to the region in force. We were looking, in particular, at how the U.S. strategy towards the Sahel is working. This is a strategy that we put in place about a year ago to try to bring more coherence to our efforts to support increased security,\u201d she said during an October conference call with reporters.<\/p>\n
After Rolling Stone pointed out that U.S.-trained military officers had conducted seven coups in these same countries\u2014Burkina Faso, three times; Mali, three times; and Mauritania, one time\u2014since 2008, Nuland was less sanguine. \u201cNick, that was a pretty loaded comment that you made,\u201d she replied. \u201cSome folks involved in these coups have received some U.S. training, but far from all of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fact is the leaders of all of these coups have received significant U.S. training. Before Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Damiba overthrew Burkina Faso\u2019s president last year, for example, he twice participated in an annual U.S. special operations training program known as the Flintlock exercise. He was also previously accepted into a State Department-funded Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance course; twice attended the U.S.-sponsored Military Intelligence Basic Officer Course-Africa; and twice participated in engagements with a U.S. Defense Department Civil Military Support Element.<\/p>\n
In 2014, another U.S.-trained officer, Lt. Col. Isaac Zida\u2014schooled via a Joint Special Operations University counterterrorism training course at Florida\u2019s MacDill Air Force Base and a military intelligence course that was financed by the U.S. government\u2014seized power, during popular protests against a presidential power-grab, in Burkina Faso. The next year, yet another coup in that country installed Gen. Gilbert Diend\u00e9r\u00e9, another prominent Flintlock attendee.<\/p>\n
Col. Assimi Go\u00efta, worked with U.S. Special Operations forces for years, participating in both Flintlock exercises and a Joint Special Operations University seminar at MacDill Air Force Base\u2014and also headed the junta that overthrew Mali\u2019s government in 2020. After staging the coup, Go\u00efta stepped down and took the job of vice president in a transitional government charged with returning Mali to civilian rule. But less than a year later, he carried out his second coup.<\/p>\n
Similarly, in 2012, Captain Amadou Sanogo, who learned English in Texas, received infantry-officer basic training in Georgia, and underwent military intelligence schooling in Arizona, and overthrew Mali\u2019s democratically elected government. \u201cAmerica is a great country with a fantastic army,\u201d he said after the coup. \u201cI tried to put all the things I learned there into practice here.\u201d In 2008, the Pentagon-funded Stars and Stripes reported that Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, the leader of a coup against Mauritania\u2019s elected president, had also \u201cworked with U.S. forces.\u201d <\/p>\n
Why did these officers who were trained by the United States to defend their governments topple them instead? If Nuland has any idea, she won\u2019t say. \u201cYou need to talk to them about why they are overthrowing their governments,\u201d she told Rolling Stone, referring to the coup-makers.<\/p>\n
The State Department isn\u2019t the only arm of the U.S. government with its head in the sand. U.S. Africa Command or AFRICOM, which provides most of the training to African officers, doesn\u2019t know how many coups its charges have conducted nor does it keep a list of how many times it\u2019s happened. \u201cAFRICOM does not maintain a database with this information,\u201d Africa Command spokesperson Cahalan told Rolling Stone. \u201cAFRICOM does not actively track individuals who\u2019ve received U.S. training after the training has been completed.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMoving forward, the United States should ensure military coups are never seen by its partners as a viable option. That should include keeping track of the military officers it trains in order to identify them in the event of a coup,\u201d said Sarah Harrison, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group and formerly associate general counsel at the Defense Department\u2019s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs, who noted that such information could be used to improve future trainings and to immediately suspend military assistance in the event of a coup. \u201cIf the U.S. government is ignoring the fact that it trained putschists, that would reflect a broader problem of a lack of long-term strategic thinking for its counterterrorism policies.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile security training gives the United States access, which some argue results in influence, to foreign militaries, I have concerns that such efforts are not coupled with comparably strong diplomatic policies to address failing, corrupt, or predatory civilian governments that the militaries are intended to be subordinate to,\u201d Harrison told Rolling Stone. \u201cOf course, the United States does not want to be in the business of state-building, but when it gets so closely involved in the development of security forces, to ignore the contexts in which they are situated and whether such efforts will actually have lasting and positive change is futile.\u201d <\/p>\n
Coups aren\u2019t the only unintended consequences or \u201cblowback\u201d stemming from U.S. efforts to mentor foreign troops. Lauren Chadwick of the Center for Public Integrity found that, according to U.S. government documents, at least 17 foreign officers schooled via the U.S. International Military Education and Training program between 1985 and 2010 were implicated in criminal and human rights abuses. An open-source study by the non-profit Center for International Policy also identified 33 U.S.-trained foreign military officers who committed human rights abuses. <\/p>\n
More recently, reports emerged that elite Afghan commandos, trained by Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets, were being recruited by the Russian military to fight in Ukraine. Former Afghan general Abdul Raof Arghandiwal told the Associated Press that the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary force, was coordinating the effort.<\/p>\n
On our conference call, Nuland also inadvertently drew attention to the fact that while the United States had trained Mali\u2019s Goita, his government had thrown in with the Russians making, as she put it, \u201csome very bad choices in inviting Wagner forces to be part of their security mix.\u201d She said the result of this involvement, which reportedly began in December 2021, has been \u201cviolence and terror going up.\u201d <\/p>\n
Nuland\u2019s assessment, however, ignored the fact that security trends have been in a free fall for years, despite the U.S. pouring more than a billion dollars of security assistance\u2014in the form of equipment, training, and weapons\u2014into Mali and its neighbors in West Africa over the last two decades. As Rolling Stone reported in October, the Pentagon\u2019s own Africa Center for Strategic Studies chronicled catastrophic security failures that predate significant Russian involvement in the region. \u201cThe western Sahel has seen a quadrupling in the number of militant Islamist group events since 2019,\u201d reads a recent Pentagon report. \u201cThis violence has expanded in intensity and geographic reach.\u201d <\/p>\n
In fact, the Africa Center found violent events linked to militant Islamist groups in the Sahel jumped from 76 in 2016 to a projected 2,800 for 2022, a 3,600 percent increase. The spike in fatalities stemming from these attacks has been almost as extreme, rising from 223 to 7,052 over that same span. Despite this record of failure, America\u2019s playbook for the region remains largely unaltered with the United States continuing to provide security assistance\u2014just as it has for almost two decades\u2014as terrorist violence escalated, deaths rose, insecurity increased, and coups proliferated. \u201cSo what we wanted to do in the countries that we\u2019re working well with is talk about how we strengthen our support,\u201d Nuland said. \u201cIn Burkina, in Niger, and in Mauritania, we are working very closely with those militaries, with their gendarmerie, with their counterterrorist forces to support them in their effort to push back and protect their populations from this poison in Mali.\u201d <\/p>\n
Analyst Sarah Harrison sees this stay-the-course policy as a recipe for further disaster. \u201cThroughout four presidential administrations, foreign policy officials have leaned heavily on these counterterrorism tools despite evidence that they\u2019re not working\u2014and in some cases, could be prolonging conflict or making the situation worse,\u201d she told Rolling Stone. \u201cIn many unstable countries where the U.S. fixates on counterterrorism approaches, what the local population is really suffering from is a lack of resources. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s clich\u00e9 to talk about \u2018root causes\u2019 in conflict prevention and mitigation, but that\u2019s what it comes down to. What people are in need of is strong economies, healthcare, education, infrastructure \u2014which depends on resources. More military training and transfers of weapons aren\u2019t going to solve those problems.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rollingstone<\/p>\n
Tags:American soldiers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There have been at least seven coups led by soldiers who trained with Americans forces in Africa in recent years and the security situation only seems to be getting worse. One year ago, Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Damiba was a military leader on the rise. The 41-year-old officer had just overthrown Burkina Faso\u2019s democratically-elected government and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6467,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1153],"tags":[2615,2614,1100],"class_list":["post-6466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-military","tag-soldiers","tag-trained","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6468,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6466\/revisions\/6468"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}