Angry Planet - Congress No Longer Sends America to War

Episode Date: October 30, 2017

An ambush killed four U.S. Special Operations soldiers in the North African country of Niger. Before the incident, few Americans had ever heard of Niger and fewer knew American soldiers were fighting and dying on the continent.What were the troops (a mix of Green Berets and support troops) doing there, and who is ultimately responsible for their deaths? This week, War College looks for some answers along with Derek Gannon, a retired Green Beret, and Joseph Trevithick, who’s been studying the fluid situation in Africa for years.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. You can reach us on our new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The men on the ground believe that what they're doing is they're creating an army so the United States military, the regular military, the tanks, helicopters, guns, and parachutes types of guys don't have to put boots on the ground in Africa. You're listening to War College. A weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. A report dated a few years ago, said U.S. Special Forces were operating in more than 90 countries.

Recently, we learned one of those was Niger Africa. And the only reason the public knows anything about it is because of four fatalities among the U.S. troops involved in the fight. This week, we're going to talk about what happened. in what America's military is doing in Africa. Joining us are former Green Beret and current softwrap.com reporter Derek Gannon, as well as show favorite Joseph Trevethic, who's been following America's wars in Africa for years

and currently reports on them for TheDrive.com. Okay, so let's get the basics out of the way. Derek, we'll start with you. What happened? So basically, what happened, what we know and what we found out over at Soft Rep, pretty much within a couple hours of the incident, was at a Green Beret team that was a, There in Niger on a J-set or a joint combined training exercise with the Nigerian government and military were assigned to about 30 Nigerian special troops out of an intelligence brigade out of the Nigerian military.

And they were in the southwest region of Niger in the Tila Berry region just outside of a village called Tango Tango. Now, their mission initially was to basically find ground intelligence. I'm going to use that word very specifically on a individual with a known al-Qaeda in the Maghreb and Islamic State in the Greater Sahara Ties that was operating in the southwestern region and Niger doing some cross-border operations. Now, what they did was they went to that village under local intelligence to try to what's kind of coming out is not maybe even capture him, but more unlikely collect intelligence on his operations. and then if they could capture what we believe is the Islamic State Negator Sahara's leader. His name's Abu Walid Sarahui. Basically, they got to that position. He and his folks were not there.

So they started to return back to their base camp in the Tili Bari region of Nishir. And they stopped over near a village called Tango Tongo. And so basically they stopped in the village of Tango Tango to have the Nigerian military used it as an outpost and they were resupplying there. The Green Beret team that was there was a force of 12 with as of yet unknown number of special forces support soldiers, namely the two that were killed, Jeremiah Johnson and La David Johnson, were support soldiers. And they were mainly using those folks as drivers of the lightly armored technical vehicles or four-wheel drive vehicles that they were using in the region. So what the Green Beret team and the Green Bray command did was they split the team up half and half like we usually do.

Half of them stayed with the convoy, the other half decided to have a meeting with the local leaders. So what we used to call a key leadership engagement or meeting. What is known now as elements of the Islamic State in the greater Sahara that's being led by this Zahawi fellow knew of their whereabouts. The southwest region of Mejia is a very fulani nomadic trials. heavy, which the ISIS in the Greater Sahara, AQIM, and Boca Haram recruit from heavily. And it's believed that neighborhood that they were in or villages they were in were sympathetic to the Islamic State ideals, sort of speak, and were basically delaying the special forces team from leaving the actual village itself so they could allow these

terrorist forces to set up an ambush, which they did in the, it was about a 50 plus size force split them in half and the team was pretty much left on the ground without air support and fought these folks for about an hour until the French mirages flew overhead and the French special forces with their Puma showed up. Can we talk for a minute about what this mission was really all about? I have a question that for me spans across the whole plan in Africa. Now, I can make it a little more specific than that. But who is Sarawi? And We think he's a high value target. What does that even mean in a case like that?

Do we think this guy is coming here to the United States? Is he really going to come to my house and blow it up? I mean, try to, if you can explain, like, who these guys are and why we're there. That'd be great. Well, I'll answer your last question first. Absolutely no, Zahawi or the Islamic State cannot nor will come to the United States. That's their dream. They don't, you not possess the man.

power to travel to the United States. So who is Zahawi? Well, that kind of dills down into the history of the West African sub-Sahara region of homegrown terrorism. Zahawi came from a group known as the Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb. Now, that's an amalgamation of a couple West African Salifist-le terrorist organizations that have been operating in the Western African-Sahel region that the French have been dealing with for years. And one of the main forces of the al-Qaeda and the Maghreb is a group known as the Al-Marbutan. And I can't do a lot of good French accents, so imply the French with that name because it is Algerian French.

This group is led or was led or is led because I'll get to that point in a second. by a man named Maktar Bel Moktar, otherwise known as Lahore or the One Eye or the Marlboro Man. Now this guy, this guy is an interesting guy. He's been around the jihad since the late 70s, early 80s, when he was, he traveled from West Africa, his areas in Algeria, where he's from to Afghanistan in the early 80s and got trained in the bin Laden camps when, you know, unfortunately we were supporting the Mujahjaddin. against the Soviets, learned all of that information and all that fun stuff in the camps, the bin Laden camps in Afghanistan.

And that's where he lost his eye, actually. He was juggling a Soviet grenade as a joke during a training exercise. And, you know, I think he dropped it and lost his eye. He came back to Africa after that and brought his al-Qaeda ideals with him and started up small groups of Mass Brigade, ones who bathed in blood, the Almuritin. And then it just became he pledged fealty to the, the, the, as al-Qaeda Central, as we call it, and reflagged under the al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, known as Albarnutain.

Now, Zahawi was an up-and-com, he's a young guy. He's an up-and-coming commander who was, it's been rumored that Mokhtar himself groomed this young man into being a Salafist leader. Moktar, Bell Moktar, we like to call him the Teflon jihadi, because nobody really knows if he's dead or not, because he's, the United States has said they drone struck him four or five times. So Zaharawi became kind of disoval. allusion with the Arab strong ideals of al-Qaeda in the Maghreb and was really, really, really

enamored by al-Baghdadi's declaration of the caliphate and the way the Islamic State is kind of a younger, more social media, hip, you know, apocalyptic terror group. He decided to take his brigade of his loyalists with him, sliced off from the al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, pledged his fealty to al-Baghdadi and started raising a black banner of the Islamic State and named it the Islamic State in the greater Sahara. And this was in late 2016. Since then, a lot of these West African regions around there has a lot of nomadic tribes. And then there's a bigger one, the biggest one called the Fulani tribe.

He began to recruit heavily from the Fulani as well as another group that does that as well is Abu Bakrishakow's Boko Haram, which is situated in Lake Chad Basin, which is, has been operating with impunity in southwest Niger. He has, you know, caviar dreams of becoming the man who reunites the, the Magreb, if you will, with the caliphate. And, you know, and that's where we're at right now. He's been in a heavy, heavy recruiting binge along the tri-border area, the Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. Joe, you've been covering the American military in Africa for years. How does all of this fit in with the big picture there?

This has been going on for some time, and recently at an unprecedented preface conference, really the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, pointed out that the mission in Niger has been going on for at least two decades. And it predates the 9-11 terrorist attacks. And it's become significantly more important since the collapse of Omar Gaddafi's regime and his subsequent execution in Libya following. a Western-backed intervention there in 2011, and he had been more or less holding back a number of the nomadic and other sort of terrorist groups that we've just heard about in great detail. And a significant number of those long, long time, not just jihadis, but they're their Tuaregs and they're Flawney, and there were other people who had a variety of disparate

grievances against a number of different regimes. You know, MoMAGadoffi had been very impressed by their reluctance in many cases to acquiesce to the government of Chad, who he had waged a war against. And so, you know, these people had been in the region for some time. And after Momor Gaddafi's regime collapses, they get to get their guns and they raid a few state arms dumps, and they drive straight across the desert into Northern Mali and precipitate crisis there that ultimately leads to a coup that overthrows the government in that country. And then the situation completely goes off the rails, prompting a U.S.-backed French intervention.

And that's in January 2013. And that brings sort of to the fore the latest incarnation of this really longstanding mission that is now very much concerned with providing support to this ongoing counterterrorism peacekeeping effort that is both African and French predominantly in Mali. There is an ongoing crisis in Libya that has taken on a number of new dimensions in the past couple of years. There is, you know, what we've already heard about, these crises in the tri-border region on the other end of Niger due to Boko Haram.

And so Niger has, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, become an exceptionally strategic country located right in the middle of this very bad neighborhood. And the United States begins to expand its presence there in particular. These individuals who were ambushed in Niger earlier in October were conducting a mission in support of this overarching counterterrorism campaign plan, which is nicknamed Operation Juniper Shield. And so that's what's driving this strategy throughout this portion of Africa, the north and western region of what's called the Sahel. And you'll hear this. And the sawhole is a term for basically where the Sahara Desert ends, but before true sub-Saharan Africa begins.

And it's this intermediate sort of desert scrub portion of the continent that has a ton of what we like to call. ungovernance space where central governments simply do not have the capacity to exercise their authority. They may not even know what's out there in terms of the basic geography. A lot of what the United States has been doing over the last decade has been just helping countries like Niger map out their own country because there's not a lot of population centers. And that's exactly why these terrorist groups can drive about in their technicals and flourish with significant impunity. is just because it's exceptionally difficult to maintain control over vast areas that are virtually inhospitable. So, I mean, that's, it sort of gives you a broad picture of what you're talking about here

and why it's so fluid and why it can be so difficult to get a grasp on it for people who haven't been following it for so long. That makes so much sense. And Niger is also, if I understand right, it's one of the absolute poorest places on Earth, right? And the government has been remarkably unstable, and they've had a number of coups in the last few years, too. So they're not going to make much in terms of partners for the United States. Well, I would, I just want to jump in there. They did have a coup in 2010. Since then, the government there has been exceptionally stable compared to its neighbors.

And I'm just old. I'm just old, Joe. I'm just old Joe. 2010 seems like yesterday to me. no it just it is there are a lot of coups in the region um it's important to point out it's yes there is point out uh how nigerre came to be the center of gravity is in no small part that the center of one of the more important centers of gravity was initially in moritania and there was a coup in moritania and then it shunted into molly and then after the uh twaregs

and sardine the uh islamist showed up in in 2012 and And the coup there shunted the center of gravity largely into Burkina Faso, which then started to experience political instability around 2012, 2013 itself, which then also further prompted this push into Niger. I have a document from Africa Command. And as of 2011, Niger was second to last of eight countries in engagement priority. So it's not a given. You know, stability in this part of Africa is unfortunately not a given. These regimes have, to very dubious human rights records, don't really tolerate political dissent. Is Nietzscheer worse than any other?

I would really not want to get into that. But, you know, there are issues. There are definitely issues, and it's worth pointing out for sure. Yeah, there's definitely, there's definitely a no set ranking strike. on who the best, worst option in Africa. He's absolutely correct. That would be hard to, hard to gauge, actually. Why does the military have authorization to be fighting there on behalf of America?

How did that happen? I think that's another big picture question a lot of people are asking. Is this a declared war? Well, the AUMF is the bigger, the much bigger issue. Oh, yes. You know, that law was passed in the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, was intended to give President George W. Bush the freedom to more or less go after Al Qaeda in all of its forms anywhere it existed at the time. It has been used ever since then by

both President Obama and now by President Trump to authorize military action against associate groups or groups that can be determined by a very expert U.S. government lawyers to be associated with global al-Qaeda. This has been used to authorize action against Islamic State, which is an evolution of al-Qaeda in Iraq. So, and now that there's sort of been this bunny hopping, legally speaking, that since Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is understood to be an evolution of al-Qaeda in Iraq and covered under the 2001 authorization of the use of military force law, that then associate groups

of Islamic State are, as a result, also covered by that extension. It's a, well, as I said, it's, I laugh and I really shouldn't laugh, but it is how the United States has waged war against terrorists across the globe for the last 16 years. And there has been no end of talk about Congress repealing that law and passing a new one to compel the United States government to come up with a new argument, which has generally gained no traction, mainly because I think that most politicians would prefer to stay away from this debate because it brings up really annoying questions of, well, you were in favor of this for a very long time, but now suddenly, there's been this one thing that apparently makes it no longer okay. And, you know, that may not matter for you and me. It may not matter for the vast majority of Americans. It may not matter for the vast majority of people who live in the places that we were conducting counterterrorism operations. But it matters when it's the exact kind of sound bite that can pop up in an attack at. And so it matters to these people. It matters to why Lindsay Graham can say he had no idea that there were, you know, more than 800 troops. You know, 800 to 1,000 troops in Niger one day and then a week later he can say, we need more troops in Niger. We definitely need more troops in Niger.

I mean, that's how this happens. All right, listeners, we're going to pause here for a quick word from our sponsors. We'll be back after this. Thank you for listening to War College. You are back on with Derek Gannon and Joseph Trevethic, and we are talking about America's wars in Africa. So, Derek, where does the buck stop militarily? I mean, obviously with the president, right?

And there's a whole mess of people in Washington. But who's running the show on the ground there? Well, I want to touch on the authorized use of military force for just a second, if I could. Definitely. That authorized use of military force against, even in the title tells you exactly how broad spectrum it is. It's authorized you. It's a military force against terrorist organizations. And that was written into law the 18th of September 2001, literally not less than a week after 9-11. And since then, the AUMF, as it's been parsed down, is literally the global war on terror.

It is an open bounty on any, and what was touched on was on any al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups. It's just in the 16 years at this blanket war decree of a global war on terrorism has been around, it's just kind of absorbed new terrorist organizations instead of just Al-Qaeda affiliates as a whole. For instance, in 2008, al-Shabaab, Harakata al-Shabaab and Somalia had yet to pledge their loyalty to al-Qaeda Central. And they're more of an eastern regional terrorist organization trying to create an after- African Caliphate. And in the early 2009's, I believe, the then leader of the Al-Qaeda, or excuse me, of Al-Shabaab, pledges loyalty al-Qaeda, which split that terrorist organization into because half wanted to stay national for an African caliphate. The other guys wanted to go pro and go international. So the AUMF is literally what we call the global war on terror. It is an open-ended decree from President Bush that the Obama administration and what is just been mentioned, the Trump administration has literally used and has touched little. Now, with that being said, where the buck stops with it politically, obviously is the Senate Armed Armed Services Oversight Committee. If they're not getting these weekly, daily, monthly briefings on special operations and special forces missions, specifically in Africa, then maybe these folks should not be sending their intern.

of some of these meetings and actually listen to what's been going, what is going on in these closed door sessions. As far as militarily, where does the buck stops? The buck always stops at the Department of Defense, obviously, and the command, and if you really want to get technical, the commander in chief is overall authority over the United States military. We know that. But militarily, where the buck stops and where the information flow, I think, is bottlenecking as it always has. And it's not to their, it's not their fault. There's a lot of information coming through these doors is literally the Pentagon itself. And how do you deal with every other week? There's either we are, you know, two deaf cons away from launching a first strike on North Korea

to the very next thing is that we're, that Lindsay Graham comes out of a closed door session with General Mathis. And all of a sudden in an ad hoc press briefing says you're going to expect to see more special operations in U.S. military actions in Africa, not less. And also, alluded to the fact that they're actually going to have a meeting and changing the rules of engagement for advisors that are already on the ground to where instead of a defensive posture, meaning if you feel that your life is in danger or threat, you can engage a target now to where the hell that you're actively looking at

is involved with engaged and or supporting a terrorist organization. You can openly engage them. That, to me, is a declaration of a low-intensity conflict, otherwise known as a war. But that's my opinion, but that's not what was on paper. the military there's a lot of covering up uh you know these risk assessments was the team prepared was the team underprepared did they lack combat experience which to me to me my my point to that my counterpoint to that is i know of several of my close friends and several of members of the of the

teams of green berets that infiltrated north of northern afghanistan uh as america's response in october of 2001 that had little to no combat experience and routed and destroyed the Taliban in eight weeks. So that argument doesn't hold water with when you talk about special operations and special forces, soldiers in general. As far as where the buck stops, it's always, I'm not saying that the teams can run amok without any oversight. The buck militarily is going to stop with SOC africom. It's going to stop with SOCACACACCOM and then the Pentagon itself. And in essence, special operations command, along with the major commands,

such as the Department of Defense, really need to kind of figure out, are we briefing Congress good enough, which I tend to believe, having spent 16 years in special operations, and in the military, the amount of paperwork that I've had to write for after-action reviews,

I hope someone's reading those. So this is where we're in the gray zone. We don't really know right now. This is a new war. This is a new battlefront that a lot of Americans don't know. And as Jim pointed out, we've been in Africa since for decades.

I mean, honestly, since the 60s. It's been, it was a huge Cold War proxy, you know, Tug of War Battleground, 60s in the 70s, and then, you know, China, Russia, and India and the United States, started looking at Africa as a really, really, really, really good strategic natural resource grab. So, you know, the permanent five of the United States, United Nations Security Council, which involves the major first worlders, if you will, have been involved with their fingers, in Africa for a while. So where does, that's a great question.

I don't know if I could even answer it or have. Where does the buck stop? And how do we deal with the fallout from that? It doesn't sound like you guys are describing any kind of clear and present danger to the United States, right? Why are we there? Why are we there? It does not. There is no clear and present danger that I can see other than already mitigated.

positions, you know, stopgaps put in place that I see to the sovereignty, if we're going to use large words of the homeland or the United States. What I see is in operation and a mission with the heavy use of, like I, you know, these, these green berets who are somewhat, and I know this is a weird term, somewhat of an armed anthropologist themselves to go in there and assess the situation and try to build up a host nation itself. Now that is a small, footprint. I think you have to look at, you have to look at a couple mitigating factors. One, I'll be political for a second. You have to look at the 2014 cease of combat operations in Afghanistan was a huge win for the Obama administration and a lot of his, his base. However,

that money had to go somewhere. That money had to go somewhere. The funds for operation enduring freedom Afghanistan were shifted and correct me if I'm wrong, Jim, were shied. We're shifted to initially the Horn of Africa for the Siege of SOTA, which is a combined joint Special Operations Task Force and the Horn of Africa, but got an influx of not only funding and equipment but troop count from Operation Enduring Freedom Afghanistan, which was then shifted over to Africa under the moniker of Operation Enduring Freedom Trans-Sahara. And under this blanket, AUMF, like have as many missions against counterterrorism. and missions started, Operation Juniper Shield came of that.

It was coming a bit before then, too, because you saw it as the drawdown, because the drawdown in Afghanistan had been discussed for a long time, and so then that emphasis shifted, and, you know, the big way you saw this, and you just mentioned it there about the influx in troop count was that when a third special forces group, the Army's third special forces group more or less got freed up from this this thing in Afghanistan, they were immediately retasked to North and West Africa and they became a primary trade provider there. Which was their original area of operations prior to the analogy? So look, please tell me that I'm wrong.

But what you both have said, it sounds to me like they are there because the money had to go somewhere, the momentum had to go somewhere, and the bureaucracy is running on autopilot. I would say that a lot of that is correct in a way. But it's also long been the position of the United States. And this is a Cold War mentality. It's long been the position of the United States that stable regions are in U.S. interests. And if you want to pick unstable regions, I mean, you could do a lot.

worse than picking north and west Africa. And I think rightly some time ago, it was became at least in sort of dark corners of the Pentagon and of the state's apartment that Africa was going to become this sort of perpetual nightmare. And if there's something that's running on autopilot, it's the idea that we need to help in Africa. There's also a really nasty post-colonial legacy in Africa. which impacts just how much Westerners especially can do visibly.

And beyond needing to do something, it's still been this operational backwater. And it's long been that way. When U.S. Africa Command was created at the tail end of the Bush administration, when the idea for a dedicated command for Africa was, was formalized, which came into being fully in 2008. It was billed as something that was going to be totally different from all of the other regional military commands that we have. And there was going to be this heavy integration with both the State Department and with the U.S. Agency for international development. And this was exceptionally important because people sort of rubbed the

view that the security component was important, but it was still relatively mired compared to the fact that significant parts of Africa just did not have clean drinking water, and significant parts of Africa simply did not have access to basic medical support, and that if you were going to talk about drivers for security problems, people without clean drinking water and people without access to basic government services who have only experienced weak institutions, Well, those people are the bread and butter of militant groups, and not even just terrorist groups. I mean, just militant groups up down and sideways on the spectrum. I mean, if you want to recruit people, people who are not starving, because starving people can't fight,

but on the verge of starving and who are tired of seeing leadership figures driving around in their Mercedes, well, there is a ton of those people in Africa because that's sort of the way it is at the moment. And I think somebody said, we really need to do something about that. And then somebody said, yes, we are now going to do something about that. And now that's been what's sort of running on autopilot is this is that, you know, and you hear it at every single one of these official briefings. And people say, what are we doing in Africa? They ask this question you've asked. What are we doing in Africa?

And they give the stock answer in this bureaucratic speak. we are building partner capacity. We are supporting, you know, the development of democratic institutions. We are doing all these things. And, you know, never really getting down is an integrity of how and what are your metrics. And right now, the most common metric, and this is something I've heard, especially from the development community, friends of mine who worked in Africa, they say the metric is money spent. It's always money spent. And that's an exceptionally common metric in international development.

It's not an uncommon metric in military operations. Money spent. Money spent. And the easiest way to do that, of course, is to plus up on overhead. And so you hear guys talk about USAID projects, and they're 70% overhead. So you build a well, but you're also staying in a village of private security. And most of it actually goes into keeping. your guys pretty comfortable in Africa rather than building the actual well.

And so, you know, this is where the disconnect occurs in the overarching strategy, such as it is, and how it gets implemented on the ground. And I think we're starting to see a certain amount of that just in the way that the Pentagon really wants the public to understand what we're doing in Africa. Of course they do. I hate people saying it's like, you know, they're obfuscating and it's like, you know, there's a conspiracy or something. It's like, no, they really desperately want you to understand what the U.S. military is doing in Africa and why you should care about stability in North and West Africa. Because they do care.

They just can't explain it either. And that's a problem. That's an exceptionally significant problem. If they can't explain what everybody seems to, as a rule, understand to be an important goal. Well, then how do you think that translates into how the operation is being fulfilled? That's true. I honestly, I think the Pentagon really, I agree with you. I think the Pentagon wants desperately for us to understand them,

and they feel that they're speaking English, but the Pentagon and regular Americans speak two different languages, and neither one of them can understand it or learn it because it changes almost quarterly. They really do want us to understand, but what I can tell you is from a Green Beret perspective on the ground, and these guys believe that their operations are integral to regional stability. That's why they think they're there. Building the wells, the 18th deltas, the Special Forces medics,

literally building and creating field hospitals and training specialized medics, so those medics that they train can train other medics, establishing medical care supplies, buildings, also training them to defend and attack and become a, force, not unlike what we created in Chad, to protect themselves. Because Joe was correct, the United States really likes regions that are stable. Well, how do you stabilize a region that has been so far unstable for the last 20 years? You send in special forces, you send in these green berets to empower the whole local host nation by through training of what they understand

through guerrilla and irregular warfare tactics. And then they implement that into their own countries. And the men on the ground believe that what they're doing is they're creating an army so the United States military, the regular military, the tanks, helicopters, guns, and parachutes types of guys don't have to put boots on the ground in Africa. All right. Thank you guys so much. Derek Gannon, Joseph Trevethic. Thank you guys for coming on War College. Thanks for listening to this week's show. We hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please leave a review on iTunes. It helps other people find the show. One user, Mr. Petkis, left us a five-star review. Here's what he had to say. War College is on the short list of excellent podcasts that explore our military industrial

complex. Well, we'll be trying to do more of that next week. My name is Jason Fields, and my partner on the show is Matthew Galt. We split up the producing duties ever since Bethel-Hobte left us for greener pastures. You can reach us. We are at at Facebook.com slash War College Podcast. We're also on Twitter, which is at war underscore college.