Shadow Wars: Chasing Conflict in an Era of Peace

Addendum

191 Addendum As the initial deadline for this book passed, a long-running and highly secretive U.S. counterterrorism campaign in the African Sahel region emerged from the shadows, dragged into the sunlight by a French military operation that bore no small resemblance to the American-backed attacks by Ethiopia and Kenya in Somalia. Washington’s Sahel campaign, targeting al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other militant groups in the West African country of Mali, involved all the usual shadow war forces: commandos , drones, and proxy forces—the latter composed in part of Chadians long accustomed to fighting other people’s wars for them. On January 11, 2013, Islamic militants occupying northern Mali in West Africa advanced on a key town separating the Addendum 192 government-controlled south from the northern part of the country , held by rebels since the spring of 2012. France, Mali’s former colonial ruler, quickly deployed air and ground forces alongside Malian troops to first stop the advance, then recapture the north. French jet fighters bombed rebel positions scouted by Paris’s tiny fleet of unarmed, Predator-style Harfang drones. In an echo of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan twelve years prior, French army Special Forces organized Malian battalions and led them into battle. French armored vehicles, artillery, and attack helicopters arrived to reinforce the Malians. In three months of fighting several hundred militants, a few score African troops, and just two French soldiers would die alongside potentially hundreds of civilians caught in the crossfire . It wasn’t a big war, but it grew to involve governments all over the world.1 As the fighting escalated, a host of Western and African countries pledged planes, people, and logistical support to the FrenchMalian troops. The Pentagon publicly expressed its wariness of a potentially drawn-out war. “The real question is, now what?” Army Gen. Carter Ham, Africom commander, said as the first French bombs fell.2 Washington ultimately sent C-17 airlifters to haul people and supplies between French air bases and Mali and KC-135 aerial tankers to refuel the French jet fighters on their long bombing sorties and pledged $50 million in cash, but it resisted a fuller commitmentevenasChadiantroopscrossedtheborderintoMali to join the French and the West African economic union vowed to raise a UN-style peacekeeping force in the embattled country. America’s reluctance was a cover. In fact, the United States was playing—and had long played—a central role in counterterrorism efforts in Mali and across the Sahel. The deniability factor , however, was high. In 2004 the U.S. State Department launched the Pan Sahel Initiative , a $500-million diplomatic and military program meant Addendum 193 to help the region’s governments defeat Islamic terrorists within their own borders. The initiative specifically targeted Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Nigeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, with Libya a candidate for involvement provided relations between it and the United States improved. U.S. embassies in the Sahel added more military attachés as Special Forces and trainers and advisers drawn from the regular U.S.military—asmanyasathousandatatime—fannedoutacross the region, training native soldiers and improving their technical capabilities. In Chad and Mali, U.S. commandos instructed the Chadian army in basic tactics. A Special Forces sergeant expressed his frustration with the cultural gap between the Americans and their Chadian trainees. “It was like going to Mars,” he told the Washington Post.3 But a Special Forces officer deployed to Mali praised his students from the Malian army. “They’re really a sharp unit, and they’re picking it up quickly.”4 The Pan Sahel Initiative changed names several times and, gradually, all but disappeared from the U.S. press. But the commandos remained. On March 22, 2012, Malian president Amadou Toumani Toure was ousted by U.S.-trained Malian army officers frustrated with Toure’s leadership against Islamists in the country ’s vast, arid north. The coup, which Washington was swift to condemn, illustrated yet again the risks of covert U.S. military assistance. It was not uncommon for men trained by the United States to threaten the democratically elected governments that the United States publicly backed. Within a week of the coup the Defense Department had ceased all military training programs in Mali—or so the Pentagon claimed. Then on April 20 three Special Operations Command troops and three civilian women died in an early morning car accident in the...