THE ENDURING AMERICAN MILITARY MISSION IN AFRICA
Publicly, Africa may not be on the radar of the Trump Administration, but it is a priority for the U.S. military. At the moment, seventeen hundred members of the Special Forces and other military personnel are undertaking ninety-six missions in twenty-one countries, and the details of most are unknown to Americans. In charge of those missions is U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, which coördinates responses to what its head, Brigadier General Donald C. Bolduc, calls “the threat.” Recently, I spoke with Bolduc about what the U.S. military was doing on the continent. He said that the Pentagon’s biggest fear in Africa was the spread of isis—that the group would stake a hold in a remote or weakly governed area, and use that territory as a base from which to expand. isis is in northern Somalia, he went on, and in Nigeria, where an aligned faction of Boko Haram controls territory. It also influences and provides financial backing for Al Qaeda’s operations in Mali. Apart from the threat of isis, the command is also focussing on the dangers posed by dozens of other insurgent groups. Much of Africa is what Bolduc calls a “gray zone”: an environment that is volatile and uncertain because of problems arising from conflict, weather, and natural disasters, and endlessly complex—though “not so complex you can’t solve the problems inside it.” Several of the command’s deployments are civil-affairs teams, but the secrecy surrounding many missions has led observers to suspect that the U.S. government is more involved in nebulous warfare than it is letting on. This is particularly the case with regard to Somalia, where President Trump has allowed the United States Africa Command to conduct air strikes more quickly and frequently. “We are not at war in Africa,” Bolduc said. “But our partners are.”
By necessity, Bolduc says that the command has to send small teams of Special Forces into the countries in which it operates. “African governments want a small U.S. footprint. They watch what we’ve done in other places, and it scares the hell out of them,” he said. “Quite frankly, it scares the hell out of me, too.” In Somalia, one of the military’s most critical theatres on the continent, hundreds of U.S. troops are training Somali soldiers, participating in ground raids, and providing aerial assistance in the forms of surveillance and strikes (for “our own self-defense, or collective self-defense,” Bolduc said). The general, who is plainspoken and fond of folksy analogies, says that American soldiers are often just around the corner from their Somali counterparts, and constantly on the radio with them, like “teaching a five-year-old how to ride a bike,” but that they “cannot make direct contact with the enemy.” (Though there is a chance of that kind of combat, he admitted.) The Times has reported that the military is also using private contractors to help train the Somali troops, which the command denies. The United States has long been trying to contain an insurgency that it was partly responsible for creating, through its backing of the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in the mid-aughts, which fomented support for al-Shabaab. And it has long been unsuccessful.
