How Many More Governments Will American-Trained Soldiers Overthrow?
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’s democratically-elected government and was about to be sworn in as the West Africa’s nation’s new president. Wearing a red beret and military fatigues, he appeared on TV and threw down a gauntlet. “To…gain the upper hand over the enemy, it will be necessary… to rise up and convince ourselves that as a nation we have more than what it takes to win this war,” he said.
Just nine months later, an upstart underling-34-year-old Captain Ibrahim Traore-decided 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.
When Damiba seized power last year, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) admitted that the United States had mentored him over many years. Damiba’s 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’t say. “We are looking into this,” said Africa Command spokesperson Kelly Cahalan, noting the command needed to “research” it. “I will let you know when I have an answer.”
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’s playbook for the region remains largely unaltered with the United States continuing to provide security assistance—just as it has for almost two decades—as terrorist violence escalated, deaths rose, insecurity increased, and coups proliferated. “So what we wanted to do in the countries that we’re working well with is talk about how we strengthen our support,” Nuland said. “In 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.”
“It’s cliché to talk about ‘root causes’ in conflict prevention and mitigation, but that’s what it comes down to. What people are in need of is strong economies, healthcare, education, infrastructure —which depends on resources. More military training and transfers of weapons aren’t going to solve those problems.”