Sunday Alamba/AP Photo
A soldier stands guard outside the Splendid Hotel in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, after it was attacked by al-Qaeda-linked extremists, January 18, 2016.
President Biden may have withdrawn troops from Afghanistan, but America’s “war on terror” has not ended. Instead, the post-9/11 wars are taking a new shape, driven in part by the same elite policymakers who have promoted militarism as the solution to terrorism, despite ample evidence that a war-based approach not only kills many people, but actually serves as the most significant recruiting device for groups that use terror tactics.
One of the major ways these wars continue is through what the U.S. government calls “security cooperation,” with the military training, equipping, and partnering with other countries’ militaries to fight militant groups. Though many Americans are unaware, outside of the Middle East, Africa is the region where such operations are most concentrated. The alarming thing is that, while some American officials and experts acknowledge the counterproductive nature of a militarized approach to Africa, they nevertheless call for more of the same—doing counterterrorism better, more effectively, and more comprehensively.
Take, for example, former intelligence official Judd Devermont, whom President Biden recently appointed as special adviser in the White House to run Africa strategy. Though Biden has suggested that his administration is ready to rethink the U.S. approach to Africa, all indications are that Devermont will maintain entrenched patterns of overreliance on military force.
It’s clear that the U.S.-sponsored model of a “war on terror” fuels government repression of its own people and escalates cycles of violence.
Devermont recently said that “we need to broaden our view of what the military does.” He was speaking at an event at the hawkish think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he is longtime director of its Africa program. It’s important to note here that CSIS is a de facto research arm of this country’s defense sector. It is funded by a bevy of corporations heavily invested in a militarized status quo. They include Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Saudi Aramco (the U.S. military is the single-largest institutional consumer of oil in the world). The big five defense contractors that raked in between one-quarter and one-third of all Pentagon contracts in recent years—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman—are also major underwriters of CSIS.
Devermont called for using the military for a broader set of tasks—helping with humanitarian crises, furthering partnerships, reinforcing diplomatic ties, and even building infrastructure. He framed Africa as at the heart of American security interests and the place to fight not just “terrorism” but also “democratic backsliding,” and compete with Russia and China for economic and political influence. (Exaggerated estimates of the military threat posed by China, in particular, have become one of the latest justifications for U.S. militarism.)
This is not just a failure to truly recognize that a military-first approach is counterproductive, but it is also a failure to ask bigger questions. What is the magnitude of the so-called “terrorist” threat to the U.S. from Africa? Arguably, it is minuscule compared to the threats to Americans posed by pandemic, climate change, or racially driven police violence. Does the use of force actually work to protect Americans and others around the world—or is it, itself, a major source of violence, death, and suffering? Finally, if military violence begets more violence, how does the U.S. truly put a stop to that cycle?
My research for Brown University’s Costs of War project shows that between 2018 and 2020, the U.S. took some sort of action in 85 countries against groups that the U.S. or other governments labeled as engaging in acts of terror. These interventions have caused a tremendous loss of life—an estimated 929,000 people have died as a direct result of America’s post-9/11 wars—and come at tremendous cost to taxpayers, who have spent $8 trillion on these wars. This figure includes at least $2.2 trillion in obligations to care for veterans of these wars through the course of their lifetimes.
Just as with the war in Afghanistan, security experts are increasingly recognizing that U.S. military actions in Africa haven’t worked. In September, an article published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center stated that, when it comes to counterterrorism in Africa, “Africa is, in some ways, worse for the fix.” In other words, the dramatic rise of “terrorism” on that continent in recent years has been fueled by the fight against it. Moreover, government officials are beginning to recognize that the problems leading to militant violence in Africa are structural in nature, stemming from poverty, lack of opportunity, and undemocratic governance.
I found a similar dynamic in the West African nation of Burkina Faso, where the U.S. since 2009 has funded, equipped, and trained security forces in counterterrorism. Since then, the country’s military budget—and accompanying military violence—has skyrocketed. The Burkinabe government has used its beefed-up military might to crack down on the Fulani ethnic group, traditionally nomadic herders who have practiced Islam for centuries. Since militant violence began to escalate in Burkina Faso in 2016–2017, state security forces have killed more civilians than have militant groups.
This has created what the U.S. calls “blowback,” as people have joined militant groups to seek revenge on state forces. A civil society leader explained, “About 80 percent of those who join terrorist groups say that it isn’t because they support jihadism, it is because their father or mother or brother was killed by the security forces.”
This statistic lines up with a 2017 study by the United Nations Development Program that found that 71 percent of those who joined “violent extremist groups” did so because of “government action,” including the killing or arrest of a family member or friend. Worldwide, there are more militant groups, and more recruits to those groups, than there were before 9/11.
It’s clear that the U.S.-sponsored model of a “war on terror” fuels government repression of its own people and escalates cycles of violence. The case of Burkina Faso shows that militarized U.S. “security cooperation” actually increases human rights abuses, private profiteering, and government authoritarianism. And this is not unique to this particular country or regional conflict. Countries around the world have used U.S.-supported counterterrorism efforts to crack down on Muslim tribal peoples.
Research suggests that, when it comes to putting an end to organizations that use terror tactics to pursue their goals, a military approach is the least-effective government tactic. A RAND study of 268 such groups operating from 1968 to 2006 showed that just 7 percent were defeated militarily. During this period, governments prevented the majority of groups from further violence by incorporating them into the political sphere as parties or movements or by treating them as criminals and arresting leaders through policing methods.
Nonetheless, given the web of funding and influence that drives U.S. foreign policy, the idea of “preemptive war,” a Bush-era doctrine that motivated the disastrous U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq for 20 years, will likely continue in Africa.
There is a strong contingent of elite policymakers, both Democrat and Republican, from the Biden and Obama administrations as well as the Trump and Bush administrations, whose viewpoints and actions support an unthinking, all-too-easy U.S. resort to military force, espousing the idea that a preventative war approach is effective. But it is not.
In order to truly put an end to the post-9/11 wars, in Africa and elsewhere, we must question this assumption that drives American foreign policy despite research that shows that militarism does not truly provide peace or safety.
