The U.S. handed over its last base in Niger to local authorities yesterday, bringing to a close more than a decade of U.S. security presence and investment in the country. Following a coup in Niger just over a year ago, the ruling military junta ended the country’s security partnership with the U.S. in March. (AP)
The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Niger is a significant development in three stories that WPR has followed closely over the years.
The first is the fallout from the wave of military coups that has swept the Sahel region: in Mali in 2020 and 2021, Burkina Faso in January and September 2022, and Niger last year. All three were either directly or indirectly the result of pressure put on the civilian governments in these countries by longstanding jihadist insurgencies in the region. But the insurgencies and the coups themselves are also a response to even longer-standing governance failures by those governments, including democratic backsliding, corruption and marginalization of communities in peripheral regions.
Second, those coups were a wake-up call for the West. The junta leaders were able to seize and maintain power in part because they appealed to genuine popular disaffection with the previous governments’ partnerships with Western countries, in particular France—as Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger’s former colonial power—but also the U.S., as the region’s more recent security partner.
All three juntas have since rejected their countries’ ties with the West and instead opted to work with Russia’s Africa Corps, formerly known as the Wagner Group. As a result, geopolitical competition is increasingly bifurcating West Africa, remaking the regional landscape, as Afolabi Adekaiyaoja wrote in April.
Finally, the U.S. military withdrawal from Niger marks a crossroads for Washington in its engagement with regional governments and across Africa more generally over the past decade and more. The war on terror led the U.S. to form security partnerships with a number of countries in West Africa, as well as Somalia, Mozambique and elsewhere. But those partnerships were so military-centric that they often ignored how systemic problems and governance failures contributed to the very security issues the U.S. was trying to help solve.
With the war on terror now running on fumes but the insurgencies in the Sahel far from resolved, the question is whether Washington will move to form new partnerships—perhaps with Cote d’Ivoire or Benin—while repeating the same flawed strategy; or if the U.S. will reimagine its approach to counterinsurgency as part of a broader course correction in its engagement with the region.