Trump’s Niger uproar shines light on the U.S.’s murky African wars
"MORE...Top US general reveals new info on Niger ambush"
By Ishaan Tharoor October 24 at 1:00 AM
For days, President Trump has been locked in controversy over his response to the deaths of four Special Forces soldiers ambushed by suspected Islamist militants on Oct. 4 in Niger. Trump drew criticism for his near-two-week silence on the incident — conspicuous given his usual habit of declaiming Islamist perfidy whenever given an opportunity — as well as for what is turning into an unseemly public spat between him and Myeisha Johnson, the pregnant 24-year-old widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, one of the slain soldiers.
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At least 6,000 U.S. troops are deployed across dozens of African countries on a variety of missions, but the largest contingent is an estimated 900 soldiers posted in Niger, where U.S. forces have been operating in a support role for more than half a decade in conjunction with a larger French force that has been stationed in the region in the wake of a 2013 French-led intervention against a rampaging Islamist insurgency in Mali.
But the foreign military presence hasn't stemmed the threat of extremist militancy in a part of the world racked by poverty, poor governance and a history of internecine conflict.
The White House “probably hasn’t even begun to think through or review or really even know the details of the U.S. military’s footprint in a country like Niger. One could say that they’ve been distracted by other things, but those things are also of their own making,” Matthew Page, a Nigeria expert and former State Department analyst, told the Atlantic .. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/niger-isis-us-soldiers-attack/543531/ . “I think what this illustrates backs up what a lot of us have been saying about Trump’s Africa policy, which is that it’s not even really half-baked. There’s no one home when it comes to Africa policy.”
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