Brief War Update: French Collapse In Sahel?

The new US tactic appears to be to jaw-jaw about Wagner and Russia in the Sahel region of Africa. For our general orientation purposes here’s a pretty handy map of the region:

As we know, the region is rich in resources, including most of the uranium used in French nuclear power plants, but is desperately poor. Most of the area was formerly part of what was known collectively as French West Africa. France has, since independence was granted to the various countries, maintained a tight security and economic control over the region. Following NATO’s attack on Libya, radical Islamic groups were empowered across the Sahel (and further south into ECOWAS countries such as Nigeria), endangering France’s hold over its client states in the region. This led to the collective West participating in the French led Operation Barkhane (2014-2022). The large US air base in Niger was built as part of that operation:

Operation Barkhane was an anti-insurgent operation that started on 1 August 2014 and formally ended on 9 November 2022. It was led by the French military against Islamist groups in Africa's Sahel region, and consisted of a roughly 3,000-strong [peaking at 5,100] French force, which was permanently headquartered in N'Djamena, the capital of Chad. The operation was led in co-operation with five countries, all of which are former French colonies that span the Sahel: Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. Mali was a part of the operation until August 2022.

The full article is quite informative and worth scanning.

The various insurgencies across the region have proven to be intractable. In 2021, as anti-French sentiment across the Sahel kept increasing, several governments—led by Mali—turned to Russia for help. I have no idea whether Russia’s aid, which is still relatively small, will succeed where the West has not, but you can get some useful background on the dynamics behind this development in this article dated February 28, 2023:

Russia’s Growing Footprint in Africa’s Sahel Region

Summary: The war in Ukraine has not stopped Russia’s activities in Africa. Over the past year, the Wagner Group, in particular, has taken advantage of France’s and other Western countries’ worsening relations with Sahelian states.

You’ll need to do some reading between the lines. Overall the article slants against Russia, yet toward the end we read this even handed and somewhat prescient—in light of recent events—assessment:

Washington and its partners in the Sahel have tough choices to make. Despite its rhetoric, the Biden administration seems unwilling and unable to push Russia out of the region. It is not clear whether U.S. policymakers have come to terms with that reality. Old tools, such as France’s counterterrorism operation, have failed. Currently, Washington has a modest military presence in countries including Djibouti, Kenya, and particularly Niger, where American drones and intelligence assets have played an important role in regional anti-terror operations. But there is little desire for the U.S. military footprint on the continent to grow any further.

Blaming Russia for all of the Sahel’s problems has understandable appeal given the brutality and sheer brazenness displayed by Wagner and other actors. But the notion of competing head-to-head with Russia in Africa as part of a wider great-power competition deserves close scrutiny. Unfortunately, the drivers behind the Sahel’s vast problems are unlikely to be alleviated if Russia is squeezed out of Mali and Burkina Faso. Countries across the continent, including in the Sahel, want greater agency in managing their foreign, political, and economic affairs. They do not want the United States and Europe to impose partners upon them. Some recent language from Western capitals about a zero-sum geopolitical competition on the continent amplifies that problem. In a similar vein, various African governments have rebuffed repeated U.S. and European demands that they pick sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Such pressure has, paradoxically enough, further stoked the anger and historic resentments that Russia and its proxies are now trying to exploit.

So, that was to lead up to the news today. Briefly, as the attempt to find a military solution has collapsed, France appears to have decided to withdraw from nearly the entire region—not just Niger but also Chad, which has been a center for power projection. If these accounts are correct, they portray a French security establishment in disarray. Note, too, that it was the US pushing for a French military intervention. One suspects that the depletion of France’s limited military resources in support of the war on Russia may be behind the decision to simply pull out, rather than accede to the Blinken/Nuland importuning to plunge in deeper:

DD Geopolitics

@DD_Geopolitics

Sources in the French army command said that following an urgent meeting on Monday, a working group was set up to evacuate French forces from Niger. And it is planned to evacuate them not to Chad, but directly to France. Negotiations are already underway with civilian shipping companies to plan the operation. The deadline for the complete withdrawal is March 2024.

Some in the French military believe that this decision will only hasten a repeat of a similar situation in Chad, so troops will have to be withdrawn from there as well.

Thus, France is not going to participate in the conflict or initiate an invasion of Niger. At the same time, the U.S., with the help of Nigeria, were pushing the French command to a forceful operation in the hope of bargaining more favorable conditions with the Niger junta to preserve their assets in the country. Most likely, it was these conditions, the fulfillment of which is necessary for the U.S. to recognize the new government, that Victoria Nuland conveyed during her visit.

10:46 AM · Aug 9, 2023

That leaves the US, which is itself not eager to get more deeply involved, to try to “preserve its assets” in Niger—the air base. In the long run, it doesn’t actually matter whether Russian security aid can solve the insurgency problem in the Sahel. The real point is that the collective West is being pushed out of a vast region that it very much wanted to control. While this will pass virtually unnoticed in America, you can rest assured that they eyes of the rest of the world will be following how this plays out. They will recognize that over extension is a real problem for the American Empire. They will be linking to this to the increased pressure on the American presence in Syria and the Persian Gulf.