The Missing Component in U.S. Counterterrorism Efforts in Africa

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the defense and intelligence communities recognized that they could no longer ignore huge swaths of Africa. The terror attacks’ genesis may have laid in Afghanistan, but the threat failed states and ungoverned territories posed was broader. Not long after, the Pentagon stood up the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) in Djibouti. President Barack Obama greenlighted establishment of a drone base in Niger as drone strikes became the core component of his counterterror strategy. While U.S. forces theoretically exercise regularly with their Moroccan counterparts, Obama-era anger at National Security Advisor Susan Rice’s advocacy for the Polisario Front led the Moroccans to cancel while, in 2020, the Pentagon scrapped the exercise on just hours’ notice so would-be American participants could redeploy to the Eastern Mediterranean and Persian Gulf in the aftermath of the drone strike on Iranian Qods Force commander Qassem Soleimani. President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of U.S. special operators in Somalia left drone strikes as the primary counterterrorism arrow in America’s counterterror policy quiver for Africa.

Mali is quickly becoming the rule rather than the exception. Since 2020, there have been successful coups in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Sudan; attempts in the Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau; and a self-coup in Tunisia. This is bad enough, but the threat has spread to the continent’s largest states.

In September 2021, Eric Berman, until recently the director of the Small Arms Survey, wrote an insightful report examining the relation between poor munition management in the Lake Chad basin on the region’s growing insurgencies. With regard to Boko Haram, he found seizures of weaponry from state stockpiles to be “astonishingly high.” Insurgents and terrorists have seized not only small arms, but also European Union-donated armored vehicles and a range of heavy weapon systems. “The quantity of small arms and light weapons—many of which also were manufactured in the EU—is so great that it has sustained the insurgency for over a decade,” he found. Berman is not exaggerating. Insurgents and terrorists have raided weapons depots not only in Nigeria, but also in Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. Some raids, such as in Bama, Gaidem, and Mainok, Nigeriam, as well as Toumour, Niger resulted in the loss of dozens of vehicles and hundreds of thousands of rounds of munitions. Corruption also matters. Earlier this year, an internal audit in Nigeria found police could not account for more than 88,000 AK-47s.

Simply put, no amount of drone strikes or weapons sales will enable Nigeria and other Lake Chad Basin states to defeat Boko Haram if the state recipients are unable to secure weaponry. Boko Haram terrorism and insurgency, meanwhile, threaten the stability and potential prosperity of Africa's most populated state, any collapse which would reverberate throughout Africa and Europe.

President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken have repeatedly promised that, in their administration, “diplomacy is back.” U.S.-funded organizations like HALO Trust and MAG International may be best known for demining (MAG was part of the international coalition which won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize), but they also have considerable experience securing weaponry and ammunition both to prevent them from inadvertently fueling insurgencies and also the risk improper storage poses to nearby populations.

Hellfire missiles fired by Predator or Reaper drones can cost $150,000 apiece. Maintenance, fuel, and the satellite guidance systems of the UAVs themselves add exponentially to the price of drone-based counterterrorism. And while unmanned aerial vehicles have a unique ability to reach targets in otherwise diplomatically or topographically difficult environments, overreliance on technology ignores the costs of collateral damage.

Whack-a-mole strikes will never eliminate terrorism if militants can rearm themselves easily from poorly maintained government weapons depots. Perhaps the time has come for the White House, State Department, and Pentagon to more fully resource assistance to the security of weapons depots in Nigeria and across the Sahel. While regional problems are complex and there is no magic formula to their resolution, relatively small investments in Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria might go a long way to enable Biden and Blinken to fulfill their promises to end “endless wars.”

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.