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In a heated exchange yesterday, Congressman Matt Gaetz grilled the Commander of U.S. Africa Command, General Michael Langley over taxpayers’ dollars being spent on training coup leaders in Africa.

The exchange served as a revelation of one alarming aspects of a much larger foreign policy failure on the continent.

Over the last two decades, U.S. foreign policy in Africa has been an utter failure as terrorism and instability have increased dramatically alongside U.S. intervention. In fact, several U.S. trained African soldiers have led attempts to overthrow civilian led governments. A number of them have been successful.

Since 2005, the United States has injected billions of dollars into Africa for counterterrorism operations including airstrikes, raids, and training of at least 50 thousand African soldiers. In that same time frame, terrorist attacks and terrorist organizations have increased dramatically.

As of 2022, there were approximately 18 Islamic terrorist groups in Africa, which is a 260% increase from 2010. In 2021, there were as many as 4,800 deaths reported as the result of terrorism in the Sahel region, representing a 180% increase from two years prior.

This isn’t to definitively say that the increase in terrorism is a result of U.S. intervention. There is no way to determine that by correlation alone. What the correlation does tell us with absolute certainty, is that the U.S. Government has completely failed to reduce terrorism in Africa.

Meanwhile, civil stability has been in stark decline with coup d’é·tats becoming the political norm in many West African countries. And many of those coups have been led by US trained military officers. Mali and Burkina Faso have each experienced 3 coup attempts by soldiers who participated in US training programs.

In January of 2022, Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba staged a coup d’é·tat in Burkina Faso, deposing the duly elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré. Damiba is a highly trained soldier who has, according to U.S Africa Command, participated in no less than 6 U.S training exercises.

Mamady Doumbouya is another highly trained African soldier who led a Guinean special forces unit that began training with the United States Green Berets just months before storming the presidential palace and overthrowing the country’s president, Alpha Condé in September of 2021.

General Langley acknowledged in yesterday’s hearing that both Damiba and Doubouya were in fact trained by the U.S. Military, but assured us that they teach the soldiers core values including democracy, and that only around one percent of the 50 thousand soldiers they have trained with our tax dollars have participated in attempted coups. According to him, we have nothing to worry about. Afterall, we’re teaching them about democracy and only 500 of them have utilized our training to participate in military coup d’é·tats.

500 is far too many, let alone one. And at least two coups attempted by U.S. trained soldiers have been successful. If our goal in Africa is to promote freedom and democracy, we are failing miserably.

If the United States Government doesn’t get their act together, chaos on the continent will only increase, providing bad actors such as the CCP with the perfect opportunity to intervene, promoting tyranny and autocracy rather than freedom and democracy.

After nearly 20 years, U.S. foreign policy in Africa has failed to reduce terrorism and it has failed to promote freedom. Are we just going to keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting the outcome to improve? Or are we going to respond with sanity, understanding that what we have been doing has not been working and then change our strategy? I certainly hope that it’s the ladder. Otherwise, terrorism and instability will only continue to grow in Africa, and there will be no doubt left that our leaders have gone completely insane.

Source: todaynewsafrica.com

Ayuure Atafori
Author: Ayuure Atafori

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