Jihadism's shifting center of gravity

Success in the Middle East costs the Sahel

This is the story I told almost two decades ago in Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating (2005), with the key caveat here being that this was written before the creation of Africa Command, which I predicted in a concluding “Heroes Yet Discovered” segment by citing “The first U.S. military commander of African Command” (p. 338). The story arose from a meeting I had with CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid and his planning staff while I was down there in Florida in 2005 giving a speech on The Pentagon’s New Map to the command.

Abizaid had asked me what my strategic thinking was concerning CENTCOM’s future challenges, and I ended up waving my arms in front of a giant wall map, yielding this segment in my PNM sequel:

CENTCOM’s area of responsibility features three key seams, or boundaries, between that collection of regions and the world outside. Each seam speaks to both opportunities and dangers that lie ahead, as well as to how crucial it is that Central Command’s version of the war on terrorism stays in sync with the rest of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

The first seam lies to the south, or sub-Saharan Africa. This is the tactical seam, meaning that in day-to-day terms, there’s an awful lot of connectivity between that region and CENTCOM’s AOR. That connectivity comes in the form of transnational terrorist networks that extend from the Middle East increasingly into sub-Saharan Africa, making that region sort of the strategic retreat of al Qaeda and its subsidiaries. As Central Command progressively squeezes those networks within its area of responsibility, the Middle East’s terrorists increasingly establish interior lines of communication between themselves and other cells in Africa, as Africa becomes the place where supplies, funds (especially in terms of gold), and people are stashed for future use. Africa risks becoming Cambodia to the Middle East’s Vietnam, a place where the enemy finds respite when it gets too hot inside the main theater of combat. Central Asia presents the same basic possibility, but that’s something that CENTCOM can access more readily because it lies within its area of responsibility, while sub-Saharan Africa does not. Instead, distant European Commands owns that territory in our Unified Command Plan, a system constructed in another era for another enemy. Those vertical, north-south slices of geographic commands were lines to be held in an East-West struggle, but today our enemies tend to roam horizontally across the global map, turning the original logic of that command plan on its head.

Central Command’s challenge, then, is to figure out how to connect these two regions in such a way as to avoid having Africa become the off-grid hideout for al Qaeda and others committed to destabilizing the Middle East. By definition, such a goal is beyond CENTCOM’s pay grade, or rank, because it’s a high-level political decision to engage sub-Saharan Africa on this issue — in effect, widening the war. And yet, solving this boundary condition is essential to winning the struggle in the Middle East. What the Core-Gap model provides Central Command is a way of describing the problem by noting that transitional terrorism’s resistance to globalization’s creeping embrace won’t simply end with our successful transformation of the region. No, that struggle will inevitably retreat deeper inside the Gap, or to sub-Saharan Africa.

Why is this observation important? It’s important because it alerts the military to the reality that success in this war won’t be define by less terrorism but by a shifting of its operational center of gravity southward, from the Middle East to Africa. That’s the key measure of effectiveness. Achieving this geographic shift will mark our success in the Middle East, but it will also buy us the follow-on effort in Africa. You want America to care more about security in Africa? Then push for a strong counterterrorism strategy in the Middle East, because that’s the shortest route between those two points.

Ultimately, you’re faced with the larger, inescapable requirements of having to connect Africa to the Core to run this problem to group, otherwise today’s problem for CENTCOM simply becomes tomorrow’s distant problem with EUCOM. When you make that leap of logic, the next decision gets a whole lot easier: America needs to stand up an African Command. Now, I know that sounds like a huge expansion of our strategic “requirements,” but when you consider the boundary conditions in this way, the discussion shifts from if to when.

Blueprint was published in late 2005. Africa Command was established two years later in the fall of 2007.

Back in 2005 America was just beginning to establish itself militarily across Africa for the long war against radical terrorism there. Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa (Djibouti) had been established in October 2002, and I ended up embedding with US forces there and in Kenya for a bit in the spring of 2007, resulting in my long-form article in Esquire called “The Americans Have Landed.”

In the piece, I predicted that our handful of facilities on the continent would radically expand to two dozen or so within a few years. We now have more than 30 such military facilities.

Why rehash all this, besides my bragging?

I came across this great REUTERS piece: Why West Africa is now the world's terrorism hotspot.

Took two decades, but there it is.

As I often note: success in long-range strategic thinking comes in decades, not years, and most certainly not in this election cycle. That’s what’s so tough about it: your thinking is always farther out ahead than people doing their today-jobs can stand because it just seems like overload.

From the piece:

Overshadowed by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and Sudan, conflict in the Sahel rarely garners global headlines, yet it is contributing to a sharp rise in migration from the region towards Europe at a time when anti-immigrant far-right parties are on the rise and some EU states are tightening their borders.

And yeah, we can now tie this situation to climate change’s increasingly devastating impact across the Sahel, yielding this confluence of stressors that drive northward migration — a condition that jihadist groups are more than happy to leverage and exploit, with plenty of fundraising to be had smuggling.

[U.N.'s International Organization for Migration (IOM)] data shows the number of migrants arriving in Europe from Sahel countries (Burkina, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal) rose 62% to 17,300 in the first six months of 2024 from 10,700 a year earlier, a rise the U.N. and the IOM have blamed on conflict and climate change.

The new concern?

Fifteen diplomats and experts told Reuters the swathes of territory under jihadist control also risk becoming training grounds and launchpads for more attacks on major cities such as Bamako, or neighbouring states and Western targets, in the region or beyond.

The follow-on consequences are what we now hear in the news:

Jihadi violence, especially the heavy toll it has taken on government troops, was a major factor in a wave of military coups since 2020 against Western-backed governments in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, the countries at the heart of the Sahel.

The military juntas that replaced them have since swapped French and U.S. military assistance for Russians, mainly from Wagner's mercenary outfit, but have continued to lose ground.

Meaning, to no surprise, that we’re not the only superpower working this angle. Russia’s Wagner Group is muscling in, and our facilities are being cut back by the locals.