On a quiet Sunday morning in early September 2021, diplomats found themselves yanked away from their weekend plans as another military coup stunned West Africa. After reports on social media of shooting in the capital city of Conakry, news filtered out that a young army colonel had seized power in Guinea. Wearing the tactical clothing symbolizing his role as the commander of Guinea’s special operations forces, 42-year-old Col. Mamady Doumbouya declared that he would sweep away the authoritarian behavior and corruption that had marked the rule of the then-83-year-old President Alpha Conde. In the months that followed, it became increasingly clear that Doumbouya intends to keep his grip on power for quite some time, with the most recent schedule for the transition back to democratic rule lasting up to 39 months.
The coup in Guinea was one of several that have shaken West Africa and the Sahel region in the past two years. In Mali, the failures of a counterinsurgency campaign involving a large European force under French leadership led to a build-up of frustration within the Malian army. In August 2020, a faction around Col. Assimi Goita brought down the democratically elected President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita; nine months later, Goita deposed the country’s appointed transitional president. After bringing in Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group willing to commit war crimes to intimidate communities accused of collusion with jihadist insurgents, the Malians triggered a withdrawal of European troops. A similar dynamic unfolded in Burkina Faso, where the inability of a civilian government to cope with jihadist insurgents was also used to justify a military takeover in January 2022. Though Guinea has not faced the kind of insurgencies that have overwhelmed Mali and Burkina Faso, the anger over elite corruption and foreign meddling that helped propel young officers to the top was a common feature in each of these societies.
The resurgence of military rule represents a disastrous setback for Europe’s strategy to strengthen regional states facing jihadist insurgents that have destabilized the Sahel and are now beginning to operate in the coastal states of West Africa. Ten years after France’s military intervention in Mali triumphantly pushed insurgents out of Timbuktu, the hopes that European Union institutions invested in an expanded European military effort to strengthen the rule of law in the Sahel and West Africa now lie in tatters.
This strategic disaster was a product of the gradual accumulation of blunders. The extent to which EU strategy was still shaped by French officials prone to a neocolonial “Francafrique” mindset toward states that had experienced French rule until the 1960s meant that EU policy did too little to break from patterns of economic inequality and security dependency that were deeply resented by local populations. Barely concealed racism when it comes to the politics of immigration compounded these negative dynamics in severely hampering the ability of EU institutions to make a comprehensive offer on trade with and travel to Europe that could provide positive incentives toward strengthening democratization and the rule of law.
Among all these mistakes, the policy failures that most directly contributed to the resurgence of military rule in West Africa and the Sahel stemmed from training programs that were supposed to turn regional militaries into pillars of stability. Often with substantial U.S. involvement, attempts to restructure military and police units have focused on frontline combat capabilities, privileging the training of special operations forces, or SOF, that can hunt down insurgent groups on the battlefield over many other institutional structures that a military needs to survive the relentless grind of taking and holding ground against an elusive enemy. Instead, these efforts often succumbed to a kind of “cult of SOF” that permeates military fan cultures on social media. At times, an institutional narrative that lionizes the semi-mythical prowess of SOF units without considering more mundane questions of logistics, transport and maintenance without which they would fail has done lasting damage not just to EU and U.S. strategy, but also to the states the EU and U.S. hoped to stabilize.
The U.S. and European focus on training elite military units in West Africa has proven a distraction from the more arduous task of building the foundations of military resilience.
In any society, a focus on SOF as the epitome of a military’s warrior ethos can, if unchecked, fuel a toxic culture of praetorianism through which SOF units begin to view themselves as an elite destined to guide the state. Even as the U.S. personnel that deployed to Guinea expressed shock at how the local SOF units they were training brought down an elected president, they struggled to acknowledge the possibility that transferring their own SOF culture to a different socio-political context may have contributed to the problem. In countries such as Guinea or Burkina Faso where state institutions are weak, this praetorian impulse can instill a sense of messianic self-belief among SOF officers who come to view themselves as morally superior to civilian politicians.
This focus on training elite military units that enable European and U.S. governments to withdraw their own troops from the frontlines has proven a distraction from the more arduous task of building the foundations of military resilience. As the West’s debacle in Afghanistan has shown, no amount of local SOF units can save a state if its civilian and military infrastructure remain dependent on equipment and supply chains that are entirely managed by external partners. All the gear supplied by U.S. and European partners proved useless in an environment in which the Afghan state was still unable to maintain the logistics and maintenance infrastructure essential to managing civilian and military needs.
How other societies confronted wars of survival that EU and U.S. policymakers have not experienced on a personal level indicates what effective support for states in the Sahel and West Africa might look like. A good example is Vietnam in its war of independence against the French and the subsequent war of reunification with the U.S.-backed South. Though their French and then U.S. adversaries often reluctantly praised their fighting skill, it was the ability of Vietnamese insurgents and the North Vietnamese state to sustain complex logistics that enabled victories such as Dien Bien Phu or Ap Bac. However much they relied on Soviet support, without elaborate systems of supply chain management and transport developed by Vietnamese officers, even the most elite Vietnamese units would have been unable to challenge U.S. forces. In a very different battlespace 60 years later, Ukraine’s ability to manage intricate logistical challenges while integrating advanced Western weapons into its military structures has enabled its soldiers to push back against the Russian invasion.
Turkey’s emergence as a global player in drone development is also an example of how a state facing particular geopolitical pressures has found ways of adapting specific technologies to its own needs in ways that stronger powers would not have anticipated. While not every society in the Sahel or West Africa has the structures that Ukraine with its arms industry or Vietnam with its tightly disciplined political cadres had to develop such military resilience, states such as Senegal or Ghana do already have some of the institutional prerequisites needed to organize complex systems needed to run effective operations with far less need for U.S. or European assistance. Even if the EU and U.S. would have to live with the fact that African states in a position to develop technological and logistics capabilities best-suited to their own needs could become commercial competitors, the loss of market share in some sectors is a price worth paying for a scenario in which societies in West Africa and the Sahel have the military resilience to handle existential crises.
The consolidation of militaries based on the primacy of engineering skills needed to manage logistics and weapon systems suited to local needs could even prove to be a contribution to entrenching the rule of law in West Africa and the Sahel. Militaries anchored on an officer corps that views defense as a task that needs legitimacy and resilience across all parts of society might be more likely to engage with the need to work with democratically elected leaders, however flawed, than officers steeped in the toxic praetorianism of SOF culture. The extent to which U.S. and European governments have privileged this cult of SOF over the basics of military resilience is in itself a telling indictment of how they view the societies they claim to be helping. After all, a mindset convinced that West African states are inherently unable to handle advanced logistics and arms production would reflect the same neocolonial assumptions that proved so flawed in the face of Vietnamese and Ukrainian skill.
Alexander Clarkson is a lecturer in European studies at King’s College London. His research explores the impact that transnational diaspora communities have had on the politics of Germany and Europe after 1945 as well as how the militarization of the European Union’s border system has affected its relationships with neighboring states. His weekly WPR column appears every Wednesday.