Harry Targ
But
in Indiana, our Indiana National Guard is the state partner with the Nigerien
military. So we send Indiana guardsmen and women to Niger. They send their
military leaders to Indiana for training. So it’s no secret-it hasn’t been a
secret to me that-of what is occurring in Niger with the threat of ISIS and
other cells of terrorist groups as well.” (Jim Banks,
Congressman from Indiana, “Indiana Congressman on the Attack in Niger that
Killed 4 U.S. Soldiers,” NPR, October
23, 2017).Indiana and Niger
The media and President Trump have been sparring over the
unsympathetic way he talked to a grieving young widow of one of four Special
Forces soldiers killed in action in Niger on October 4. But ever so slowly
politicians and reporters are beginning to ask a vital question: Why are U.S.
troops in Niger and other countries across the African continent?
Part of the story has to do with agreements between state
National Guard units and other countries. For example, on January 24, 2017 an article
in the electronic publication of the National Guard Association of the United
States (NGAUS) reported that the Department of Defense “State Partnership
Program” would formalize a relationship between the Indiana National Guard and the
African nation, Niger. Further, the newsletter of the National Guard lobby group indicated that the state of Indiana’s recent contract with Niger was the seventy-fifth agreement between a state national guard component and a foreign country under the Department of Defense “State Partnership Program.”
Major General Courtney P. Carr, the Indiana National Guard Adjutant General said about the January, 2017 announcement: “Hoosier Guardsmen are dedicated to deepening our development and security cooperation relationships with our Nigerien partners.”
The NGAUS article pointed out that the Indiana
National Guard has experience in humanitarian assistance and “will support the
U.S. government’s ongoing diplomatic, development and security efforts to
achieve shared goals.” Niger’s spokesperson General Seyni Garba, Chief of
Defense, said “This partnership is timely because it offers a great opportunity
for the Niger armed forces to further develop its capabilities to face all the
major security challenges of the day.”
Perceptive Hoosier pundit Brian Howey reported on
October 5, 2017, that the Indiana National Guard hosted a meeting between the State
Adjutant General, Congressman Banks, and the Niger Chief of Defense at Camp
Atterbury in August. General Garba warned that Niger was in the heart of the
continent’s terrorist zone. Howey pointed out that U.S. Special Forces train at
Muscatatuck Urban Warfare Center in Indiana. In addition, he quoted from a New York Times article referring to a
$50 million drone base being constructed at Agadez, Niger. Howey concluded: Indiana’s Niger connection has just taken a
sobering turn. (Brian Howey, “The Indiana-Niger Connection,” Howey. Politics Indiana,
howeypolitics.com, October 5, 2017).
Techniques
of Empire Today
Although the imperial agenda and the ideological
precepts justifying it have remained essentially the same for two hundred years,
the techniques of empire have changed as growing resistance at home and abroad
and new technologies allow. Changes in warfare, other violence, and imperial
expansion include the following:
-Wars are internal much more than international and
casualties are overwhelmingly civilian rather than military.
-The global presence of some form of the United States
military is ubiquitous-between 700 and 1,000 military bases-in anywhere from 40
to 120 countries
- US military operations have been privatized. A 2010 Washington Post report found 1,911
intelligence contracting firms doing top secret work for 1,271 government
organizations at over 10,000 sites. Ninety percent of such work is being done
by 110 contractors.
-More “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles” have been used to kill
alleged enemies over the last eight years than the entire prior period of US
military operations. Also drones have come home as their use by urban police forces
show.-US agencies, such as the CIA, have been engaged in the increased use of assassinations and efforts to undermine governments. One report indicated that there are 13,000 assassination commandoes operating around the world. And the new Director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, has promised to make the CIA a “much more vicious agency.”
-So-called “humanitarian assistance” is used to
support United States policies in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. A
New York Times story reported that at
least 40 American groups received $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for
Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade.
-Military operations continue and expand without
“boots on the ground.” As a result empires can kill with impunity because
military operations are less visible than wars in prior years. Also the number
of soldiers involved in twenty-first century wars is lower than twentieth
century ones.
Just recently, Nick Turse and colleagues reported on
data indicating that the United States has been engaged in secret military
training of personnel in many countries. They called the policy “a shadowy
network of U.S. programs that every year provides instruction and assistance to
approximately 200,000 foreign soldiers, police, and other personnel.” (Douglas Gillison, Nick Turse, Moiz Syed,
“How the U.S. Trains Killers Worldwide,” Portside,
July 13, 2016).
Their report is worth quoting further:
“The data show training at no fewer than 471 locations
in 120 countries…involving on the U.S. side, 150 defense agencies, civilian
agencies, armed forces colleges, defense training centers, military units,
private companies, and NGOs, as well as the National Guard forces of five
states.” Despite the fact that the
Department of Defense alone has poured some $122 billion into such programs
since 9/11, the breadth and content of this training network remain virtually
unknown to most Americans.”
Turse has also discovered that the recently
constructed U.S. military African command (AFRICOM) has one base, Camp
Lemonnier in Djibouti and 11 outposts or Cooperative Security Locations across
the continent. Less transparent, Turse indicates, are 60 military outposts in
34 countries (60 percent of the continent) and U.S. military offices with
defense attaches in 38 nations. U.S. military presence-sometimes small,
sometimes large, in some cases U.S. army, in others private
contractors-permeates the continent. Impacts of 21st Century Imperialism
By any measure the pain and suffering brought by 21st
century imperialism is staggering. U.S. Labor Against the War recently reported
that sources estimate 1.3 million people, mostly in the Middle East and South
Asia, have died due to the war on terrorism initiated in 2001. They quote a
research report that estimates that one million Iraqis have died since 2003 and
an additional 220,000 citizens of Afghanistan and 80,000 from Pakistan. Other
sources claim these figures are too conservative and remind us of the untold
thousands upon thousands who have died directly from war and violence in Libya,
Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the Middle East, South Asia, and North
Africa.
These figures, of course, address deaths directly
attributed to war and terrorism but do not include economic sanctions, environmental
devastation, massive flight of people from war zones, persecution by
authoritarian regimes, and drone strikes and assassinations. Large areas of the
globe, largely centered in the Middle East and North Africa, are ungovernable
with foreign intervention and anomic domestic violence on the rise. In a
troubling essay by Patrick Cockburn the author asserts that:
“We live in an age of disintegration. Nowhere is this
more evident than in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Across the vast swath
of territory between Pakistan and Nigeria, there are at least seven ongoing
wars-in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and South Sudan. These
conflicts are extraordinarily destructive. They are tearing apart the countries
in which they are taking place in ways that make it doubtful they will ever
recover.” (Patrick Cockburn, “The Age of Disintegration: Neoliberalism,
Interventionism, the Resource Curse, and a Fragmenting World,” The Unz Review: Mobile, June 28, 2016).
Cockburn suggests that this fragmentation has core
features: no winners and losers, deconstruction of states, massive population
upheavals, and migrations; in short death and destruction. And most Americans,
through no fault of their own, as in
Indiana, are not informed about their state’s national guard contractual
relationship with another country. And
the citizens of the United States in general are not knowledgeable about nor
can they participate in decisions about whether U.S. troops, drones, private
contractors, and military assistance should be engaged in other countries.
