It's Not the Right Time for the U.S. to Restart "Security Cooperation" with the Sahel

Be wary of legitimating fragile, repressive governments that are losing on the battlefield.

I’ve seen two major calls recently for Washington to re-open “security cooperation” with Mali and the other military-ruled Sahel states, especially Burkina Faso and Niger:

• In Just Security, International Crisis Group’s Franklin Nossiter and Jordanna Yochai argue that “there is room for mutually beneficial cooperation. The United States could offer low-cost, nonlethal assistance, building upon recent diplomacy and military-to-military engagement. For example, Washington could provide equipment maintenance assistance or train Mali’s army on how to defuse improvised explosive devices. A gradual approach would address some of Mali’s security gaps, while creating space for further cooperation in the future. This could eventually include commercial equipment sales or a waiver restoring security assistance on a program-by-program basis. This would provide a greater array of legal options for the U.S. and Mali to address common interests, without forcing Washington into unrestrained cooperation with a regime that forcefully seized power and has drawn criticism for its heavy-handed approach.”

• In the National Interest, Togolese Foreign Minister Robert Dussey calls for the U.S. to help “save the Sahel.” Among his recommendations: “Military cooperation must be restored and expanded. The three governments have established a joint force, now expanded to 15,000 troops, to combat the jihadist threat. That force needs equipment, training, and intelligence support that only capable partners can provide. Washington should commit to being one of them. Every foreign military trainer operating in the Sahel today occupies ground that American partners vacated. The choice is not between engagement and neutrality. It is between engagement and ceding the field entirely.”

In different ways, both pieces call for a resumption and rationalization of the fairly ad hoc outreach that the Trump administration was making to the Sahelian states in 2025 and early 2026.

I oppose this type of “security cooperation” generally, because (1) the results never match the hype, whether we’re talking about training or intelligence or even combat deployments and “decapitations,” (2) these initiatives become self-justifying and open-ended, warping relations between the global superpower and the geopolitically weak recipient, and (3) the distribution of resources within another country’s military inevitably has distorting effects on the balance of power within that military.

In addition to these general concerns, there are four major reasons why I think it’s a bad time to restart or increase training, equipment, intelligence sharing, and other forms of security assistance (security intervention?):

1. Domestic repression continues to run high. The Sahelian military governments have dug in for the long term (although see point #3 below), and there are serious reasons to treat their rule as a political fact. But there’s a difference between (a) acknowledging the reality of their rule, which could justify resuming normal and polite diplomatic relations, and (b) really embracing these governments and granting them legitimacy.

2. Offering the same old “cooperation” without any new ideas is, at best, a form of treading water. Nossiter and Yochai write, “Washington cannot afford to neglect the lessons of 15 years of Sahelian counterinsurgency efforts as it contemplates what form of partnership to pursue with Mali’s military authorities.” That certainly makes sense. But I don’t see how that squares with the same authors’ call for “provid[ing] equipment maintenance assistance or train[ing] Mali’s army on how to defuse improvised explosive devices.” What lessons are being applied? Dussey calls for “equipment, training, and intelligence support” - why, when that kind of cooperation was being provided prior to the coups of the early 2020s, was violence getting worse? Until and unless someone can convincingly answer that question and propose a different model of security “cooperation,” they should not be advocating a return to the failures of the past.

3. The risks of new coups are real. I don’t think it’s ever wise to estimate coup risks at greater than, say, 50%, because even the most fragile regimes might be run by people with serious expertise in coup-proofing - and staging coups is a tricky business. Still, one key factor that contributed to recent Sahelian coups is very much operative now: battlefield losses and humiliations. What would be the point of initiating a serious security “partnership” with Assimi Goïta or Ibrahim Traoré now, only to see them overthrown?

4. Jihadists’ and rebels’ battlefield momentum is serious. The coordinated attacks of April 25 in Mali have now been followed by another round of assaults on July 4-5. Pumping in “training, equipment, and intelligence” conveys the message that the military governments should be doubling down on a failing fight, rather than stepping back to think about what has gone wrong. The problem is not defusing IEDs, the problem is coming up with a political strategy that can end the war. In the medium term, that may mean negotiations, ceasefires on terms that disadvantage the government, acceptance of de facto partitions, etc. What is the alternative - pump in foreign money and weapons and see what happens? Nossiter and Yochai gesture towards a need for “political dialogue,” but seem to place the cart before the horse - why should military cooperation be resumed before the political strategy is defined? Why is the assumption always that one can change the military picture and that such change will favor a better political settlement? Isn’t that the logic that kept the U.S. bogged down in Afghanistan for twenty years?

A scene from Mali’s 2020 coup via Wikimedia Commons (and VOA)

Ultimately, it’s just very hard to get past the narrative that the situation in the Sahel is a technical problem. That narrative is so seductive: If we had better surveillance and intelligence, we could locate the bad guys and kill them. If we had better equipment, we could repulse jihadists attacks. If we killed the top leaders and blunted the attacks, the insurgency would wind down. If we could disarm the IEDs, we could control the roads. If we could control the roads, we could bring government authority and services back to rural areas, we could show people what government can do for them…But it’s the same narrative that’s been circulating for twenty years and more. It doesn’t work.