American Enterprise Institute

Web event — The crossroad of competition: Countering the rise of violent extremists and revisionist powers in Africa

Conversation: Dagvin Anderson, Commander, US Special Operations Command Africa Frederick W. Kagan, Director, Critical Threats Project, AEI

Discussion

Panelists: Dagvin Anderson, Commander, US Special Operations Command Africa Andrew Lebovich, Policy Fellow, European Council on Foreign Relations Mark Mitchell, Former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict, Department of Defense Katherine Zimmerman, Resident Fellow, AEI

Moderator: Emily Estelle, Research Manager, Critical Threats Project, AEI

9:15–10:30 a.m. Wednesday, September 9, 2020

Event Page: https://www.aei.org/events/the-crossroad-of-competition- countering-the-rise-of-violent-extremists-and-revisionist-powers-in-africa/

Frederick W. Kagan: Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Fred Kagan. I’m the director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. And we are here today to talk about Africa and specifically the threat of violent extremist organizations in Africa. This an incredibly important topic, and I thank you all for sparing us some of your attention.

Africa, the area of Africa that we are observing, that we are talking about, is home to more than half a billion people and a large concentration of terrorist groups linked to al Qaeda and the Islamic State. It’s a matter of great concern for the United States, and it’s a matter that receives very little attention.

We’re very fortunate today to have with us Major General Dag Anderson, the commander of Special Operations Command, which is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. Gen. Anderson leads more than 1,700 US military interagency and international military personnel operating in 27 countries throughout Africa and Europe. He is a distinguished graduate of Washington University in St. Louis. He commissioned through the Air Force ROTC program, which I won’t hold against him for all my time at West Point. He has participated in Operations Provide Comfort, Deny Flight, Deliberate Guard, Allied Force, Enduring Freedom, and Iraqi Freedom and has commanded a special operations squadron, an expeditionary squadron, an operations group, and a special operations wing. He was a fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard and an Olmsted Scholar in the Czech Republic. He has just completed joint staff tours at Headquarters US Special Operations Command, Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and Headquarters for US Forces Korea and Headquarters United States Indo-Pacific Command. We’re thrilled to have him with us.

I’m going to spend the next 28 minutes or so in a discussion with Gen. Anderson, and then we’ll have a panel discussion that the AEI Critical Threats Project Research Manager Emily Estelle will lead. You can submit questions at any time during the event using email or Twitter. That information is located on the event page below the video box.

So Gen. Anderson, thank you so much for joining us, again, sparing some of your time to talk about this very incredibly important topic. I’d like to begin, if you would, by having your understanding and your laydown of the status of violent extremist organizations in Africa. What is the threat to the United States? Why should we be paying attention? Where are the VEOs succeeding, and how are they succeeding? Over to you, sir.

Dagvin Anderson: Okay, Fred, I appreciate it. Thanks for the time, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk to the folks here, in the venue here from AEI, in order to engage, so I appreciate that. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about Africa because, quite honestly, I think what you brought up is one of — anyone who deals with Africa, I think one of the quick frustrations is why does Africa matter and explaining why do we care. And it’s multiple different fronts, whether it’s economic or informational or it’s social or it’s the security side. So obviously, I’ll talk to the security side and address your questions thereof, you know, why should we pay attention to this and how are things developing.

I think why we pay attention to this is because al Qaeda and Islamic State have both stated that they intend to attack and undermine the United States, whether that’s directly to the homeland or it’s US interests abroad. They have stated that openly, and they have followed through with attacks, obviously, 9/11 being the clearest example of that. So we know they have the will. Part of it is do they have the means or the opportunity, and I think that’s why

Africa matters to us is because Africa is providing them that safe haven, that venue where they can establish themselves, they can develop their means ,and then they can eventually establish, whether it’s a caliphate or their area of control that will give them resources to then carry out these attacks and then undermine the international order and attack the United States and Western allies and partners. So that’s why it matters.

And then as we look at this, I’ll just talk quickly about how we see these two threats developing. So the first one — I’ll just talk about Islamic State quickly. Islamic State has taken some significant hits recently. Al-Baghdadi was killed. They’ve been driven out of what their declared caliphate was in Syria and Iraq. And they’ve lost, I think, in the international world, quite a bit of legitimacy. And so what they’re looking to do is where do they find that legitimacy, where do they rebuild, and Africa provides them those opportunities.

So we see them expanding out into the West, Islamic State Grand Sahara, in the Mali region. We see them in Islamic State West Africa, in Northeastern Nigeria. But then, more disturbing to me is what they’re — we’re seeing them as they expand down the eastern coast, the Swahili coast of Africa. And so we see them established in Somalia. We see them going down into Mozambique, in Tanzania. And we see that these affiliates continue to expand and leverage each other.

And so as we look at this, these affiliates obviously take some guidance and some education and, we assume, some money. That’s a hard thing to track, but some funding from Islamic State core. But we also see that Islamic State core is very dependent and reliant on these affiliates for legitimacy. And so what has really showed us this or what the indication has been is that a year ago, I had been talking to you about their publication of videos coming out of Mali for what Islamic State Grand Sahara was doing, overrunning some Malian outposts and attacks and high-vis things that they were doing out there. That has since shifted, as the French have applied a great deal of pressure to them in that Liptako region of Mali. That has changed the narrative, and they’re not nearly successful. So now we see Islamic State core pulling on stories coming out of Mozambique, which is recently developed into a greater threat as they took the port down there in Cabo Delgado and they’ve become more violent and more organized in their efforts.

And so we see this symbiotic relationship between the affiliate and the core, but we see Islamic State core is really needing these affiliates in order to provide a sense of legitimacy and to continue to publish — publicize the fact that they’re relevant. So this where we see Islamic State. And they’re spreading out. As we see them engage, we don’t see them being quite as strategic as al Qaeda. They’re much more blunt and direct and a little bit more violent in how they engage — well, a lot more violent in how they engage. And they appeal to the disaffected who want to take action.

What I think the deeper threat and the more concerning threat is al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is much more patient. They have learned over the last 20 years. They’re a very resilient organization. They have a strategy that has been published. Associated Press was able to get ahold of pieces of that from Mali and have published that, the al Qaeda playbook. And they’re following this strategy, and they’re very methodical about how they do that.

And the concerning part is that they have said they want to be quiet about this. They don’t want to draw the attention of the West, particularly the United States. They saw what

happened to Islamic State in Iraq and Syria when that attention was drawn to them, and it caused the dismantlement of their caliphate. So they are very cautious about how they do this. And they understand where those red lines are, and they stay below that threshold of drawing attention.

So as we see them, I’ll talk about east and west, because the two big al Qaeda affiliates — al Shabaab in Somalia and then what’s happening out in Azawad with AQIM, al Qaeda Islamic Maghreb and JNIM. For what’s happening with al Shabaab, that’s probably the most imminent threat that we see. They have been largely contained to the southern part of Somalia, down in the Jubba River valley, but that has also created a bit of a de facto safe haven for them in that it’s very difficult to get into that terrain and very difficult to get in there because of clan makeup, because of terrain itself, and just because of how they’ve kind of consolidated down there. It’s difficult for the Somalis and for our partners that we advise to affect that area.

What that has allowed them to do is develop their planning, develop their finance, develop their media operations there to a high degree. What’s concerning there is we know that they’ve become more responsive to al Qaeda, they’ve become more aligned with al Qaeda, and that also, they have publicly stated that they want to attack the West. That came out with the aviation plot that was in the news a while ago. And while some can say and some have argued that while that plot was still nascent and it hadn’t — wasn’t really feasible, what I would say is the concerning part for me is that that was a significant investment in time and money and resources and recruitment to make that happen. And we didn’t know about that. We weren’t aware of it. And we stumbled upon some information that alerted us to that.

And so then, the question is what else are they doing, what else are they planning that we aren’t aware of. Because we know they have the intent and they have been — had a de facto safe haven. Immediacy to that threat is what we’re focusing on in the east, focusing our efforts down in that Jubba River valley in order to disrupt the ability for al Shabaab to attack — definitely to attack the homeland but also to attack US interests in the region.

Moving out to the west, I see that as the deeper strategic concern. We sometimes forget that al Qaeda has their roots in Africa. The initial intellectual thought came from Mauritanian imams. Many of the folks originally from Africa, and obviously, bin Laden was initially established in Sudan. So they’ve got roots there. When they came back, they came to the Azawad region because they saw opportunity. When they came, they made themselves part of the social fabric. They intermarried into the region and became part of that local leadership. They were able to do that largely because it’s isolated and remote and a lot of people didn’t necessarily care what happened up there.

They then, 2012, moved to the south, threatened Bamako. That brought the French into this and pushed them back. But what we’ve seen is they’ve been very deliberate about how they’ve developed this, and they’ve been careful to stay under the radar, as I said before. And I’ll just quickly walk through is that they walked down — they’ve then moved into Southern Mali, then moved past Southern Mali into Northern Burkina Faso. They’ve done that very strategically. They’ve attacked infrastructure, driven out security forces, removed — often through execution — the tribal leadership, and then they’ve controlled the economics. They’ve controlled the markets and the roads, which gives them a [inaudible] attacks.

Then what we’ve seen them is they’ve repeated that then going to the West, out towards the Mopti region of Central Mali and even further out, almost to Senegal as they get out to Kayes, north of Bamako. We also see them moving down towards the littorals. We know they’re active in the littorals. They just had a recent attack in Côte d’Ivoire, but they’re taking a different tack there. They’ve exploited the cleavages with the Fulani especially, or the Peul population, which is a large and nomadic population, and the Tuaregs, both of whom are largely underrepresented in the government. But yet, you’ll note, JNIM and AQIM have two leaders that are — one is Tuareg, and one is Fulani. So they give this illusion of representation to these underrepresented populations.

But as they get down into littorals, we believe they’re looking at other cleavages they can exploit between the north and south. They’re also establishing themselves, and they can do that through other means. If they don’t have to use violence, they won’t. But we know they’re very active in those regions, and that’s concerning as they start moving down to littorals. And I believe a lot of what they’re doing is economically driven. As they start establishing their safe haven, we’ve seen the violent attacks drop in Azawad — not because they’re not there. It’s because they no longer need to fight. They’ve established themselves.

And what we see them following is economics. They do kidnap for ransom. They control the economic centers, as I mentioned. They’re looking at artisanal or other gold mining, especially, or precious metals that they can mine and easily extract from that region, from Mali across into Burkina Faso. And then they’re looking to how they can exploit the licit and illicit trade routes that go from the Gulf of Guinea up to the Mediterranean that have been active for centuries. And people underestimate, I think, the value of that trade. It’s in the billions of dollars.

And you take this organization now and you give them access to reliable income, with a safe haven where they can act without much disruption and without anyone really being able to see them, with the known intent and will to attack the United States and the West, to disrupt the Western international order, that becomes concerning. And then as we look at this, it’s not a matter of if they’ll become a threat; it’s a matter of when they become a threat to the West, if they’re left unchecked and the trajectory continues the way it is.

So that’s why this is concerning. That’s why it matters to the United States and the international community. This not a threat that one nation can take care of on its own. It’s not a United States problem. It’s an international problem.

And it’s a problem that takes like-minded nations who are willing to work together and cooperate and defend the current world order in order to defeat these terrorists because I do think it poses a threat to — especially to Europe, a direct threat to Europe. That’s largely why the European countries have been committed and why France is committed with their largest deployment.

But it’s also more than what any one country can do, and it’s going to take a concerted effort to coalesce these multiple efforts that are there into a coherent strategy and a coherent effort to bring everything to bear against these VEOs who have been proven to be very resilient, very resourceful, and more strategic. We should not underestimate what they’re doing.

Fred, I know that was a long answer to your question. I hope I covered everything there. It’s not just because I’m sitting here in Africa. This is because I am an American who has family that sees this as something that needs to be defended.

Frederick W. Kagan: Thank you, sir. No, I totally agree with that. Every couple of weeks, I see the fantastic intelligence summary that the Critical Threats team puts together on Africa, that we make available on our website, criticalthreats.org, and I have a hard time sleeping for days after that, as I look at what these groups are actually doing.

There’s a part of me that’s really horrified that I now know where Timbuktu is on a map. That was very distressing to me, when I realized that I was going to have to geo-locate that. And these places all seem very far away. These groups seem very localized, and they look — focusing on local problems, and they’re not talking about attacking us all the time. And they’ve been dismissed for many years, therefore, as not being a huge threat to us.

But then of course, you know, Afghanistan was pretty remote, and the al Qaeda group in Afghanistan was also focused on a pretty local fight for a long time. And yet, that’s where the 9/11 attack was launched from. And I think here, we’re looking at groups that have access to resources many orders of magnitude greater than what there was in Afghanistan, to ports, to airports, and so on. And so I think understanding the threat, as you’ve laid it out, and taking it very seriously is an essential matter for American national security. So I thank you for what you’re doing and for laying that out.

I think this is a great time to shift to the question of what SOCAFRICA is doing, in fact, and it’d be great if you could describe for us your main activities and your main successes and challenges.

Dagvin Anderson: Hey, Fred, I’ll definitely talk about that. I want to address the point you just made because it’s one that I didn’t talk about that I think is critical. People do see this as localized. We still get people saying, “Hey, isn’t this — Macina Liberation Front, isn’t this — Ansar ul Islam, this is not — these are local problems and let them deal with them locally.” I would say the difference here — and this is the concern we have with these international terrorist organizations like al Qaeda — is they have come in and galvanized these localized groups that were disparate and united them into a single front with a single mission.

And so 18 months, 24 months ago, I’d have said many of these terrorists that the French capture and interrogate and talk to would have identified with a local organization, Macina Liberation Front or something. Now, what we see very routinely is when we capture them is they identify themselves as al Qaeda. They often carry pictures of bin Laden, and they talk about the larger jihadi fight that they’re after. And I think that’s the difference here is that these international organizations, Islamic State and al Qaeda, have the ability to transform a local grievance into an international one and transform the mentality.

They don’t necessarily recruit that way. A lot of these people are recruited by local issues or local concerns, but once they become part of that organization, then they start fighting for a different reason. And that’s why talking about what’s happening with Islamic State on the Swahili coast is concerning, because that’s what they’re doing in Mozambique, Tanzania, and other areas and converting these local issues into a larger issue. So I appreciate you bringing that up.

And I think the other thing too is that getting people to understand — same thing, Timbuktu was a mythical place as a kid that we got lost in, right, and I never thought it really existed. And then I found it, right, and I didn’t find it for good reasons. There’s a great reason to go to Timbuktu. It’s the wealth of knowledge that the libraries there own for the history of Islamic thought and scholarship that has been resident in this part of the world for centuries that most of the West doesn’t even realize. But yet, it’s there. But that’s not why we’re talking about Timbuktu. We could talk about Timbuktu because of the great music that came out of Mali, that was very well-known, that people drive out in the middle of the desert to hear, right. Eric Clapton went out there. These are things that we should be talking about coming from Mali, coming from Africa. But instead, we’re talking about the VEOs, because that’s what’s gotten our attention and that’s what brings us to Timbuktu.

I’m sorry I’m on a bit of a tirade here, but, you know, when I took command a year ago, my father came over, 86 years old, and we got done, proud day, taking command of an organization in my — afterwards, my dad said, “Hey, why are you here?” And, you know, “Well, Dad, this why they picked me and this . . .” He goes, “No, no, no. I got the military piece and why you got it, but why are we even in Africa? Why does SOCAFRICA exist?” He goes, “Why do we even need this organization? I don’t care about Africa.”

And so I think that’s an issue that we need to address, both with our policymakers and our leadership to understand why, strategically, it’s important in Africa, but also to our local communities and our populace. Why does Africa matter? People understand why Europe and Asia matter. But they don’t fully understand why Africa matters. And Africa matters for a multitude of reasons, and we can go into those. But that was eye-opening to me. After a couple beers and a few hours of conversation, I think my dad just pressed the I believe button because his son was taking command of SOCAFRICA, so clearly, it must matter.

And that takes me to then what are we doing here. What is it we do in Africa? We do, I think, a lot with a very small footprint and a very small investment. We are about 0.3 percent of the DOD’s budget. I think that’s maybe even an exaggeration of rounding up. But with that little bit of investment, we get a great return on what we do. And I would say that when people focus on how much, I think the better question to ask is what is the right investment in the right places and are we having the right effect. And I would say in some places, we absolutely are, and I’ll get to that.

So some of the things we’re doing — I’ll talk about Somalia first quickly. We have a small effort there, less than a thousand folks that are engaged in working with our partners in Somalia. So what we have done there, there’s a Danab, which means lightning. It’s their command — I guess the best way to equate it is kind of a commando force. It’s not a special operations force, but it’s better than the Somali National Army. That’s what our forces are training. A year ago, a year and a half ago, they were pretty much unknown, and the Somalis couldn’t tell you what the Danab were and didn’t really have much faith in them. In recent polling, they are the most trusted security organization in Somalia and the most trusted Somali federal organization agency. A large part of that comes because of their association with United States Special Operations. What we provide them is credibility. We also provide them a great amount of training, and they are an effective force for Somalia.

And that’s important to understand. What is the force that Somalia needs? Not that they need to replicate us in the West, what is it that Somalia needs? And they’ve been quite effective. We’re still in the process of building them. That is part of our mandate.

The other thing that I said, or as I said earlier, we’re focusing south on the Jubba River valley to get after al Shabaab where their stronghold is, where their leadership resides, where we believe their planning for external operations resides, where their media cells are. How do we get after that and focus those efforts?

And the other part of that is we’re not just partnering with the Somalis; we’re partnering with AMISOM — that includes Burundi, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Uganda who have been there for a long period of time — and then also our bilateral relationship with Ethiopia and Kenya. And why does Somalia matter? My dad asked me that question too. “Why do I care about Somalia? We should be out of there.” Somalia matters, just look — I got a map here. I’m sorry no one’s going to see it, but I got a map. Somalia matters. It sits on strategic terrain, first and foremost. That’s important, right. That’s a strategic location.

Why do we care about the piracy in Somalia? It was because of the shipping and the strategic terrain that it sat upon. It’s critical because if Somalia is not stable, Ethiopia and Kenya are going to struggle. Ethiopia and Kenya, the gateways to Africa, the gateway to East Africa, two of the most wealthy and influential nations on the continent, important that they remain stable and Somalia is key to that stability. And then the fact that Somalia has opportunities, I think, that they can develop. If they can get over their internal politics and their clan dynamics, Somalia has opportunities that they can be self-sufficient and they have proved before, they have had a history of that. So Somalia does matter.

Then I go to the West, and what are we doing in the West? So we’re engaged in the West primarily with a partner there in Niger. We are engaged, across the Sahel, with Mali, a very small team with Mali, that’s — we’re working through the events recently in Mali there, obviously, with our engagements. We have a small team there. Burkina Faso, Chad, and then Niger. We do episodic engagements throughout the continent, but I’ll talk about our investment in Niger.

Niger, despite it’s being a landlocked nation with many challenges, it’s got one of the highest — I think, it has the highest fertility rate in the world. It’s number 189 of 189 in the Human Development Index. They’re a very poor country, but they have a sense of identity, Nigerian identity. They do try to represent their ethnicities, and the different ethnicities within Niger feel a sense of national identity, so they’re willing to fight for that. And they’re a very capable people, maybe 85 percent illiterate. When our partners go train with them, they don’t have to train them twice. When they go back to train with them a second time, they don’t have to retrain them. They build upon what they’ve been taught.

Not only that, we see the Nigerian forces where we’ve trained their special operations forces — we have built some companies there and helped them build with other international partners with the Belgians, the French, the Germans, and others have contributed — but we see the Nigerians then investing in their own school, their own training, and they have built their own special operations companies. We don’t see that from many partners. Many partners don’t have the capability. More importantly, they don’t have the drive and will. That’s what we see out of Niger. They know they’re in a bad neighborhood. They know

they’ve got a lot of challenges. But they’re willing to face those challenges and work towards that.

The issue there, the concern there is many of these countries, including Niger though, because the security challenge has become so great, they’re starting to invest 15 percent, 18 percent, 20 percent of their GDP in security. That means they’re not investing in education. They’re not investing in health. I shouldn’t say “not.” They’re not investing as much in health and in education and in judicial development, etc., all these other things that they need to provide as governments, these things that when they’re not provided to the population, that the VEOs prey upon or use against them. So that’s also part of what we bring is we partner with them and help enable that.

I think the biggest thing, as we look about our engagements across the continent, is we enable others. We enable our African partners to do more. We enable our European partners to do more. We enable our other partners in the interagency, whether that’s USAID or OTI, Office of Transition Initiative, under USAID, whether it’s State Department initiatives for defector reintegration. We help partner and enable that. Those aren’t our mandate, nor do we direct how that happens. But our presence, our security presence helps enable those other levers of government to come to bear and allows our international partners to also engage. I think that’s a key piece that we sometimes underestimate is how much those second-, third-, and fourth-order effects matter and that SOF presence enables this.

The other thing I will say is a US flag helps build trust. It also builds confidence. And just having a US flag there means there’s a commitment from a global power, from the United States, and that means others will then invest and commit. And that can’t be underestimated as well.

The last thing I think I’ll say about that is that those are our primary engagements. We also engage episodically throughout the continent, many different countries, through different training events and different opportunities, that we don’t have to have a persistent presence, that an episodic presence can be very effective as well. One of the areas we’ve seen is in Tunisia. We’ve had a persistent engagement with them. We’ve built a very capable partner there that we want to bring out and help engage in other places because they now can handle — they can deal with their threats internally. We still episodically will engage with them, but now we can bring them out to help train other African partners and be a security exporter. We’ve seen that with Morocco as well.

And the last thing I will say, Fred, I know I’m going on here, but Flintlock is a key engagement for us. Flintlock is our annual exercise that we do as a special operations exercise. It is the power that the United States brings to convene European, international partners. We had Japan come and observe, we had Brazil come and observe, because they understand the threat that terrorism brings to the global order in Africa. But we bring these partners together, and we bring partners from across West Africa together to work together.

What we saw last year was significant because the Moroccans flew their aircraft in support. For the first time, African air providing support to other African partners. We saw the Mauritanians, where it was hosted, fly their ISR, ISR that was provided and trained by the US, that they were flying on their own, integrating with that combined team in Flintlock, the combined African team that was being advised by Western partners. That’s significant, as we see Flintlock bring countries together and then develop their skills. And not just develop their

military skills, but talk to them about the importance of law enforcement, of evidentiary change so they can prosecute, talking about how information operations are critical to their efforts, talking about how civ-mil engagement’s important, that you have to be able to do that. We can show that and model that during an exercise, and that has significant impact.

And the second- and third-order effects again, as you look at this, is when these partners go back to their countries. These are majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels. They now know each other. They form a bond. And now, they start talking amongst each other. They share data. They share tactics and procedures. And now they start attacking this problem as a multinational effort. That’s the power that the United States brings and that SOF brings with a very small investment.

So again, it’s not the size of the investment. It’s is it in the right place and is it doing the right things with the right effect. I would say, right now, yes, we are. And we’re having great effect with a small investment.

I’m not trying to overstate what we’re doing. I am not going to say that we’re going to solve this problem, by any means. The French have a much larger commitment, and I should be — I want to make sure I give them the credit they’re due. They just lost three soldiers up in the northern part of Mali. They had a terrible helicopter accident where they lost 14 French soldiers in November, right before Thanksgiving. They have put a lot of blood and treasure into the Sahel, and they are incredibly committed. We value their partnership, and we partner with them to help enable both their ops and our operations and the capture or the killing of Droukdal was a key point of that.

The number-four al Qaeda leader, the highest-ranking al Qaeda leader outside of the Middle East and outside of Iran was in the Sahel. He was active out there and providing not just a conduit to the leadership; he was part of their leadership. And this goes again to show the tie of al Qaeda to Africa and the roots that they have in Africa and that they’re coming back to those roots. Again, why we need to watch this carefully and why we need to look at this.

Fred, that’s what we’re doing. I will say the last thing we do is we observe this, right, and so we can help characterize this. While the French are carrying the heavy burden of the fight in the Sahel, we are there as well. And our forces being there allows us to integrate with our partners, build that trust so we can get additional information from them and understand how this threat affects them and how this threat is rapidly expanding. And I think that this is important to understand because it is going faster than we thought a year ago, which was going faster than we thought a year before that. In 1919, we had Flintlock in Burkina Faso. I could not have Flintlock in Burkina Faso this year. The threat situation has moved that rapidly.

All right, I’ve gone on there, I’m sorry. I’ll turn it back to you, Fred, and let you drive here.

Frederick W. Kagan: Thank you, sir. Actually, I’m about to turn it over to Emily to move on. I just want to say it is remarkable what you are able to do with such a small force and at such a small cost. I think you’ve just given the pithiest and clearest exposition of why pulling out of Africa, reducing our presence in Africa would be grand strategic folly of the highest order. It buys us no resources that we need urgently elsewhere, and it would cost us a huge benefit that you’re bringing us, that it’s the more remarkable that you are able to accomplish what you’re accomplishing with partners who are the poorest countries in the world.

I looked up, you know, the Malian GDP is less than 0.1 percent of the American GDP. The Somali GDP basically rounds to zero, as a percentage of the US GDP, and it is a failed state. And we have decided that we are going to outsource and rely on partners and that’s what we’re going to do, but we need to understand the nature of the partners we’re relying on against the magnitude of the threat that you’re talking about. And we need to be asking ourselves at what point is this strategy of relying on the poorest and most fragile countries in the world to combat a rising and virulent threat is actually viable.

But I know that while that’s going on, you and your team at SOCAFRICA and throughout AFRICOM are doing an amazing and valiant job with the resources that you have to make a big difference. We’re very grateful to you for that and for spending some time here.

And with that, I’m going to turn it over to the Critical Threats Project Research Manager Emily Estelle. Emily, over to you.

Emily Estelle: Thanks, Fred. Thanks for turning it over. We’re going to get all the panelists onto video now, and I’ll introduce everybody.

Great. So I’ve invited the panel to respond to Gen. Anderson’s remarks, and we’ll get into a bit of discussion after that. So just to introduce everybody to start, we’ve got Mark Mitchell, who’s the former principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, as well as a highly decorated US Army combat veteran in the Special Operations community. Andrew Lebovich is a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. And Katherine Zimmerman is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

So I’ll start with Mark. Drawing on your experience as both an operator and a policymaker, what challenges do you see from a policy perspective, and how do those challenges translate into operations below the threshold of war in theaters like Africa?

Mark Mitchell: Good morning. It’s a real pleasure to join everybody. I wanted to say thanks to Gen. Anderson for his leadership there in SOCAF, and to Fred, I want to echo some of the comments that have already been made this morning.

I think the first and most significant challenge that we face is strategic myopia. Our leaders have shown an interest in divesting from our efforts in Africa, and they have a laser focus on conflict in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, despite the NDS language about great- power competition and the need for continued CT. I’ve seen senior leaders in the Pentagon ask questions like, “Why are we in Africa? Why do we care what happens in Timbuktu? Why are we subsidizing the French?” And, you know, some of this goes back to the 2017 episode in Niger and the aftermath, particularly with some members of Congress falsely accusing DOD of failing to inform them about our activities in Africa.

I would just point out that beginning with the Obama administration and in the current administration, the president sends a War Powers Act notification to the Hill every six months. These unclassified and public reports are easy to find, unless you want to feign ignorance and outrage. I would also add that — I know some of the other folks on here — members of the Hill staffers, they know that DOD provides numerous briefings and updates on our CT efforts, many of which are not attended by members of the Oversight Committees.

So going back to that incident, aside from all the hand-wringing and some faux outrage, the incident led to the Joint Staff’s Africa optimization plan. But unfortunately, it couldn’t answer the question of optimization for what. And they seem to be looking to get out of there. And I think that this mindset really draws away from the — it represents a misunderstanding of the idea of competition, and DOD has continued to conflate competition with deterrence to ideas which are related but not synonymous. And deterrence is about what our adversaries think of our capabilities, will, and intent. Competition is what our partners and allies think about our capabilities, will, and intent vis-à-vis our adversaries — i.e., which relationship is going to yield the greatest benefit for my country and our needs and goals. And competition requires real partnership and mutual benefit, not simply an episodic transactional relationship when the US needs something.

And as everybody has talked about so far, many of our African partners are facing internal threats from VEOs. And by helping them solve their challenges, we show that we are great partners to them. And we must remember that they don’t see this great-power competition the same way we do. They are dealing with all these internal challenges: poor governance, ethnic and religious conflict, economic deprivation, corrupt security forces, declining law and order, and general instability. So the extent that we’re able to help them solve their problems, we’re not only combating terrorism, but we’re building that goodwill and confidence that the US will be a better long-term partner than China or Russia.

And as Gen. Anderson said, I think this is both effective and economically sustainable with a small footprint. I do think we need to do a much better job of integrating our overall military efforts with the diplomatic and economic and informational and work to address the underlying political issues that contribute to instability.

I also want to give a plug here for our UN peacekeeping efforts and helping to build, through the UN peacekeeping, some of those security exporters that we talked about and capabilities and encouraging cooperation between African partners. I think that’s critical. You know, go back to US pulling out of MINUSMA in Gao and Timbuktu, which I thought — we were talking about 16 people and yet, who had an outsized effect on the efforts there. So I think it’s really about looking at Africa as a theater of strategic competition and recognizing that we need to help. If we want to be a true partner, we need to help them solve their problems and not just focus on ours.

Thanks.

Emily Estelle: Thank you, Mark. I’m glad you drew in the issue of great-power competition, which is something that I want to build into this discussion as we keep going forward.

I want to hand it over to Andrew first. Andrew, the US is supporting allies and partners in the Sahel, among them the French Operation Barkhane and the G5 Sahel Joint Force. What are the US and our partners achieving in the Sahel, and are these efforts achieving their intended effects?

Andrew Lebovich: Well, thank you, Emily, and thank you, Gen. Anderson, for joining us and for inviting us to be a part of this discussion. Those are good questions.

So I think the first question is how do we actually define achievement and then what kinds of cooperation are we talking about, because as Mark mentioned, as Gen. Anderson mentioned, the actual US contribution is often quite subtle and much smaller, for instance, than the French or even others. So there are aspects of this that have been very beneficial and where we can say that there’s been a large impact, and then there are others that I’m going to get into shortly where I think we can say it’s been — it’s been lacking.

So for instance, in ISR support and logistical support to Operation Barkhane, to French operations in particular in the region, this has had a very important impact, and it would really, I think, be very difficult for the French to conduct operations in the way they currently conduct them without American support. And French officials are very clear about this, very adamant about this. And also we’ve seen more specifically, for instance, in the operation that killed the former leader of AQIM, Abdelmalek Droukdal, that US support was very important to this.

And then, of course, there’s another aspect, which is providing material and providing training and support to — in the southeast to G5 member nations. So the G5 Sahel: Mauritania, Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. And we have a series of training operations and a presence in the region that’s expanded going back to 2002. It is hard to say, stepping back, that this has really contributed to greater overall security. This is not necessarily the fault of US forces — and I think sometimes there’s a tendency to conflate this a bit — but I don’t think the overall security picture, I don’t think anyone would say that the overall security picture right now is much better than it has been. Even in the last couple of years, we’ve seen a really precipitous degradation of the security situation in different parts of Mali, in parts of Niger that were often thought of as being much more stable and then, of course, in Burkina Faso, where the collapse of the state in parts of northern and also eastern Burkina Faso and increasingly western Burkina Faso has been really dramatic to witness.

And so where I think US training has been very beneficial and very important is in building up some of the partner capacities, building up some special units, building up some aviation. I don’t mean to minimize that, but the problem is — not just for the US, I would say similar things about the French engagement, for instance — is that there’s often a disconnect between military efforts and overall political goals in the region. And part of this is because, at least on the US side, there’s a tendency to struggle to define what those political goals are.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t real political goals and that there aren’t things we should try to achieve. But to this question that’s come up of why Africa, why the Sahel, part of it is that on the policymaker side, there’s not much of an effort to actually define the strategic goals for this political engagement beyond counterterrorism or now, increasingly, great- power competition, but again, in, often, very vague ways that don’t help create a kind of step-by-step process by which the US military could engage more effectively and the US government could engage more effectively. And so that’s a major concern.

And also of course a lack of coordination that exists between training initiatives. International training initiatives in particular is, I think, oftentimes counterproductive, or at least limits the effectiveness of these programs.

And then again to this question of what our desired effect actually is — what do we actually want in the region — there’s a plethora of training and equipment programs, but security force abuses continue in the region, and in some cases, have accelerated. In Mali and Burkina

Faso especially but also in Niger, where governments often either continue to partner with local militias or at least tolerate their presence, and so this something that is not directly related, for instance, to US engagement but at the same time has a hugely detrimental effect on security, on community cohesion, and on counterterrorism efforts.

So this is all related. And again, it’s related to this question of politics, a lack of support, oftentimes, to local peace arrangements, a lack of support to demobilization and reintegration efforts, and oftentimes, efforts that focus on high-level counterterrorism or often very low- level fights, but where jihadist groups and armed groups in general continue to proliferate and adapt to a changing local environment because there is still no real integrated strategic approach regionally or from the international community focused on political outcomes.

And so I think I’ll stop there because I know we’re on a tight time crunch, but I look forward to questions afterwards.

Emily Estelle: Thank you. Yeah, I think that’s a great point about the lack of a strategic framework, and, you know, studying the VEO groups and looking at what their political objectives are, I think one of the challenges is having strategy that actually counters what they’re attempting to do, not just the parts of it that catch most of our attention. Katie, you’ve called for replacing the US government’s counterterrorism framework with a strategy that focuses on securing the populations that [inaudible] groups target. What challenges do the US government’s framing and structures pose to an approach that’s focused on conditions, and how would the specific capabilities of special operations forces play into such an approach?

Katherine Zimmerman: Thanks, Emily. And again, thank you to Gen. Anderson for taking the time to spend an hour or so with AEI to talk about this.

I think that as we’re looking at the challenges that the US faces, it’s primarily from the way that we frame the problem set. You’ve heard it touched on by Gen. Anderson, you’ve heard it touched on by Mark and also by Andrew, that we’re myopically focused on the counterterrorism problem and defining it in that way. You know, looking at the threats that are coming here at home and when you look at Africa, you know, frankly, none of the groups there have the capability to attack the United States at home. That doesn’t mean that some of them don’t have the intent, as the general alluded to earlier with al Shabaab inside of Somalia, and are pursuing those external attack capabilities, but it means that as we rank and stack our counterterrorism threats, Africa falls to the bottom repeatedly. And so if we treat it as a counterterrorism problem, that means that it ends up, frankly, at the bottom of the list with fewer resources.

The other problem with defining it as just counterterrorism is that the groups themselves, the local groups on the ground, their day-to-day actions are not those of a terrorist organization. These groups see themselves really as revolutionary and are conducting an insurgency to transform how the populations in which they operate live their day-to-day life. So they are focused on governance and changing how many people are subscribing or at least tolerating their form of Islam. So, you know, if you’re looking at the terrorist threat from these groups, not every individual who’s a member of JNIM in in Mali and the Sahel or al Shabaab inside of Somalia are focused on conducting global jihad or even think about global jihad on a daily basis.

But when we define the problem set that way, it means that we have a series of responses to it that go from the one that we all think about when we think about terrorists, so the drone strikes and targeting high-value individuals to disrupting networks, to improving law enforcement, to a very securitized approach, and that goes from what the State Department is doing, where we’re watching the Counterterrorism Bureau at State focus on law enforcement, intelligence sharing, border security, foreign assistance, even to some of the assistance that’s coming out of USAID. And that type of securitization of our soft power really does us harm in the long term.

So you heard Andrew talk about, you know, the absence of a strategic framing for what the US seeks to accomplish in some of these spaces beyond defeat the terrorist groups. And that really comes to the challenge that we have as a government in developing a strategic response that is led by the State Department that, you know, subordinates our hard power to the soft power, so the successes that SOCAF is achieving on the ground are not just fleeting but are actually supporting something more long term.

You know, so to go back to the repeated words, but ending the endless wars, right? We’re not going to end the wars until we have some sort of political solution, and we still haven’t found that after almost two decades of this fight. And what SOCAF is doing in Africa is, you know, fundamentally not too different from what we have in other counterterrorism spaces. The difference is they’re doing it with a lot less and, as Fred noted, with partners that are a little less capable because they’re resource constrained in various ways.

And the last real challenge that we have is our question of risk. So Mark talked about this with the aftermath of the Tongo Tongo ambush, in which we saw four US servicemen killed in 2017, and the congressional response. But really, you can look at Tongo Tongo, you can look at what happened post-Benghazi, and the United States has decided that we are not going to take any risks to our personnel, even those personnel who have signed up and accepted the type of risk that they’re looking to achieve. And so you know, the question of should we have special forces in the field and, you know, are they achieving enough to accept the risk that we’re taking to their people, that’s a question we need to answer.

And the other one is the question of failure. So, you know, this is outside of the conversation of SOCAFRICA, but on the soft-power side, in terms of foreign assistance, are we taking risk in terms of trying out new programs that may or may not be successful? You know, they are small dollars when we’re looking at the full budget in terms of our foreign assistance, but trying to achieve different effects on the ground means that we can’t just keep doing the same foreign assistance programs on repeat. You know, building schools is great, but not all these communities are looking just for schools.

And, you know, there is a question of what that governance looks like and how we can start changing our foreign assistance outside of a state-to-state relationship, but perhaps working through the central government and then also working with substate actors out on the peripheries. And so, you know, there are multiple engagements now. Congress just passed a law last December that actually mandates a strategic framework for working in fragile environments. I think all of us can look at Somalia and Mali and Niger and Burkina Faso and Nigeria — and I’m leaving off multiple states in Africa that can be defined as fragile. We don’t have a strategy to work in those states. And so Congress is looking to push us to actually have that whole-of-government approach.

And the reason why I’m focusing on this and not actually what the special forces are doing is their role, you know, they have a certain skill set and they’ve been operating along that skill set. That’s not going to change fundamentally. There are things that can change on the margins, if we change our approach, the types of intelligence they push back, so rather than just pushing back a targeting set in terms of what our intelligence is, also pushing back some of the social grievances and local governance gaps that maybe their partners within the interagency, within the US interagency can fill. t\That’s sort of, kind of, sensor in the field might be something that would shift in this new paradigm. But in terms of what our special forces are doing, you know, they are out there and to bring a unique set of capabilities to this problem set, and they’ve been doing that. It’s just whether we position the rest of the US government in a way that’s leading the effort so the special forces are supporting it, rather than out in front.

Emily Estelle: Thanks, Katie. I’d like to invite Gen. Anderson to respond, if you’d like, to anything the panelists have said. We’ve got a bit of time to do some back and forth here. And I think there are a few other topics that would be worth hitting on in your responses.

So we started to touch a bit more on, kind of, the overlap between the counterterrorism space and the great-power competition space, and I think that’s worth drawing out. Some of my recent writing has focused on the overlap here and looking at, you know, great power and counterterrorism not as just a push and pull, but instead examining how different players, so Russia and China, but also other states that are involved on the African continent are shaping the environment in which VEOs are operating. So I’ve been calling it a vicious cycle, but looking at how external players are and the conflicts they’re involved in are not just kind of overlapping with counterterrorism but actually fueling some of these grievances and extending the conflicts that we’ve talked about. So I’ll just, you know, put that idea out there. But Gen. Anderson, over to you for any thoughts that you have in response.

Dagvin Anderson: So I — I’m not sure that I would necessarily respond. There’s a lot out there so I wouldn’t respond in general, but just a few additional thoughts to add to this.

I do think that our small investment does have a huge payback. And I think the return on that investment is not just with our partners, with our African partners, but also with our European partners, but also on the international stage. And that goes to being a great power. It goes to competition. It goes to just, you know, who we are as Americans even. And I think that’s important.

And, you know, so the example I want to put out there because I think it hits that is when the COVID crisis hit. I happened to be in Kenya at the time, right, and I actually had to come back to Germany because they were talking about I wouldn’t get a flight back if I didn’t leave Nairobi. That was the last American that left the continent from SOCAF. No more came off the continent. And I want to make that very clear, because that was important that we stayed engaged.

There was a lot of discussion of should we stay out there. You’ve got small teams in very remote locations. You know, is that smart? We never thought twice about leaving the continent. What we thought deeply about, what we reacted to was how do we mitigate the risk so we can continue to work with our partners to take on these mutual threats. And so it seemed like a long time in the opening days here when COVID was really hitting the continent, hitting Europe and the United States, but what we focused on was how to mitigate

that risk. How do we treat and isolate forward? How do I get means to CASEVAC in case someone has a bad reaction or needs to get to higher-level medical care? How do I get the right protective equipment forward? How do I engage with our partners, and how do I educate our partners on COVID? This what we did, and we stayed in place.

I had lots of pressure to come back home, to bring troops off the continent. But instead, we figured ways to fight through a contested environment, how to operate under COVID. And the feedback we’ve got has been pretty overwhelming. Every African partner has said, “We have noticed, and we appreciate that you stayed.” Even partners where we didn’t have a persistent presence, the neighbors noticed that we stayed engaged in the fight.

And we didn’t just stay. We didn’t hunker down in our base and hide. We went out with our partners because the VEOs did not stop attacking. And we enabled them to go out and take the fight to those VEOs. We learned how to operate in a COVID environment, how to mitigate that risk. That’s what the Americans do well. That’s what we represent as a nation. How do we solve problems, and how do we work with our partners? And that commitment was critical.

Other partners, other Western partners, whether it was the Norwegians or the Germans or the Dutch, came to me afterwards and said, “We stayed because you stayed. If you had left, we probably would have left as well.” And that’s a force multiplier now. Because we stayed, they stayed; they continued to engage with the partners. This is the power the US brings, and this is the importance of our engagement.

And this goes to, when it comes down to it, great-power competition. Because we stayed and engaged with the threat that was important to these partners, we stayed there with a mutual effort that we stood side by side with our partners. This is what SOF does. And I think we have to be careful that we don’t conflate the last 20 years of special operations in the Middle East, of being direct action roles, of going in and pulling bin Laden, you know, out of his bedroom or going in and doing these raids. Yes, we have special operators that are incredibly good at doing that. But where we excel and where special ops niche is enabling our partners and working those tactical-level engagements to have strategic impact.

And I will tell you, that’s what COVID was for our nation, that we stayed engaged with literally small teams in remote areas, but we stayed engaged where it mattered. And that is what other great powers, or so-called great powers, are unable to do or could not do or would not do. And the fact that we stayed is critically important, and that goes to what Mark was saying about the importance of partnership.

We have to partner. No one nation can take this on alone, and this not something that’s going to be solved — Katie hit on this too — it’s not going to be solved in the short term. This a generational impact. And we very much understand that this not — we in the dime, if you talk about dime, we are the lowercase M military. We’re enabling information operations. We’re enabling economic investment. We’re enabling diplomatic engagement. And we’re enabling international engagement. That’s what we do, and that’s what our investment — that’s what matters there.

So I just wanted to highlight that again. And I think when it comes to the competition piece, and you talk about this, yes, I do think — I just came out of INDOPACOM. I was the deputy director of operations. I spent two years focused on this. I do very much think that the

Chinese are trying to change the world order, the world order they benefited from, the world order that allowed other nations to rise after World War II, the world order that allowed our adversaries to become global powers and economic powers. Right?

This what’s unique about what America has brought to the international community and this international order: that, if you choose to participate in, focuses on the rule of law and on order, not on what benefits one nation. Yes, it does benefit the United States, but I believe it benefits all nations who participate in that. I don’t believe China wants that. China wants what benefits them primarily, and I’ve seen that in their engagements in Southeast Asia, what they’ve done in the South China Sea.

What I want to, kind of, clarify is what Mark and some others hit on there is when we address this. What we do in the South China Sea and the Pacific is we show resolve and adherence to international norms and international order. I’m not there to confront China. I want China to become part — I want them to be a responsible part of the international community, to responsibly address these issues together. But if they’re not going to be part of that international order and they’re going to try to undo it, then I am concerned about that.

And when I see them build islands in the South China Sea, when I see them try to expand their territory and their military footprint — against what threat, when the United States has withdrawn their threat after the Cold War, what threat do the Chinese see the need to expand against? So this where I have concern. And then where we confront the Chinese is when they try to steal our intellectual property, when they do things within our borders, we confront that. And I think we are starting to do that. But where we compete is where we need to — where we see them compete and where we have to look at where does that influence matter. Where do we see common interests that we can align against? And that’s happening in Africa. These lines of influence aren’t set. They’re very fluid. And I do think we have mutual interest that we can align with and compete very effectively in Africa.

And over the last 20 years, we have proven we are the gold standard when it comes to special operations, when it comes to counterterrorism, and when it comes to counterinsurgency. That is why many other nations want to partner with the United States. That’s why their primary effort is they want the United States to come help them. Because we are the experts, because we are the best at this, and we have over 20 years of experience doing this. We have developed capabilities and the things that aren’t high tech — just the ability to share intelligence, to share operational information, and to engage — that benefit our partners, that don’t take a lot of investment. But yet, we have the expertise, and more importantly, we have the will and values to do that: to engage with our partners as equals, to not make them feel like they’re second class, not make them feel like they’re inferior, but to engage with them as equals.

And I’ll tell you again, I’ll go back to Niger, some of the best partners I’ve ever seen and best partners I’ve ever engaged with, incredibly motivated, incredibly capable, against many, many challenges and many odds. And like I said before, I think, 85 percent illiterate, but yet, many of them speak five different languages. And they know the territory, and they want to go out and defend Niger.

And so when we go out and engage and we engage with our values, that matters. There are other values out there that I don’t — I’m not fully aligned with it, that I think are corrosive, and we have to be careful if we’re going to let those nations engage with those values

because we will pay for that on the back end. And so if we don’t want corrosive dictatorships, we don’t want people that oppress and don’t respect human rights, then we have to be willing to go out and engage and engage with our values. And it’s not just the US military. It’s across all of government that we need to do that, and many of the panelists brought that out. So I just — I just wanted to make that kind of clear. I know many of them agree with that.

The last thing I will say as we talked about it and Katherine hit on it, if you use this as a fire analogy, if we’re the firefighters or we’re coming in to advise the firefighters, the place is already on fire and we’re probably a little bit late. What we need to do is what the other elements of government bring is you have to build the structural integrity or to build the structures that are resistant to the fire. You have to clear away that — what all the things that are combustible. You have to invest in that. That’s where you get fire prevention. Because once the fire starts, even if you have sprinklers in place, it’s going to do damage when you solve that. And if you’re going to come in with the firefighters, which is what SOCAFRICA often is, or supporting the partners and they’re firefighters. There’s already damage, significant damage done, and you’re fighting now to just contain and preserve. That investment in the fire prevention needed to happen a long time previous.

I’ll close there. Appreciate the opportunity to respond.

Emily Estelle: Thank you, sir. We’ve got a huge number of really awesome questions so I’m going to group them by theme and try and hit on the points that the audience wants to hear about. One theme that actually the fire prevention analogy brought to mind is the idea of fragility. And I’d like to give Mark and also Katie the chance to talk about the evolving policy framework and the idea of state fragility and global fragility that’s been coming through in the policy environment recently. So Mark, if you want to go first on that.

Mark Mitchell: Sure, thank you very much. I just want to remind everybody that DOD, State, and USAID did a Stabilization Assistance Review, culminated in 2017 with a joint document signed by the secretaries and the director of USAID, on best practices in stabilizing environments. There’s a, I think, a huge overlap between many of the things that need to be done in these fragile states, and it provides an excellent model for moving forward. When I left office, we were talking about doing a number of test implementation cases, most of them in Africa. Unfortunately, I’ve lost the bubble on where it stands, but I couldn’t agree more that we really need to take that long-term approach to those institutions of, you know, economic, diplomatic, governance institutions and the military within these partner countries and focus on building them for the long term and maintain that strategic patience and long-term outlook because none of this going to be solved in a couple of years. Thanks.

Katherine Zimmerman: And I think, just to quickly add to that, you know, as we’re looking at the fragility framework, you know, as Mark mentioned, DOD, the State Department, and AID have all been doing a lot of work over the past few years to determine what worked well and how to incorporate lessons learned from the past institutionally. So rather than just doing it by theater, which we had done inside of Afghanistan and we did it in Iraq, but actually, applying it to what the US government does.

You know, we’re at a phase now where as we’re looking to compete with other global powers. It’s not just hard power where we want to be competing with. So it’s not just how

many troops we have in various theaters and the relationships that we build military to military, but the other bits and pieces that we can bring across.

And so, you know, as Gen. Anderson has noted, you know, SOF is certainly an enabler, and especially in these countries, it is an enabling presence for other civilian members of the US government to be out and about in the field. But if there’s no other side to the coin, if we only bring the military power, that is the only way we’re going to view this problem set. And the fragile spaces become increasingly just a spiral of localized conflicts that feed out and breed more fragility.

You know, I actually really like the firefighting analogy, but, you know, creating a buffer zone and then working on some of the cases where we do see the governance gaps and we see the opportunities that our adversaries, both the al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other Salafi-jihadis, but certainly China and Russia and, to some degree, Iran, and in certain countries, to build into some of the local populations and to exacerbate conflicts.

Emily Estelle: Thanks, Katie. On the idea of fragility and institution building, I think it’s worth thinking about not just states themselves but also regional organizations. I want to go to Andrew to ask about specifically the economic community of West African states is one example that we got a question about. And what do you see as the role of that organization, including in the fight against VEOs?

Andrew Lebovich: Well, so ECOWAS right now is playing or trying to play a key role, mostly in political negotiation and political mediation and management, especially after the coup in Mali. There have been efforts for years to constitute an African intervention force that would be part of ECOWAS. It hasn’t really materialized. It was one reason for the creation of the G5 was because even regional states were growing frustrated with the failure to constitute this force.

But even on a political level, the ECOWAS leadership sometimes has been problematic, for similar reasons, that there are, you know, there are problems defining political end states and problems defining what a, kind of, ECOWAS perspective would be in part because member states have different goals, have different concerns in places like Mali, in places like Niger, in places like Burkina Faso. But in Mali especially, there’s been a marked difference between ECOWAS’s desire to push for, first, the return of the deposed president and then for a quick transition to civilian rule compared with multiple ECOWAS presidents who are changing constitutions or violating their own laws to push for third terms in office.

And we see elections coming up in in multiple countries, in Niger and Burkina Faso, and so these inconsistencies matter. And so again, this is actually a good chance of pointing out that also it’s not just the US or not just European partners that have trouble defining political end states. It’s also regional states, sometimes.

Emily Estelle: Thank you, Andrew. Gen. Anderson, I want to roll up a couple questions for you that I’ve received about China and Russia. And I think the audience has really caught on to those issues as key right now and so, you know, a few questions here. One, to what extent are VEOs benefiting from the increasing Russian and Chinese military presence, if they are? Related question to that is as we’re looking at a space for competition with Russia and China in Africa, are there any opportunities for cooperation with those states against VEO

challenge, looking at Mozambique as one case where that might actually be a cautionary tale for involvement of some of these forces? So I’d like to get your thoughts on that.

And then broadening out a bit from the VEO issue specifically, when we look at, say, China’s military and economic presence in East Africa, for example, do we have a viable communication and influence strategy to meet or counter the Chinese foray into Africa? So I’ll turn that over to you and any other thoughts you have on the Chinese role, particularly given your experience with INDOPACOM as well.

Dagvin Anderson: Thanks, Emily. So I can’t think of any time the VEOs have benefited from China or Russia. I’m not sure exactly what that question was after directly, but I don’t know of any place where the VEOs have benefited from China or Russia or that they’re helping the VEOs, if that was what they’re getting at. We don’t know of any of that, nor are we tracking that. That’s not in anyone’s interest to help these violent extremist organizations. The VEOs will look for any opportunities that they will seize. If there’s a cleavage or a difference or there’s something, they will seize that. But I don’t know anything that’s related strictly directly to China and Russia.

The cooperation piece, so I’ll go back to what I said earlier on that. Yeah, of course, there’s opportunities to cooperate. There’s more to be done in Africa than any one nation can do. It’s are they willing to do that in that is in line with international norms and international order. If they’re going to go in there and subvert that or they’re going to do things that put a nation into unsustainable debt or other things like that, then I question where can we cooperate. We attempted to cooperate with the Chinese off the coast of Somalia. They’re still going off the coast of Somalia to do piracy patrols where the rest of the international community doesn’t see a huge piracy issue. So I wonder sometimes what their motivations and interests are. It’s not always clear. They’re rather opaque with that.

So yes, there is opportunity. I think when they do their investments, you know, there’s — the African nations, many, almost every one of them needs infrastructure investment, and the Chinese have been willing to do that. That’s beneficial. It’s beneficial to everybody. As long as it’s not there solely to extract resources from the African nations, as long as that is something that is workable with the international community and that helps benefit and helps grow that host, that partner nation, that host nation’s economy, then yes, there are opportunities to cooperate.

I think that often though, what we see from Chinese investment, in Chinese engagement, is it’s not multilateral. They much prefer bilateral engagement. We’ve seen that throughout Asia. We see they want to be in engagements where they can use their economic superiority to dictate terms. We see them, then once they get entrenched, they then use that to their advantage to a way that I don’t think is mutually beneficial all the time. So that’s where it’s concerning.

So yes, of course, there are places to cooperate. It’s whether or not and how willing they are to cooperate and how willing are they to conform to international norms that have been quite successful over the last 70 years to bring an unprecedented time of peace and prosperity around the globe. So that would be my answer to that. So yes, I do see opportunities if they’re willing to play by the rules.

I think you had one more part to that, and I might have missed it as I was writing this out. So the narrative piece, when it comes to communications and influence and engagement, I do think that’s an area where the US government needs to apply more resources and more thought. We need more energy in that. We need a coherent narrative and a coherent strategy to engage.

We were brilliant at this during the Cold War. I think what Radio Free Asia and Radio Free America, Voice of America did was absolutely critical. I know that for a fact. I got the opportunity to study in the Czech Republic for two years, a few years after the Cold War ended. I got several friends who were former Communist members in Czech Republic, right. They no longer are. They used to talk about how they would drive down to the Czech border, near Vienna, to listen to Radio Free Agent, because they would get underneath the jammers, not Radio Free Agent, to Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. And what drew them, it goes to what a couple panelists said before about the soft power. They drove down there to listen to American jazz and American rock. And then interspersed in those programs was American news, news that they thought they could trust because there was — they didn’t feel it was propaganda and spun. So having unbiased news that we push, that we send out around the world is absolutely vital to what we do.

We have, I think, the ideals and values that transcend borders that people immigrate to America for. We should not be afraid to engage the world with those values. We should not be afraid to advertise those values.

Whenever I go to Africa, there isn’t a partner that doesn’t ask about how to come study in America, how do I get my kids to America, how do I get there? And it’s not because of just they want to extract their benefits from America and get what education; it’s because they believe in what America stands for. And that goes to how we engage in the information realm, and we can’t be afraid to do that. And we become reticent, I think, to engage in information operations, to engage in news and broadcast that matter, and that goes to how do we do this in the digital realm and how do we engage people today that may not have televisions or radios, but they’ve got a smartphone and they have the means to get voice packets and that, if they can’t read the text, they can understand the message that’s broadcast through the internet. How do we engage there?

And I think that’s where, as a nation, we need to look and not be afraid to talk about who we are as a people and what these values are that attract millions of immigrants from around the world to our borders. That is the strength of America. And that is what our Founding Fathers established, and that’s what the Statue of Liberty stands for. I don’t defend that statue. I defend the words at her feet and the intangibles that that beacon stands for.

Emily Estelle: Thank you so much, Gen. Anderson and Mark, Andrew, and Katie for joining. We’re at time. I don’t think I can wrap it up much better than Gen. Anderson just did, certainly.

So I want to invite those watching to, you know, continue submitting questions on Twitter or an email, if you like. We’ll try and keep replying to them online as best we can. I received a lot of great questions that we weren’t able to answer today, and it’s great to see interest in this topic. It’s an important one that that’s not talked about enough. So that’s everything we’ve got for today and thanks for joining us and, you know, hope everyone learned something and have a great day .

Dagvin Anderson: Emily, thanks a lot. It was great. Really appreciate it.

Emily Estelle: Thanks.

Andrew Lebovich: Thank you very much.

Katherine Zimmerman: Thank you.

Mark Mitchell: Thank you, everybody. Take care.