US National Security Experts Call For US Troops to Be Immediately Withdrawn From Niger
Jose Nino
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Several defense experts and former officials have called on the Biden regime to quickly evacuate American troops from the African nation of Niger as it experiences increasing degrees of instability. The junta-supported regime recently requested that north of 1,000 United States troops currently present in Niger will begin to withdraw in the coming months. Experts believe that the coup that brought the current junta into power and the overall situation on the ground makes Niger particularly dangerous for American troops.
“If you don’t want to see another Benghazi or another Mogadishu, these guys got to go,” Michael DiMino, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities and former CIA officer, said to the Daily Caller, making a reference to incidents where American forces in Libya and Somalia were attacked and killed by militant units in 2012 and 1993. “It was never a matter of if, it was always a matter of when those guys had to go because this new government in Niger does not want us there. They made that very clear.”
“What the State Department was not understanding, is that these guys are cold-blooded. This new government in Niger? They don’t care. They do not want the United States involved in their country,” DiMino added. “There was this denialism for several months that, ‘We can salvage this, we did fix this.’ The denialism put us behind the ball such that we could have a very terrible event occur at any moment. That’s that’s how bad this is.”
The American has kept a military presence in Niger since 2013 to carry out counterterrorism operations and halt the spread of Islamist terrorism across the Sahel region. Niger hosted a significant airbase and the American government dropped hundreds of millions of dollars in the last decade into helping train and equip Niger’s armed forces.
The region has been in a dilapidated state for a while. Since the middle of 2023, the country has been in a state of political chaos after its military launched a coup and overthrew the democratically elected president. Abdourahamane Tchiani was the general who spearheaded the coup. Ironically, he received part of his military training at a Department of Defense-backed college.
The military has currently installed its own regime in Niger, opposing the “illegal” American presence in March and has brought in Russian forces for security purposes. The Biden regime recently spent weeks attempting and failing to persuade the military regime in Niger to allow American forces to stay in the region. That has failed with the government of Niger calling for the US to withdraw its troops.
Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities and host of the Daniel Davis Deep Dive show, believes keeping troops in Niger does nothing to boost American security.
“Ground troops do not prevent terror plots abroad from forming. It is physically impossible to garrison every patch of ground in any country where terror groups operate, so even in places like Niger, a capable militant organization could function without our detection,” Davis said to the Daily Caller. “Having troops on the ground in a handful of countries — literal dots on the global map — does very little to affect our safety.”
“We do prevent terror attacks, though, by the effective, robust, and excellent performance of our anti-terrorist capacities between our federal, state, and local law enforcement, 17 intelligence agencies domestically, cooperation with our many allied intelligence departments abroad, and when appropriate, special forces raids abroad based on actionable intelligence,” Davis added.
Overall, the US’s decision to send troops to Niger was a mistake. And it’s an even bigger mistake to keep these troops here. If the US were a sane polity, it would deploy these troops to the US’s southern border for the purpose of maintaining national sovereignty.
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