Africa’s zone of anarchy is getting worse

In the most violent region in the world, the West is realising that it messed up. Protestors in Burkina Faso throw Molotovs at the French, American-trained soldiers overthrow their governments, and Malians wave Russian flags.

After a two-decade American deployment in the Sahel in Africa, the Pentagon has finally admitted that the area is getting worse. A paper quietly published last month, and reported on this week, described a ‘deterioration of the security environment’, and said that violence this year had ‘expanded in intensity and geographic reach’. It predicted 2,800 ‘violent events’ in the Sahel in 2022, more than double last year’s number.

Some aren’t surprised that the West has failed. Aneliese Bernard, who used to work alongside US special forces in Niger, told me that western officials in the Sahel often just aren’t interested in the area. Western diplomats usually prefer to stay in the ‘ivory towers’ of their embassies. The 2012 attack on American diplomatic buildings in the Libyan city of Benghazi gave officials an excuse to stay inside.