 Endowment for International Peace. I want to thank you again for attending today's conference, and thank you also to our partners, the African Peace Building Network. It's my pleasure today to introduce our lunchtime speaker, someone who needs no introduction to most of you, Eric Schmidt, the national security correspondent for the New York Times. He has a wealth of expertise in this region. His first trip to the Sahel was to Mali in 2007. And in the last five years, he's visited the region just about once every year to Mauritania, Niger, Chad, Senegal. You've probably seen his reporting embedded with Chadian troops reporting on the French military presence in Niger. So he's uniquely well qualified to address the topic of Western counterterrorism strategies in the Sahel. Eric, thank you. Thanks very much, Fred, and thanks for the invitation from Carnegie to talk a little bit about the Sahel today. As Fred said, I've been kind of fortunate to kind of bop around the region a little bit. It's not the kind of places my wife likes to go on. She keeps panicking for a beat maybe in Paris or Rome or London, something like that. But I know this audience in particular kind of humbled to address many of you who were experts in this area. And I often read your work. I'm just recently back from a couple weeks in Chad where I was spending time with US special forces there. And many of you have been there to Chad know this is a desperately poor landlocked Central African country that's fighting off militants from both the Islamic State and from al-Qaeda and other groups. And the culminating exercise for the event that I was at involved was on the outskirts of the Chadian capital in Gemina, in which four flat-bottomed boats with mounted machine guns roared down the Chari River. The boats pulled up along the riverbank, just opposite neighboring Cameroon, and disgorged rifle-toting Chadian special anti-terrorism group forces in their American trainers. In a hail of gunfire, shooting blanks, actually, they stormed the thatch huts of a suspected Boko Haram bomb maker, seized laptops, computers, cell phones, and other materials inside for clues on terrorist operations, and dashed back to the river, fending off a mock ambush on the way. Piling back into their boats, under covering fire, the Chadian commandos sped off in a drill that American and Chadian officers later told me, play out for real almost every day, if not every week, in the nearby Lake Chad basin area. This was the fifth year that I'd gone to the exercise. It's a US special operations exercise that they conduct. It's called Flintlock. You all may have heard about it. It involves European commandos as well. And for me, it's a chance to get out of Washington and get to the region. As Fred mentioned, I've been over now five times in countries where the exercise has been sponsored in Niger, in Mauritania. Chad, in last year, was in Senegal. And while the exercise is basically a basic rehearsal of tactics, which become actually quite familiar year after year. It's only two and a half week exercise. I've come away, including the scenes that I just described. There are a few observations that have struck me as I've come away from this kind of watching this now over five years, and then even before that, the exercise in Mali. The Sahel, of course, is, if not the poorest, certainly one of the poorest majority Muslim regions in the world. It is home to the largest expanse of contiguous, ungoverned spaces on the African continent. Many of the governments in the region are weak in their capacity to assert authority and security, much less provide real services beyond their capital cities and a smattering of urban centers is extremely limited. Now they are also facing, of course, the devastating effects of famine, as is much of other parts of Africa and the Middle East. These fragile states present an assortment of very resilient jihadists, including ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and their offshoots, who both have a vulnerability to exploit in the short term that they can see and an opportunity to create a new hub for operations over the long term. So what's happening to counter that? On one level, in the first three months in office, President Trump and his top aides have given little indication that they want to distance themselves from President Obama's main counterterrorism strategies in places like this, and that is to train, equip, and otherwise support indigenous armies and security forces to wage their own wars instead of having to deploy large American forces to far-flung hot spots like Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and the Sahel. The Pentagon, for instance, has allocated about $250 million over two years to help train these armies and security forces of North, Central, and West Africa. The administration, just this week, as you all may have read, is now poised to sell up to 12 light attack Super Takano aircraft to Nigeria to support that country's fight against Boko Haram, despite criticism from human rights organizations that the West Africa country has not done enough to stop the abuses and corruption that flourished in the military. This is a theme I think we can see. They've already, I mean, administration lifted some of the restrictions that had placed on sale of F-16s to Bahrain. Now we're seeing it with Nigeria. I think you can see that as we move ahead with other countries that the administration deems are valuable allies in the fight against counterterrorism. They're not going to be applying these kind of human rights conditions to this. So those are some of the things that have been going on kind of on the American front. But perhaps more interesting what I've noticed in making these repeat trips is that this and other training exercises are venues that are pushing the countries of the Sahel. And most importantly, they're militaries to work more closely together. And these are, of course, countries and militaries that up to now maybe never even spoke to each other or even were adversarial. I'm thinking Nigeria and Cameroon, for instance, before that. I saw this not only in the exercise, the Flintlock exercise with these various nations working together, or in this particular exercise this year, they were actually spread apart in seven different countries doing this. But in Yemen, I also met with members of the task force that's the headquarters there for Chad, Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon, who are combining to coordinate their efforts to fight Boko Haram in that region. However loosely sometimes that's organized and actually deployed. I also talked to Chadding and French officers who are involved in a new Sahel G5 counter-terrorism force that involves the nations of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger to combat common threats along their border areas. And some of their initial joint operations have just started in the last few months and show some promising results. So these are signs of regional cooperation, imperfect and stuttering, to be sure, but good signs. Signs of things are moving in the right direction in terms of thinking about regional cooperation with American and other allied assistants there. So let's unpack this threat that I talked a little bit about and the response a little bit more, starting with Al Qaeda. FDD's Long War Journal reported last month that Al Qaeda affiliates launched over 250 attacks in the Maghreb and Sahel regions in 2016. More than 150% increase from the reported 100 or so attacks in 2015. Earlier this month, Al Qaeda factions in the Sahel reconciled their internal disputes and formed a single movement called the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims, pledging their loyalty to the AQIM leader, Abdul Malik Drukdal. With the regrouping, AQIM is now able to reestablish its unified presence in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Libya, Mali, Niger, and Tunisia in a more effective way. And though Al Qaeda has mostly been decimated in large parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen, its North Africa and the Sahel networks appear to have grown exponentially in the last few years, increasing their tempo of terror attacks and establishing links in North and West Africa. AQIM fighters have targeted multiple Western-style hotels and killed tourists and other locals alike in places like Mali, the Ivory Coast in Burkina Faso in just the last couple of years, targeting these so-called soft targets. That's Al Qaeda. Obviously, there's also been a big increase in the ISIS presence in the region, particularly in Libya, but also spreading to neighboring Tunisia and then spilling over into the Sinai nearby. Libya, of course, has been a focus of American and other ally counterterrorism efforts over the last two years with this specific focus in the latter half of last year with the air campaign against the ISIS cell that was holed up in CERC. Nearly 500 airstrikes that were carried out over several months there eventually drove that cell out of CERC, out of their stronghold. But many of those elements have now been pushed elsewhere into Libya. That threat is persisting with ISIS pooling in other parts of the country. In southern Libya, I was told by intelligence analysts both when I was in Africa, the Chadiens are watching this very closely, the Americans in French are watching this very closely. But ISIS has also spread, as I mentioned before, some of those that fled CERC or in other parts of Libya have filtered into Tunisia. Some of them are connecting now with the ISIS branch in the Sinai. So while they may not be massing in the big numbers, that of course, including that one big strike that the Obama administration made on its way out the door of 100 fighters were hit just outside of CERC, the threat is still quite serious, I think, and they're watching it closely. So that's ISIS. Boko Haram, as some of the other speakers today have already mentioned, has pushed back in Nigeria but is still able to carry out clashes and spill over into the borders of Niger, Cameroon, and Chad. Now I noticed when I was in Yemen of this trip, it wasn't the same level of nervousness when I was there two years ago for the same exercise. Then of course, that was really when this effort was ramping up and you had, it was just on the eve of many of the Boko Haram infiltrators that were coming into the capital and carrying out the first of a few of the suicide bombings. We did see there were checkpoints throughout the street, throughout the streets of in Yemen of this two years ago, at least in my going through the capital this time, there's sense to be, there was a little bit, obviously there's still concern about this, but it wasn't quite, you didn't feel like the country was on the same kind of war footing that it was two years ago in doing that. Moreover, there's now the schism between Boko Haram, formally aligned with ISIS since early 2015, that schism between a longtime leader, Shakao, and those who are following Barnawi, who ISIS appointed as its new governor in the province last August. And that actually may be contributing to the, the intensifying of certain attacks that we're seeing in the violence in the remaining area that the Boko Haram contains is these two groups kind of vie for power. There are strong indications, for instance, that Barnawi's faction may be gaining some momentum, aided not only by the defeats that Shakao's faction has suffered at the hands of the Nigerian forces, but also by the fighters and other resources that are flowing in thanks to their ISIS affiliation. So that is definitely something to keep an eye on. And I know when you're talking to the commanders that I spoke to, that's what they're concerned about as well. So that's the threat. What's the counter-terrorism strategy? How are both the United States, its European and African allies going after this threat? Well, as I mentioned before, it's largely through the same, at least on the American side, that same by, with, and through approach that the US is doing through its military and specifically through American special forces. And in fact, it's meant more emphasis, not less now, more emphasis on the so-called special operators, even as the Trump administration proposes overall increases in its defense spending. Those increases in Pentagon spending are, of course, coming at the same time this administration is proposing deep cuts to the budgets of the State Department and USAID, which is ironic because these, of course, are the very institutions that are valuable on the ground in working with local partners to deal with some of the root causes of terrorism. Things like lack of jobs, lack of education, the sense of belonging, and the sense of hopelessness that a lot of young people have in these areas. So even you talk to military leaders, whether here in Washington or in the field, and they're almost the first ones to put their hand up and say, these cuts don't make a lot of sense. It just puts more of a burden back on us in doing, carrying out. And one thing the US military has learned in over 15 years of fighting extremist groups like al-Qaeda and now ISIS is, you can't kill your way to victory. You can't, you can kill all the terrorists you want, but you can't kill terrorism that way. And interestingly enough, the military leaders, particularly those who spent a lot of time in place like Iraq and Afghanistan and Yemen and, of course, now Africa, these are some of the biggest proponents for that so-called soft power accounts. Mr. Trump, of course, came into office without a clearly articulated philosophy for using the military to fight terrorist groups. He had promised to be more aggressive in taking on the Islamic State, even suggesting during the presidential campaign that he had a secret plan, but he had also signaled a desire to rein in the notion of the US as the world's peacekeeper and claimed at various points to have been opposed to the ground invasion of Iraq. Well, as we've seen just in the events of the last week, he's kind of turned that all in its head in making the foreign policy much more of an unpredictable, instinctual foreign policy, more than anything that you could kind of slap a doctrine on, at least as of right now. Surrounded by generals now, who have been at the center of a decade-long shift to rely on special operations forces to project power without the risks and costs of large ground wars, Mr. Trump is choosing, at least for now, to maintain the same approach Mr. Obama did, but by giving the Pentagon more latitude to speed up the decision-making process to carry out raids and airstrikes. In fact, one thing he has done, and it was something that was modeled off the assert model that's now going into Yemen and Somalia, he's lifted some of the restrictions that were protecting civilians, that were in place in civilians. In order to speed up the fight against the militants, lifting some of the protections against civilians, and I think everybody's watching very closely to see what happens. Obviously, there was the initial SEAL Team Six raid in Yemen, one of the first things that Mr. Trump signed off on that ended not only with the death of an American Navy SEAL, three of the SEALs injured, but casualties on the civilian side anywhere from one to two dozen, depending on which accounts are on the ground. So this leeway that the president is now giving the military and the Special Operations Forces in particular may help accelerate the strikes in places like Yemen or Somalia or the Sahel, but it also carries its own perils. So that's something I think policymakers are watching very closely with as our allies on the ground because of course more civilians that are killed, it turns that policy, can be very counterproductive on the ground. As I mentioned, the role of Special Operations Forces in Africa is widening. In Africa, about one third of the nearly 6,000 overall troops on the ground are Special Operations Forces. The only permanent American installation in Africa, of course, is at Camp Le Monnier, a sprawling base of some 4,000 United States service members and civilians and Djibouti that many of you may have been to, and serves as a hub for counterterrorism operations in the region. The US Air Force flies surveillance drones from small bases in Niger and Cameroon. Elsewhere in Africa, the role of Special Operators are varied, but as you all probably know, their ranks are fairly small, typically measured in the low dozens or perhaps a few hundred for specific missions. In Somalia in particular, there are about two to 300 Navy SEALs at any given time and other Special Operators who are working with African allies to hunt down the shadowy Shabbab terrorists there. The United States is building a new $50 million drone base in Agadez, Niger, that is likely to open sometime next year, and that's gonna help monitor Islamic State insurgents in the vast area of the Sahel. It actually pushes where they operate now, they operate out of the Ingemina airport, excuse me, out of Nyami Airport. This now pushes them up several hundred miles so they're actually closer to that border with Libya that they can pursue and kind of watch as well swing over and toward Mali. Mr. Trump's talk, tough talk on terrorism was well received in Chad when I met with Chaddian officers there, but American aid in training alone, both they and American officers told me, will not be enough to defeat groups like Al Qaeda or Boko Haram or the Islamic State, these officials said. General Thomas Waldhauser, the head of the Africa Command, said just a couple weeks after I got back, he told us you could knock off all the ISIL and Boko Haram this afternoon, but by the end of the week, so to speak, those ranks would be filled. It gets back to my point, you can kill a lot of terrorists, but you can't kill terrorism with a much more holistic approach that deals with, yes, there's an element of the military involved, but there has to be other elements on the balding ground, whether it's diplomats, whether it's NGOs, whether it's even people like the Treasury Department, which actually takes the lead to the US government and trying to choke off the financing, the life, blood for terrorist groups. The American strategy in the Sahel also hinges heavily on European partners. There are about six or seven different partners, for instance, at the Flintlock exercise that are there, but of course, France takes the leading role in the region. They have about 4,000 troops spread across the Sahel region to carry out counter-terrorism operations, particularly in Mali, as I think one of the speakers said before, where they've been fighting for several years now. Its air power is concentrated in Chad. It has its reconnaissance drones in Niger, special operations troops in Burkina Faso, but Operation Barcon, as it's called, is really a network involving the whole region. And I asked if it's been a matter of any of the, obviously the French have big elections coming up this spring. If this has come up at all as an election issue in France, and the commander said it really has it. There have been so many other things, many of you have been following the French elections with all the personal up and downs of the candidates. Africa, I guess for better or worse, has been off the radar screen in terms of anybody making of the campaign issue. The US, of course, plays a very important role in supporting France in this issue, providing refueling and transport planes to keep the, as well as providing intelligence operations. So there's a lash up there. And in fact, when I was there and talking to the French officers in in Gemina, who are part of Barcon, they were saying for the first time, there's actually gonna be an American military liaison officer in the Barcon Operations Center. It'll be lashed up assuming Barcon and Africa presumably to make that coordination even better. So what about moving forward? I think what you'll probably see going forward is at least for now, given the administration's, everything else that's on its plate with China and Russia and Syria, I think we'll probably see more of the same for the Sahel and for Africa. I think the approach that I mentioned before, by, with and through this administration will continue to pursue with a little bit of a more muscular approach around the edges. There may be small increases in troops, a loosening of the authorities that I talked to. But I think what you're gonna see is moving ahead. There'll be continued supply of equipment and technology to these countries, of course, vast countries with very porous borders. It could be things as simple as border monitoring equipment. It could be simple things as vehicles and trucks to get the troops around. It could be small planes, equipped with surveillance devices. Much of what I heard from the Chadian officers and Nigerian officers, for instance, is we need intelligence and surveillance capabilities. We need to have eyes on what the threat is on the ground so that we can apply it to do that. I think the Super Tucano example of what the Nigerians are doing, that's probably at the outer edge of the military spectrum, really the capacity of what some of these countries and their militaries can even absorb if they wanted to do more. So helping the region now, helping itself is gonna be kind of one of the main themes. In fact, Colonel Kelly Smith, who is the Green Beret commander on the ground, kind of overseeing the exercise, said something I thought that kind of captured kind of the essence of what this was about. He said, Africans are war here, we're not, but we have a strategic interest in the success of our partners. And so I think given those partners in those countries, facing the budgetary constraints they have, again with the drought and the famine now and many of the other problems, the myriad problems that many of these countries have, lingering suspicions between various government and just wild card factors that can pop up at any time, I think what they were looking for was a sense of cooperation not only among the regional groups, which again is slowly coalescing, but a sense is the U.S. not give up, not turn their back on them now and not get distracted with other things. Even the relatively small amount of assistance that's going, if they can maintain that, maybe increase it a little bit. Because as Brigadier General Zechariah and Gombe, the senior chatting officer on the ground, this is a guy who's actually trained, both in France and in Florida in the United States. He said, extremism is like a cancer. We need to all continue to fight it every day. Anyway, thank you very much for your attention. I look forward to your questions. So thank you, Eric, for that very thorough and immediate, I think, account of U.S. and local counterterrorism. I'd like to start out with the first question. You've described very well this focus on training equip, the provision of these aircraft, the exercises, but what we've heard today is that there are severe problems of governance in this region, and especially in the defense sectors at the level of ministries. And I'm just wondering what tools does AFRICOM have to address those broader reform issues? Are they? There's something in DOD called the Defense Institution Reform Initiative, and I'm just wondering is does AFRICOM grasp the immediacy of this broader reform challenge? Yeah, it's a really good question, Fred, and I think that you've probably put your finger on what's a weakness here in this. I think they're so busy worrying about the tactical and maybe the operational fixes. What they can do to just get these, help some of these troops get out the door with basic equipment, basic supplies, basic assistance, whether it's against intelligence or whatever. I think in the grand scheme of things, if they could do defense reform in ministries, because clearly the U.S. military has experience with that on the bigger scale, looking at Afghanistan and Iraq are two examples that I'm very familiar with, where they've been partnering and doing that. I think that would be their model as they go long term is how, again, the goal here is how do you make these countries self-sustaining, or at least more self-sustaining? They're never gonna have the logistical infrastructure that the Pentagon has. They're never gonna have the intelligence, the array of satellites and spy planes and all that. So you're always gonna be, military's always gonna be offering that to these countries, but you can do very basic things. You have to take care of your troops, you have to feed and clothe them, you have to take care of their families when they're gone, you have to maintain that good morale, and it goes back to leadership as well, and they'll be backing and forthing whether you have some of these African officers coming here, which is a standard training program. It'll be studying in the war colleges here in the United States, or if you have advisors going there. And of course, what I saw was just a very, the biggest organized exercise of the year. These are ongoing exercises at much smaller levels, or you maybe just have a handful of green berets or some Navy SEALs in Nigeria working with their guys down in the Delta. This is something the American military and their allies in Europe, they wanna just make this a kind of a continuous stream. You're gonna have regular assistance, a regular presence there, and ultimately you'd build up to the ministry level. Very good, I'd like to turn it over to questions. We'll take three at a time. Please identify yourself and please do ask a question. I wish I should take notes. You tell me who you are. Bill Lawrence, George Washington University. Carter Ham, I remember after the Mali mission said, one of his regrets under TSCTP was not doing it. Right. Mali Enforces, with that as a prompt, we've heard a lot this morning about security and development, but we're almost still talking about them as two different spheres. What are your thoughts about integrating security and development together in terms of what you saw? Question. Yes. Claire Spencer, Chatham House. I just wanted to ask, since we didn't mention it very much at all in my panel, Minousma, did you get any feedback on the UN Peacekeeping Force? Because they were brought in on the tail of the French mission, which is stretched a bit thin, special forces or not. There's only about 1,000 in Mali, the rest are elsewhere in the region. Minousma is 10,000 strong. Could that not be a vehicle that could be modified to fit something which would do it longer term? Hello, Joala Mable from George Mason. Actually, my question has to do with the whole training of troops on the ground. Are we sure that countries who have been trained and equipped are not turning the weapons or what they're gaining against their own citizens, especially in cases where the government needs all these weapons to be protected? Thank you for those. So I actually was with General Ham on that trip that he took to Niger. I was just tagging along with him as the military sometimes lets reporters do when all hell literally broke out in Mali and he was on the phone and I was kind of trying to stay near as he was calling back to Washington with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and others and kind of watching all that in the coordination with the French that was going down. And Carter Ham was really one of the, I think one of the best military commanders in so many ways. I'd first met him in Northern Iraq. If any of you know him, he's just, he's a total standup guy with the troops, but really gets it. He didn't know a thing about Africa when he got there and really invested himself in the three years or so he was in that command. This is of course, the whole design behind the Africa command was to get to your question how do you integrate security and development in an actual and a military command? And this along with the U.S. Southern Command which deals with Latin America, the whole idea was to, you know, the idea that you would coordinate the elements of soft power, the elements of diplomacy that the State Department has with U.S. military might or military assistance because they really didn't want to militarize Africa. You remember the whole flap when Africa was created about where it was gonna be headquartered and there was all sorts of turmoil about whether you have a headquarters on the continent, ultimately ends up in Stuttgart, Germany, of course. I think in the way this manifested in the way at AFRICOM, they have two deputy commanders. One is a military commander for military operations under the four star, but then they have a career, senior diplomat who's supposed to be dealing with very much of the things you're talking about and how do you integrate these two things because they're so important and they talk about all the AFRICOM commanders and all the diplomats who've been there have talked about how do you leverage this relatively small number of resources? There's no way the AFRICOM commander will ever have a fraction of the budget that the U.S. Central Command has which deals with all the Middle East or the Pacific Command for percent. So how do you leverage that in a smart way in doing that? And it's a challenge. It's frankly a challenge because you're dealing oftentimes with many governments that are openly corrupt and you're having to deal with. Ham would tell me back then, this is before the current government in Nigeria, but he was banging his head against it, trying to get not just American military and assistance in to try and more professionalize the Nigerian military, but having working with some of the diplomats and Abuja and others to try and get them on board. So this is a constant challenge in this, obviously a giant continent that they're doing forward and moving that. On Manusma, I came away saying we have got to do a story on this because this is a mess. It is not working out. They don't have the numbers they have. It's Mali is definitely on the back burner for this thing. And while they seem to have gotten the North a little bit better, Manusma has never been able to kind of follow through on it. I think it's a promise. And you've had whether it's been the French there in the counter-terrorism role or the Germans, the Dutch have come in. And it is an untold war that's going on there because people just don't get to it. If there's any focus, it's on Boko, it's on ISIS. And Mali, I think, unfortunately, has kind of fallen off the grid. So I came away going, man, we got to get in there and do a story. Not just on Manusma, but of course, but on Mali, because the politics are totally shot. When I was there several years ago, there was, it had been kind of, Mali was held up as the model for the region. And now it's just fallen so far. It's really quite sad. The, your question, sir, on the whole training aspect, this is a big deal. And obviously we look at it in Nigeria as probably first and foremost. And the mechanism that the U.S. military and the State Department use, of course, is the Leahy Amendment. And they're looking and they're vetting all these different groups to see, are there human rights violators that you can identify in these units? And there's a big, there's a fight that goes on between wanting to instill some sense of the same kind of respect for human rights the U.S. military has, for the most part, with some of these African militaries where this is a foreign concept. How you deal with that, but also the need to just have, you know, get some of these troops on the ground and move in an active way. And of course, President Buhari's had to go through at least two iterations of generals up in Borno to try and get, you know, get that operation focused and what it is. And yet you still hear some pretty, pretty grizzly tales that my colleague, Dion Circe, our bureau chief in Senegal, has done some terrific reporting. I commend to you if you haven't read it. Her reporting on Boko has just been fabulous, but it's something that, again, it's the problems that they're running into. And when Dion came back to me and she said, I told her I was going over and she said, can you ask some questions for me, both the State Department and the military about some of these atrocities that we're hearing committed by the military of people in some of these refugee camps? The Boko, these are the people who have survived Boko that they've now put in these camps and yet are being treated as traders or infiltrators or worse by the Nigerian military. I mean, they've gone from bad to worse in some extent. And unfortunately, some of the people who I deal with the military at the State Department here in Washington are kind of like, well, we're trying with the Nigerian government, but what do we do? Well, you know, and it's not gonna get any better with this administration, as I mentioned before. The emphasis on human rights is being pushed aside and the focus now is much more on who is going to be a solid counter-terrorism partner for us. Sir, in the... Good afternoon, I'm Scott Morgan, President of Radio Atlanta Press. I do security and threat analysis. Mr. Schmidt, you and I have exchanged emails over the years in a few times. You're the guy, huh? One of them. That orange shirt, that's what did it. Comes through. My question is about a country that's on the periphery where we generally don't talk about much, but we see that it has similar fault lines as we see in Mali and that's Kahr. I was wondering, what was your sense of conversations from the charity and French military officials who have been there and seen what they project may happen next and will the US be asked to help them out this time? Okay. Thank you. Redalia Mori, Independent Consultant at Sahel Researcher. My question is about Sahel G5. Is there any plans to engage with them? Or are there any? It appears to me from my personal research that Sahel G5 is still young, but they're very ambitious and they need, they lack resources and I think we'd offer them. So I'm wondering if there are any plans to engage with them? Yes. Thank you. My name is Skye Perski. I work for DAI for our Center for Security and Stable States. A quick comment if you'll allow it. We actually worked on a program, Civil Affairs program, training program in West Africa under TSCTP that sat alongside Flintlock for many years and then it was subsequently canceled. So you'll understand the selfishness of my question, which is in your conversations during Flintlock, were there any, obviously there's an understanding that shoot, shoot, kill, kill is not the entire answer. Were there any more nuanced conversations about the kind of development solutions that could be used either alongside Flintlock or more generally speaking to support Special Forces and Civil Affairs operations in the subregion? Thank you. Starting with the question on car, it's just a time bomb. The place is just a time bomb from what I can tell. I have not been there and I haven't really covered as thoroughly as some of my colleagues in, say for instance, my colleague, Jeffrey Gettleman out of Nairobi in doing that, but everything you hear from the military, it's just kind of hold your breath. When are we gonna be having to go in there next to rescue something or there's gonna be some horrendous atrocity or something going on? So it's definitely something to keep an eye on. And the only, the little glancing blow I got at this time was the Coney story. We did write a story coming out of this and kind of broke us a little bit of a scoop, scoop lead that the US military is gonna be ramping down the Coney, the anti-Coney mission and turning it mostly over the Ugandans. I mean, he's been marginalized so much now wherever he is, you know, on the border of South Sudan. But you talk to the Green Beret guys and special operators, they've got 100 personnel, 100 soft guys plus some additional support dedicated to hunting that guy down basically because of the legislation here that Senator Inhoff is sponsored. Privately they tell you is like the biggest waste of time and money. You know, they got more missions and they know what to do with and they're chasing this guy out in the triple canopy jungle who doesn't make a difference anymore. It doesn't make any sense. So I think what Waldhauser comes in and says, let's look at all this kind of stuff with some of the Africans that we can shrink this mission down. They're not gonna go cold turkey but they're gonna shrink it way down. They're gonna still help the Ugandans and whoever else and ultimately they still wanna get the guy but his movement is greatly reduced. On this Hell G5, I didn't even know this was going on before I went over there. I had some briefings of the Pentagon. I was pleasantly surprised to hear about this. The Americans are involved in kind of helping, assisting in kind of a peripheral way. I mean, they sent some advisors over to some of the initial planning meetings but this is really kind of a French gig with the countries that I mentioned before and they've already done some operations, some joint border operations that I'm hoping gonna be writing about. I still have one or two stories left over from this trip and that's one of them. It's kind of one of these things where it's kind of like you don't wanna write too much and make it up to be too much because it's still very early on as you mentioned in your question but I think it's got promised, if nothing else, that again you've got countries that are meeting and talking about common threats and how you pool your relatively limited resources and go after this and you've got the French who are like, great. We'll help you. The Americans are like, great. You guys wanna actually talk to each other and help. We'll do whatever we can to facilitate that but again, you're dealing with countries, militaries are tiny, the police and security forces are tiny, how you move people around, logistically it's just a nightmare. Those of you who've been there, hundreds of miles in the desert, how you sustain a force out there is incredibly challenging but as I mentioned in my remarks, it's kind of interesting. Something I'm gonna be kind of watching and it kind of comes on the heels of the force that was put together from the Boko Mission in Gemina. The non-military solutions as it's emphasized in these exercises, what's interesting is if you hang around these things you get tired of watching the mock ambushes and the fake shooting and all this stuff because it's like all they do is cycle new troops through this and they get some free training for two and a half weeks every year. Instead of like taking one unit and sending them back each year and making them better, it's just kind of free training for two and a half weeks. The real value I think here is a couple of things. One is a lot of the senior commanders are coming back again and again. I was seeing commanders I've now seen two or three years and it's like and they're talking to each other and that's exactly how the American slash NATO, whatever model it is, so if you have a crisis you can pick up the phone if you're a Niame and call in Gemina and you know that commander on the other end of the line. It's not the first time you've ever met. That's the value of these exercises, is my view, is the connections you make African to African, American to African, Europeans, you're getting lashed up and that's very helpful. The other thing is the most popular thing about these exercises by far, they have put on a free clinic when I'm there. So they're kind of a medical and dental clinic and they team up American and European medics. These are military medics. They go out to some village, they give about, I don't know, a few days notice and thousands of people from all over come with whatever their problem is, medical, dental, whatever, as best they can. This is very basic. We're not talking about MRIs or anything out in the desert but they're teamed with local medics and it's the ability to kind of show the local people your government at work if you will. This military which you may have a very dim view of or worse that may have killed your relatives or parents in some past is actually here helping you. They're not everything, they're not in guns, they're actually in kind of medical gear and they're taking care of you. They're handing stuff to you, medicine for your kids, for yourself and it's like you can just see these light bulbs going on like holy cow, I didn't know my military would ever do this for me. It's like a service institution. And the thing is these military guys, they're kind of like some of the security guys are like they're not quite sure because it's big crowds, big crowds are bad. You don't want that because they could turn against you. But everybody's kind of happy and doing this and they're kind of like, hey, that makes me feel kind of good. I don't have to just shoot people or rifle butt them and whatever it is. And so it's kind of like it feeds off each other. This is like, okay, this is one day, a few hours out in this little village. I don't want to overstate this, but it kind of plants the seed that, wow, we could do this a little bit more, it'll go a long way for the civil relations in our country and in the region. And so, and the Americans, and they support that, it's great. It's good stuff. Bruce Whitehouse with Lehigh University. This one. You spoke a few minutes ago about the contrast between cycling personnel and units through episodic training versus more sustained long-term engagement with those units and personnel, which was exactly a criticism that was levied a few years ago by a special forces major who'd done a lot of training in Mali with the Malian military. And he wrote a thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School along that theme. It's available online. And he recommended we need to move away from this kind of short-term training equip what he called episodic engagement model to one of enduring engagement, which seemed like the kind of contrast you were just describing. So I'm wondering, his thesis was three years ago, do you think there's some kind of movement, A, within the U.S. military and B, within its partner militaries to foster that kind of approach? Michelle Dunn from Carnegie. Eric, I want to ask you about whether you find AFRICOM and the U.S. military focused at all on the very small cells like of IS, for example. I mean, for example, with these church bombings that have happened recently in Egypt, they seem to have been done by small cells of IS in mainland Egypt, not necessarily affiliated to the Sinai group that has affiliated itself to IS. And there are indications that there might be links between them, for example, in IS people in Libya or elsewhere. Now, this isn't a foreign fighters issue. I mean, it's more of an indigenous issue around its people inside the country and they're doing things like suicide bombings as opposed to military operations. But is this of concern at all or is the U.S. military really just focused on more of a fight against larger groups of militants? I'm Jim Michael. I'm a consultant in full disclosure. I'm a former diplomat and I'm a former U.S.A. official. So I have a bias. Two things. One is that training equipped doesn't have any sustainability. Come and they go. And the med readies don't have any sustainability. They come and they go. And they're not building the public health service and the clinics and the communities and anything continuous. But the question is this. We had almost 100 years ago, experience where we sent Marines to the Dominican Republic and to Panama to create national guards that would protect democracy. All part of supporting the efforts of these young democracies. Well, pretty soon these national guards were running these countries and maybe directly, maybe indirectly. And I wonder beyond the human rights issue, patient of concern within the countries are within our military that you may be creating, you know, competent as integrity and we'll eat country. So getting starting with the question of cycling through versus the sustained and enduring engagement because these questions are kind of related here. This is one of the big challenges and the military will tell you, well, we're doing the best we can. And if you look at our budgets, we don't know how to plan longer term for these kind of things. The way the budgeting process works, the Pentagon, they're kind of taking this money and they're trying to build these kind of programs. But that's always been kind of my criticism from kind of addressing both of your comments is particularly as I go and see these, because that was one of the first things I said, well, are any countries kind of taking a cadre and building off that? And they aren't because if you look at the training, you don't get much done in two and a half weeks, frankly, in some of these training ranges. It's pretty basic stuff that they're doing. They kind of run people through and then they do that. Where you see a little bit more of it, what I haven't gone back to do is going in and some of these small team engagements. And I don't have enough good, kind of textured understanding of whether they're building off of that in some of these small teams. Like I know when I was there, I've always been intrigued because the Navy SEALs have an unusual program with the Nigerian special boat guys. And it's been there for years. And it's kind of, it's something that's a little, I'll call it offline, it doesn't mean it's illegal. It's just, it's been out of the kind of the normal program. The SEALs have developed this. And I think that, and this SEAL camaraderie they have, I think that is maybe a more sustainable model than some of these things that we're seeing where they're trying to train, basic infantry skills and working on that. None of these, none of these, I mean the SATG, the special operations guys in Chad are about the closest that you've got in that part of the world to a no-kidding capability that's getting up there. And they've fought valiantly with the French and Mali. Some of their tunnel exploits in the Mali fight is just amazing. They've obviously got a long history fighting Gaddafi and Libya. They're very proud of that. So some of those capabilities, I think maybe niche capabilities you might see some growth in, but in terms of establishing a competent broader military, I think we're still some to just kind of both your points we're still some ways away from it. And the problem of course is changing budget, changing commanders, the Americans, the Americans are cycling these people through all the time. And so any of different four-star commanders all have different, slightly different priorities. The world changes. I mean nobody really even cared about Africa at all until suddenly you had bad stuff going on and Somalia and Libya and the SEAL, and it's suddenly like five alarm fired Carter Ham learned, you know, it went from being kind of this touchy, feely little command to suddenly he's like, we got a war fighting command here in a certain extent and doing that. On the question, Michelle's question about the cells. Yeah, they're very worried about that. And it's interesting because you go to Africa and you see what I'll call the vanilla special forces guys, the Green Berets, and then there are these other guys who you kind of see glances of. The long beards, really dark glasses and other things. And those are the JSOC guys, you know. In Africa it's this Navy SEAL, SEAL Team 6 in Somalia. I think they're probably Delta guys that are floating around the other part of the Sahel and then their agency people. And they're all over and particularly in Libya. And so they're very worried about what's going on in Libya because of the potential to leap into Europe. They're very worried about what's going on in Egypt. And now that kind of relations are better between the U.S. and Egypt and especially after General Sisi's visit here with Trump, I think you'll probably see more cooperation along those lines. So a lot of that, when you get into the hardcore counter ISIS fight, that's where you start getting into these special mission units for those of you who know the military. And there's a lot of spooky stuff going on in Africa that we only get glimpses of. A lot going on in Libya, less so frankly in the Sahel, a little bit I think in Boko. A lot, a lot going on in Somalia and there has been there. So I think anything they're looking at and because of this tendency of these groups to splinter, I mean just kind of look at you all who are really experts in this and looking what the splintering that's gone on now with an AQ in West Africa. And it comes together, it goes back. And oh by the way, what's MBM doing these days? Boko Karim, he's still alive. First question I ask everybody over there. He's still alive. Most people think he still is. The guy is not dead. I don't get him out. So I think that's the threat and everybody's trying to do their network, their mapping of these groups. How do they connect with little ISIS, big ISIS, back into Syria, who's moving, who where, and then the competition that's going on now between the ISIS and al-Qaeda guys that mirrors the competition that's going on in Syria. Fortunately, we've run out of time. Eric, I want to thank you for providing an on the ground perspective but more importantly a critical eye to US and Western counterterrorism. We look forward to more great reporting from the field. Please join me in thanking our lunchtime speaker. Thanks a lot. Thank you.