Nick Turse in TomDispatch provides a terrifying overview of what Barack Obama has merely accelerated in the last four years:
In the 1980s, the U.S. government began funneling aid to mujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan as part of an American… proxy war… against the Soviet Union. It was, in the minds of America’s Cold War leaders, a rare chance to bloody the Soviets, to give them a taste of the sort of defeat the Vietnamese, with Soviet help, had inflicted on Washington the decade before. In 1989, after years of bloody combat, the Red Army did indeed limp out of Afghanistan in defeat. Since late 2001, the United States has been fighting its former Afghan proxies and their progeny. Now, after years of bloody combat, it’s the U.S. that’s looking to withdraw the bulk of its forces and once again employ proxies to secure its interests there.
From Asia and Africa to the Middle East and the Americas, the Obama administration is increasingly embracing a multifaceted, light-footprint brand of warfare.… Gone, for the moment at least, are the days of full-scale invasions of the Eurasian mainland. Instead, Washington is now planning to rely ever more heavily on drones and special operations forces to fight scattered global enemies on the cheap. A centerpiece of this new… American way of war… is the outsourcing of fighting duties to local proxies around the world.
While the United States is currently engaged in just one outright proxy war, backing a multi-nation African force to battle Islamist militants in Somalia, it’s laying the groundwork for the extensive use of surrogate forces in the future, training “native” troops to carry out missions — up to and including outright warfare.… With this in mind and under the auspices of the Pentagon and the State Department, U.S. military personnel now take part in near-constant joint exercises and training missions around the world aimed at fostering alliances, building coalitions, and whipping surrogate forces into shape to support U.S. national security objectives.…
While using slightly different methods in different regions, the basic strategy is a global one in which the U.S. will train, equip, and advise indigenous forces — generally from poor, underdeveloped nations — to do the fighting (and dying) it doesn’t want to do.… In the process, as small an American force as possible, including special forces operatives and air support, will be brought to bear to aid those surrogates.… Like drones, proxy warfare appears to offer an easy solution to complex problems.… But as Washington’s 30-year debacle in Afghanistan indicates, the ultimate costs may prove both unimaginable and unimaginably high.
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Despite a history of sinking billions into proxy armies that collapsed, walked away, or morphed into enemies, Washington is currently pursuing plans for proxy warfare across the globe, perhaps nowhere more aggressively than in Africa.… …
Under President Obama, operations in Africa have accelerated far… beyond… the more… limited interventions… of the… Bush years.… These include… last year’s war in Libya; the expansion of… a growing network… of supply depots, small camps, and airfields;… a regional… drone campaign… with missions run out of Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Seychelles; a flotilla of… 30 ships… in that ocean supporting regional operations; a massive influx of cash for counterterrorism operations across East Africa; a possible… old-fashioned air war, carried out on the sly in the region using manned aircraft; and a… special ops expeditionary force… (bolstered by… State Department experts) dispatched to help capture or kill Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony and his senior commanders.… (This mission against Kony is seen by some… experts… as a cover for a developing proxy war between the U.S. and the Islamist government of Sudan — which is accused of helping to support the LRA — and Islamists more generally.)… And this only begins to scratch the surface of Washington’s fast-expanding plans and activities in the region.