US quietly reopens talks with Chad amid challenges in Africa posture

The U.S. has restarted talks over the future of its armed forces in Chad — the latest African country to express doubt over its relationship with the American military.

In the last month, senior leaders from the State and Defense departments have visited the capital of N’Djamena, where they met with members of the Chadian government and armed forces to discuss their security ties.

They arrived at a sensitive moment for the American military’s work in the country and on the continent more broadly. Earlier this year, the government in N’Djamena said it wanted to renegotiate its agreement that allows the U.S. military access to its territory, leading the U.S. to withdraw a unit of 75 or so special operations forces operating from a disputed base near the capital.

That request came as its neighbor, Niger, was in the process of ordering the American military out — a departure that all but ended in earlier this month, when the U.S. handed control of a $100 million base to Niger’s ruling junta.

Niger was once a top partner in the fight against terrorism in the Sahel — a much more mature relationship than America has with Chad. Still, the U.S. had around 100 special operations personnel there before April, and the country has been a valuable companion in the fight against terrorism in the region.

“We don’t expect to return in the exact same footprint that we had before,” a senior U.S. defense official said in an interview late last month July.

Instead, the official said America would do better to start from the ground up: sharing its own goals for the region, listening to Chad’s and then deciding what kind of presence made sense in the country.

“What we’re hearing from a lot of African partners is they want to lead and they’re interested in our facilitation,” the official said. “That’s different than a handful of years ago, where the U.S. was conducting operations.”

Going forward, the new presence may not include the personnel withdrawn in April, the official said, a choice a Pentagon spokesperson labeled at the time a “temporary step.”

The Defense Department’s head of special operations and low-intensity conflict was more hopeful on their return.

“This is fundamentally what we’re talking about to the Chadians,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Chris Maier told reporters during an event hosted by the Defense Writers Group in Washington. “There was probably some rationale on their removal that had to do with their presidential election that now is over, and so may give us an opportunity to have more, if you will, effective talks with them again.”

‘No West Africa policy’

To that end, the State Department announced a late-July visit to Chad by John Bass, its acting head of political affairs, holding a short press conference afterward. The Defense Department did not follow suit until a little over a week later, sending Maj. Gen. Kenneth Ekman, America’s top military officer for West Africa, according to a brief write-up of the encounter on the website of the Chadian Air Force.

Ekman’s host was Chad’s air chief, who first called for the ouster of the American personnel in April.

U.S. Africa Command usually notes when its senior leaders visit different countries in the region. The decision not to, another American defense official said, is a sign of internal government pressure to be discreet when discussing security ties at a moment of such uncertainty — and as different parts of the administration trade blame for the withdrawal from Niger.

“There is no West Africa policy from the White House,” said the official, allowed to speak anonymously to be candid.

U.S. Africa Command said that there was a “small contingent” of American personnel in Chad supporting a counterterrorism mission. It also confirmed that Ekman visited the country in August “to engage with military and civilian leaders on a whole-of-government approach to the shared security challenges in the region.”

Africa Command deferred to the State Department on the status of that security relationship. And State wouldn’t offer more specifics, instead saying the U.S. “is committed to working closely alongside our partners across the region to advance our mutual security interests and bolster peace and stability in the Sahel and Lake Chad Region.”

Those shared interests started to fray this April. Chad’s air chief abruptly sent a letter to the U.S. embassy telling it to halt operations at a base near the capital and saying it wanted to review the two countries’ military agreement. Soon after, the American military complied.

The Pentagon agreed to start negotiations after Chad’s elections in May.

Meanwhile, the threat of terrorist groups continues to grow in the Sahel, a belt of countries across northern Africa where coups have recently become more common. The region’s share of global terrorist-related deaths rose from 1% in 2007 to 43% in 2022, according to the Global Terrorism Index.

That said, Maier cautioned that the threat may be contained to the region.

“I don’t think we’ve see an external operations threat emerge from there,” he said, while still arguing that U.S. officials and embassies in the Sahel could be at risk.

The senior defense official argued that the countries calling for a different relationship with the U.S. all have different motives and shouldn’t be seen as a pattern. Still, both that official and Maier acknowledged that U.S. posture would need to change, likely becoming smaller and more spread out.

Cameron Hudson, who studies African security issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argued those may be the wrong lessons. Rather than evaluating what kind of posture the U.S. should have there, he said, the U.S. should consider whether it’s necessary at all.

“Do we really need this footprint in this region?” Hudson said. “The jihadist threat [there] is not a threat to the U.S. homeland.”