Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Deby threatened on Sunday to withdraw his country’s forces from the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF), a counter-terrorism alliance of African nations bordering the Lake Chad basin.
Deby is angry that the MNJTF did not do enough to prevent a savage attack by Boko Haram jihadis that killed 40 Chadian soldiers last week.
Deby complained on Sunday about a “lack of joint efforts against the common enemy, which is unfortunately always observed on the ground.”
“This force – created with the aim of pooling efforts and intelligence – seems to be in a slump,” he declared.
Deby implied the troops Chad has committed to the MNJTF might be better used in the anti-Boko Haram offensive he vowed to conduct after last week’s attack, nicknamed “Operation Haskanite.”
Catholic bishops in Chad, which has a mixture of Muslim and Christian citizens, held a day of prayer for the dead in the Ngouboua attack on Saturday.
“We strongly condemn these acts of extreme violence, which have once again plunged families and the entire Chadian people into mourning,” Archbishop Djitangar Goetbe Edmond said on Sunday.
The bishops extended their condolences to Deby, as well as “the government, the bereaved families, and all the people of Chad.”
The MNJTF was established in 1994, primarily as a response to bandits operating across the borders of the Lake Chad basin states of Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria. Niger withdrew its forces from the task force in late 2023 due to sanctions imposed by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) after Niger’s government was overthrown by a military coup.
In 2012, the organization shifted its attention to increasingly powerful and active terrorist groups like Boko Haram and the Islamic State franchise in West Africa, ISWAP.
The task force was reorganized in 2015 with authorization from the African Union and a civilian oversight board. The MNJTF has experienced some successes against terrorist gangs since then, but it has also been criticized for poor organization, insufficient funding, and a lack of follow-through on its missions that gives terrorists plenty of time to regroup.
As Deby’s complaint suggested, member nations have been reluctant to hand over control of their troops to the multinational task force leadership, sometimes feeling they can do better by directly attacking Boko Haram and ISWAP with their own troops instead of working through the MNJTF.
Chad is probably the best-organized of the member militaries, so the MNJTF would be in trouble if Chad withdraws. In fact, Chad is so dominant in the military alliance that Nigeria sometimes complains the entire multinational task force project is just an excuse for Chadian troops to operate on Nigerian territory.
Deby ordered a “nationwide military response” last week after Boko Haram attacked a military outpost near the village of Ngouboua last week, killing over 40 Chadian troops. Hundreds of terrorists swarmed the outpost, seized weapons, and destroyed military vehicles before withdrawing.
The government of Chad demanded “determined collective action” to “eradicate the scourge” of Boko Haram and apparently has not been satisfied with the response.
Africa has been rocked by a string of coups as U.S. influence diminished under President Joe Biden, resulting in the expulsion of U.S. counter-terrorism forces from Niger in May 2024. Niger complained about the arrogance and condescension of Biden administration officials when it decided to evict the American military presence from its soil. Chad also demanded the withdrawal of U.S. forces at around the same time.
The Nigerien military claimed that it overthrew its civilian government in July 2023, in part, because the government was not doing enough to fight terrorist groups like Boko Haram. This was also one of the reasons Mali fell to a coup in 2020, after eight years of a jihadist insurgency that spread into neighboring Niger and Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso had its own coup – in fact, two of them – in 2022.
Newsweek in May described Biden-Harris policy in sub-Saharan Africa as a “humiliation of historic proportions,” during which 1,100 U.S. troops were effectively held hostage by Niger because it would not allow the military overflights necessary to evacuate them safely. Some analysts said the administration put American soldiers in Niger in danger by withholding vital information from them because the White House was extremely reluctant to publicly admit the Nigeriens were kicking the U.S. out of the country on Joe Biden’s watch.
Russia is meanwhile stepping in to fill the vacuum of influence created by Biden, offering strategic partnerships and military support to African states without complaining about military coups or human rights violations. Chadian media has reported that at least 130 fighters from Russia’s infamous Wagner military company have been active in the country since late April.
The Economist noted in May that even the horrific Sudanese civil war, which might have as many civilian casualties as the wars in Ukraine or Gaza, could be partly blamed on the combination of bullying arrogance and distracted indifference the Biden administration displayed in Niger and Chad. The Biden team applied pressure to “nudge Sudan from military dictatorship to democracy,” only for that pressure to open a violent rift between junta leaders that exploded into a brutal struggle for power.
“I’ve never experienced such low perceptions of our foreign policy by Africans,” Jeffrey Smith, founder of the pro-democracy group Vanguard Africa, told The Economist.
