USA TODAY International Edition
Larger questions surround U.S. troop deaths in Niger
For more than a week, America has been fixated on a needless controversy involving President Trump, his chief of staff, a Florida congresswoman and a grieving widow whose Green Beret husband was killed in the obscure West African nation of Niger.
The tawdry episode raises new questions about Trump’s ability to perform one of the most sacred duties confronting a commander in chief: consoling the families of the nation’s fallen war heroes.
Most important, however, it raises larger questions about why hundreds of U.S. troops are in Niger in the first place, why four of them died in a firefight three weeks ago, and why influential members of Congress were unaware of the deployment.
Such ignorance is a travesty to families of the four Green Berets — Staff Sgt. Bryan Black, 35, of Puyallup, Wash.; Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Johnson, 39, of Springboro, Ohio; Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright, 29, of Lyons, Ga.; and Sgt. La David Johnson, 25, of Miami Gardens — killed on Oct. 4, apparently in a battle with fighters linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
It’s also a disservice to the other, nearly 2.8 million military family members who trust elected officials to provide crucial oversight when their loved ones are at risk overseas.
As explained Monday by Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, more than 6,000 U.S. servicemembers are in 53 African countries. The largest single group of troops, about 800, are in Niger as part of a French-led task force working to defeat terrorists in West Africa.
Dunford conceded in remarks to reporters that “if the Congress doesn’t believe that they’re getting sufficient information, then I need to double my efforts to provide them with information.” Absolutely. But there’s far more for the Pentagon and Congress to do.
The battle occurred after a dozen Army Green Beret soldiers and 30 Nijerian troops left on a reconnaissance mission Oct. 3 to a village near the border with Mali, where an ISIS splinter group operates. Enemy contact was deemed unlikely. But the next day, as the column was returning to base, 50 enemy fighters attacked. Two Americans were wounded, three killed and another went missing, his body located two days later.
Had the mission somehow changed? Was the intelligence bad? Were the Americans illequipped? How did the one U.S. soldier become separated, his body missing for so long? These and many other questions need to be answered.
To support anti-terror deployments in Niger and elsewhere, the Trump administration is relying on the 2001 approval for the war in Afghanistan. But as Dunford explained Monday, the fight against terror has gone global with the collapse of ISIS.
Fighting Islamic terrorist movements abroad is a worthy goal, but Congress, the only branch of the U.S. government empowered by the Constitution to take America to war, should own up to its responsibility under the Constitution and debate a new authorization for military operations overseas.
The public — military families, especially — deserve to know that the mission has the full support of America’s leaders, and to understand why sons and daughters might die fighting in faraway places like Niger.