Obama may have scaled the CIA effort back before he left office, but Trump is ramping it up again in Africa:
The C.I.A. is poised to conduct secret drone strikes against Qaeda and Islamic State insurgents from a newly expanded air base deep in the Sahara, making aggressive use of powers that were scaled back during the Obama administration and restored by President Trump.
Late in his presidency, Barack Obama sought to put the military in charge of drone attacks after a backlash arose over a series of highly visible strikes, some of which killed civilians. The move was intended, in part, to bring greater transparency to attacks that the United States often refused to acknowledge its role in.
But now the C.I.A. is broadening its drone operations, moving aircraft to northeastern Niger to hunt Islamist militants in southern Libya. The expansion adds to the agency’s limited covert missions in eastern Afghanistan for strikes in Pakistan, and in southern Saudi Arabia for attacks in Yemen.
Let's make more good jihadis. Although I don't know why the military under AFRICOM (or anywhere else) can't conduct the missions. We're at war and the military should have the role, no? Obama had a point.
Although AFRICOM has always been the oddball command, being more than just a military outfit and pulling in all sorts of government assets in addition to the military.
I assume there are legal reasons for this reversal, although I can't rule out simple bureaucratic infighting, I suppose, given that the CIA seems to be doing what the military is doing in Africa. Maybe it really is just easier for the CIA to deny involvement, although the high profile of the Africa mission seems to blunt that angle, eh?
Then again, Russia invades and wages war on Ukraine and denies the obvious repeatedly. Maybe we just want exploit the precedent Putin set.
