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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

25 years after 9/11—Trump’s new counter-terrorism doctrine reveals an exhausted America

For Trump, the killing of IS second-in-command, al-Minuki, is an ad for the new counter-terrorism doctrine. But America needs to ask itself why taking the hammer to the problem has failed to demolish it.

The survivors of the slave-raid had gathered under the uncertain shade of a clump of trees rising from the rough, red earth: “All the huts were burnt down,” the French military officer Lieutenant Fauré would report to his superiors, “Every gourd, jar and piece of pottery was broken.” Locusts and drought, Lieutenant Fauré recorded, had raged through the lands of the ethnic-Sara people through the summer of 1902. Then, as the weather turned to spring, a new plague emerged: Ethnic-Fulbé raiding groups set out from the Emirate of Bornu, ripping apart the villages of the Lake Chad basin for ivory, gold and slaves.

From his throne in Bornu, the warlord Rabih az-Zubayr bin Fadlallah had proclaimed slave-raiding a religious obligation, a jihad against the pagan tribes of the Lake Chad basin. French soldiers responded by sticking Rabih’s severed head on a pike in 1900, and then packed his skull off for display at the Musée de l’Homme anthropological museum in Paris.

Two years later, though, hundreds of small children and women were still being captured in raids. Large numbers died of thirst and starvation, French officials reported. Fauré explained how his troops survived: “Fortunately there were a number of hippopotami in the Logone, and these served as food.”

This weekend, President Donald Trump announced that the United States special forces and the Nigerian military had worked together to eliminate Nigerian jihadist Abu-Bilal al-Minuki in a helicopter-borne assault on a compound near Metele, in the northeastern Borno province. Earlier claimed to have been killed in September 2019 and November 2022, Al-Minuki was a symbol of the Islamic States’ growing power and lethality across Africa.

For the Trump administration, the killing is an advertisement for the new counter-terrorism doctrine announced earlier this month. The sixteen-page document vows to abandon “neocolonial policies focused on globalist left-wing cultural hegemony.” Even as Trump pulls back troops and downsizes America’s global presence, allies will be assisted “with actionable intelligence and CT........

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