France in Africa, creating messes with the help of their NATO allies

The New York Review of Books has an article by Howard French about a topic rare in the US press, France's continuing political and military engagements in its former African colonies: Enemies of Progress (10/07/2021 issue: accessed 0924/2021). The article focus on the nations of Burkino Faso and Chad, with some discussion of the Central African Republic..

This is the map of Burkino Faso from the CIA's World Factbook:

This is the Chad map from the same source:

A large part of France's African policy revolves around its interest in containing and exerting its influence against Libya. French shows how France's Libya priorities led it to adopt destructive policies in Chad and other African countries that do not border on Libya as Chad does.

He also describes the result of France's allegedly civilizing colonial activities in Africa:

By independence in 1960, Chad had almost no paved roads, and there were only three high schools for a population of 3.5 million. What passed for governance was an abject form of indirect rule carried out by French “novices and adventurers,” Debos writes. “Extortion was authorised by the colonial bureaucracy,” and whoever enjoyed local authority “did not hesitate to rob and pillage.”

France is active in various kinds of operations, often called anti-terrorism efforts, all acros the Sahel, "the broad band of semi-arid savanna lands that stretches beneath the Sahara from Mauritania in the west to Sudan, far to the east."

French's dry conclusion: "Western powers have achieved little good or mostly wreaked grave havoc on this continent by imposing their priorities and picking its leaders."

France and Britain pushed hard for US intervention in Libya, a disastrous decision taken by President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. After Muammar al-Qaddafi's government was overthrown, The result was that Libya became a "failed state," a condition which persists today. NATO allies France and Turkey have each been backing separate opposing factions in the ongoing conflict in Libya. And the spillover effects have been significant, as Michael Lüders wrote in Wer den Wind sät (2015):

Gaddafi's system of rule included militias, among them mercenary militias, recruited mainly in the Sahel and western sub-Saharan Africa. After its overthrow, the now unemployed mercenaries returned to their home countries with their weapons, looking for new opportunities and allies to find loot. Both the drastic increase in terrorist attacks by the jihadist group Boko Haram in Nigeria since 2012 and the simultaneous advance of Tuareg rebels and jihadists in northern Mali are both causally due to these marauding ex-mercenaries. France responded in 2013 by sending soldiers to Mali, its former colony, who managed to prevent the rebels from advancing further towards the capital, but not to drive them completely out of the north. So the French helped overthrow Gaddafi and then had to send their troops to another country to face the aftermath of that overthrow. Paris has thus truly "taken on more responsibility". And Berlin is following this line by deciding after the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015 to send Bundeswehr soldiers to Mali as well, "out of solidarity with France". A vivid example of political delusion. [my emphasis; my translation from German]