This week, the photo collective Everyday Africa, a project focussing on images of daily life in Africa, will be posting to our Instagram feed. Nine photographers across the continent, from Mali to Kenya, are contributing. Follow us @ newyorkermag to see their photos:http://instagram.com/newyorkermag

In this photo: Children play in the ocean in Grand-Bassam, a popular beach community outside of Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Photograph by the Everday Africa founder Peter DiCampo.

The Pentagon has yet to meet a military in a desperately poor or hopelessly corrupt country that it does not believe it can train and equip to a professional standard. Pentagon training has in fact strengthened and stabilized professional militaries in many developing countries. Yet some of the militaries that the United States has mentored in North and West Africa are best understood as criminal organizations that happen to wear pressed uniforms and epaulets. The better that some of these students learn to shoot while at Fort Benning, and the better the equipment they receive as favored clients, the more effective they become at their enduring vocations—drug smuggling, coup-making, and profitable collusion with pirates and terrorists.

Captain Amadou Sanogo, of Mali, was a longtime mentee of American trainers. He led a coup d’état against Mali’s weak democratic government early last year; after he seized power, reporters who interviewed him noticed that he proudly sported a United States Marine Corps pin on his uniform. As it turned out, Sanogo had been dispatched to the U.S. for training several times. Unfortunately, his skill as a mutineer ran “contrary to everything that is taught in U.S. military schools,” as a Pentagon spokeswoman later put it to the Agence France Presse.

…In the age of Barbary, as today, the most predictable aspect of war—and, for that matter, of American capacity-building—is that it will have unintended, unpredicted consequences.

Continue reading Steve Coll on on kidnapping in Algeria and terrorism in North Africa: http://nyr.kr/VuFaWu 

Photograph by Anis Belghoul/AP.