By Daniel Volman*

*Daniel Volman (dvolman@igc.org) is the Director of the African Security Research Project in Washington, DC, (www.concernedafricascholars.org/african-security-research-project), and a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars. He is a specialist on U.S. military policy in Africa and African security issues and has been conducting research and writing on these issues for more than thirty years.

In his 11 July 2009 speech in Accra, Ghana, U.S. President Barack Obama declared, “America has a responsibility to advance this vision, not just with words, but with support that strengthens African capacity. When there is genocide in Darfur or terrorists in Somalia, these are not simply African problems – they are global security challenges, and they demand a global response. That is why we stand ready to partner through diplomacy, technical assistance, and logistical support, and will stand behind efforts to hold war criminals accountable. Our Africa Command is focused not on establishing a foothold in the continent, but on confronting these common challenges to advance the security of America, Africa and the world.”

And yet all the available evidence demonstrates that he is determined to continue the expansion of U.S. military activity on the continent that was initiated by President William Clinton in the late 1990s and dramatically escalated by President George Bush from 2001 to 2009. While many expected the Obama administration to adopt a security policy toward Africa that would be far less militaristic and unilateral than that pursued by his predecessor, the facts show that he is in fact essentially following the same policy that has guided U.S. military involvement in Africa for more than a decade.

The clearest indication of President Obama’s intentions for Africom and for America’s military involvement in Africa is provided by the budget requests for FY 2010 submitted by the Departments of State and Defense to Congress in May 2009. The State Department budget request—which includes funding for all U.S. arms sales, military training, and other security assistance programs—proposes major increases in funding for U.S. arms sales to a number of African countries through the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program. The budget proposes to increase FMF funding for sub-Saharan African counties more than 300 percent, from just over $8.2 million to more than $25.5 million, with additional increases in funding for Maghrebi countries. Major recipients slated for increases include Chad ($500,000), the Democratic Republic of Congo ($2.5 million), Djibouti ($2.5 million), Ethiopia ($3 million), Kenya ($1 million), Liberia ($9 million), Morocco ($9 million), Nigeria ($1.4 million), South Africa ($800,000), and the Africa Regional Program ($2.8 million)

The same trend is evident in the Obama adminstration’s request for funding for the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program. The budget request for the IMET program proposes to increase funding for sub-Saharan African countries by nearly 17 percent, from just under $14 million to more than $16 million, with additional increases for Maghrebi counries. Major recipients slated for increases include Algeria ($950,000), Chad ($400,000), the Democratic Republic of Congo ($500,000), Djibouti ($350,000), Ethiopia ($775,000), Equatorial Guinea ($40,000), Ghana ($850,000), Liberia ($525,000), Libya ($250,000), Mali ($350,000), Morocco ($1.9 million), Niger ($250,000), Nigeria ($1.1 million), Rwanda ($500,000), Senegal ($1.1 million), South Africa ($900,000), and Uganda ($550,000).

The Obama administration also proposes major new funding for security assistance provided through the Peacekeeping Operations program. The FY 2010 budget proposes to increase funding for the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership—from $15 million in FY 2009 to $20 million in FY 2010—and for the East Africa Regional Strategic Initiative—from $5 million in FY 2009 to $10 million in FY 2010.

It also includes $42 million to continue operations in support of the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Accords in southern Sudan, $10 million to help create a professional 2,000 member armed force in Liberia, $21 million to continue operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo to reform the military (including the creation of rapid reaction force for the eastern Congo and the rehabilitation of the military base at Kisangani), and $3.6 million for the Africa Conflict Stabilization and Border Security Program, which will be used to support monitoring teams, advisory assistance, training, infrastructure enhancements, and equipment in the Great Lakes region, the Mano River region, the Horn of Africa, Chad, and the Central African Republic.

And it includes $67 million to support the African Union Mission in Somalia. And it contains a request for $96.8 million for the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI). The request for GPOI includes funding for the African Contingency Operations and Training Assistance Program (ACOTA)—which provides training and equipment to a number of African military forces to enhance their peacekeeping capabilities—and the Obama administration has requested $96.8 million for ACOTA activities in FY 2010.

Furthermore, the Obama administration’s budget request for International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) programs contains $24 million for Sudan to support implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Accords (CPA) in southern Sudan and to assist programs to stabilize Darfur by providing technical assistance and training for southern Sudan’s criminal justice sector and law enforcement institutions as well as contribute to UN civilian police and formed police units in southern Sudan and Darfur. It also includes funds for police reforms in the Democratic Republic of Congo; for training, infrastructure, and equipment for police units in Liberia; to operate the American-run International Law Academy in Gaborone, Botswana; and to create a Regional Security Training Center for West, Central, and North Africa.

And the Obama administration is also asking for funding to be provided through the INCLE programs for the first time to provide security assistance to countries participating in the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Niger, Chad, and Nigeria. Major recipients slated for increases include Algeria ($970,000), Cape Verde ($2 million), the Democratic Republic of Congo ($1.7 million), Ethiopia ($500,000), Gambia ($450,00), Ghana ($500,000), Guinea-Bissau ($3 million), Liberia ($8 million), Morocco ($2 million), Nigeria ($2 million), Sierre Leone ($250,000), Sudan ($24 million), Uganda ($385,000), and the Africa Regional Program ($4.5 million).

The Obama administration also proposes to increase funding for counter-terrorism programs. These include the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program—which provides training to countries throughout the world—the Terrorist Interdiction Program/Personal Identification, Secure Comparison, and Evaluation System Program—which supports identification and watch listing systems to eighteen countries (including Kenya)—the Counterterrorism Financing Program, which helps partner countries throughout the world stop the flow of money to terrorists—and the Counterterrorism Engagement Program, which is intended to strengthen ties with key political leaders throughout the world and “build political will at senior levels in partner nations for shared counterterrorism challenges.” The Obama administration’s budget request requests increased funding for Kenya (from $5 million in FY 2009 to $8 million in FY 2010), for South Africa (a new program for $1 million), and the Africa Regional program (from almost $15 million in FY 2009 to more than $20 million in FY 2010).

The Obama administration proposed FY 2010 budget for the Department of Defense requests $278 million in Operation and Maintenance funds to cover the cost of Africom operations and Operation Enduring Freedom-Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership operations at the Africom headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. The administration is also requesting $263 million to provide additional manpower, airlift, and communications support to Africom. In addition, the administration is requesting $60 million to fund CJTF-HOA operations in FY 2010 and $249 million to pay for the operation of the 500-acre base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti and for facilities modifications, along with $41.8 for major base improvement construction projects.

The administration has requesting some $400 million for Global Train and Equip (Section 1206) programs, some $200 million for Security and Stabilization Assistance (Section 1207) programs, and some $1 million for the Combatant Commander’s Initiative Fund. This money will be used primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan to pay for emergency training and equipment, the services of personnel from the State Department, and humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi and Afghani armed forces, but it will be available for the use of Africom as well.

The administration’s budget request also contains $1.9 billion to buy three Littoral Combat Ships and another $373 million to buy two Joint High Speed Vessels, ships that will play a crucial role in U.S. Navy operations off the coast of Africa. In addition, the administration has requested $10.5 million to pay for naval deployments in west and central Africa in FY 2010 and another $10 million for naval operations in east Africa.

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Nigeria, during her tour of Africa in August 2009, she met with Ojo Maduekwe, the Foreign Minister and Godwin Abbe, the new Minister of Defense. In her remarks after the meeting, she was asked what the U.S. government intended to do to help the Nigerian government establish stability and security in the Niger Delta. “Well, the defense minister was present at the second larger meeting that the foreign minister convened,” she said, “and he had some very specific suggestions as to how the United States could assist the Nigerian Government in their efforts, which we think are very promising, to try to bring peace and stability to the Niger Delta. We will be following up on those. There is nothing that has been decided. But we have a very good working relationship between our two militaries. So I will be talking with my counterpart, the Secretary of Defense, and we will, through our joint efforts, through our bi-national commission mechanism, determine what Nigeria would want from us for help, because we know this is an internal matter, we know this is up to the Nigerian people and their government to resolve, and then look to see how we would offer that assistance.” Thus, in addition to the security assistance programs in the budget request for FY 2010, the Obama administration is now considering providing even more military support to the Nigerian government for use in the Niger Delta if the current amnesty program collapses, as many analysts expect, and the government resumes military operations against insurgent forces in this vital oil-producing region (which produces 10 percent of America’s total oil imports).

Another indication of the Obama administration’s intentions are provided by its decision to expand U.S. military involvement in Somalia as well as its decision to continue the Bush administration’s policy of unilateral military attacks against alleged al-Qaeda operatives in that country. In June 2009, a senior State Department official (presumed to have been Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson) revealed that the Obama administration had initiated a program of indirect military support for the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of Somalia (the internationally-recognized government of the country although it only exercises control over a small part of the capital, Mogadishu) and a few other towns in the southern part of the country).

According to the official, the U.S. government was providing funding to the TFG to finance weapons purchases and had also asked the governments of Uganda and Burundi, which have deployed troops to Mogadishu under an African Union mandate to protect the TFG, to transfer weaponry from their own stockpiles to the armed forces of the TFG in exchange for promises that the U.S. government would reimburse them. In addition, the U.S. government made its base in Djibouti available to other governments for them to provide military training to the armed forces of the TFG.

During her visit to Kenya in August 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the U.S. government would “continue to provide equipment and training to the TFG,” stating “very early in the administration, I made the decision, which the President supported, to accelerate and provide aid to the TFG.” She went on to declare that al-Shabaab, the Islamist insurgent group fighting to overthrow the TFG, was “a terrorist group with links to al-Qaeda and other foreign military networks” and that they “see Somalia as a future haven for global terrorism.” “There is no doubt,” Secretary Clinton stated “that al-Shabaab wants to obtain control over Somalia to use it as a base from which to influence and even infiltrate surrounding countries and launch attacks against countries far and near.” Thus, “if al-Shabaab were to obtain a haven in Somalia, which would then attract al-Qaeda and other terrorist actors, it would be a threat to the United States.”

The U.S. government arranged for the delivery of an initial supply of approximately 40 tons of small arms and ammunition worth approximately $10 million to the TFG between May and August of 2009 from the stockpiles of the AU peacekeeping force, along with between $1 million and $2 million in cash to the TFG to finance its own arms purchase, and the delivery of another 40 tons of small arms and ammunition over the following months. A number of other governments—including Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, and France—are also reported to have sent military personnel to the U.S. base in Djibouti to provide military training to TFG troops.

According to a report by the Associated Press, American officials “say the U.S. military is not conducting the training and will not put any forces in Somalia.” Other countries were conducting the training, the Associated Press reported, because “the [Obama] administration is making a concerted effort to avoid putting any American footprint in Somalia, which would risk alienating allies and add to charges by Islamic extremists of a Western takeover.” However, is has since become clear that most of the arms and training has been transferred to al-Shabaab, either by Islamic militants who had infiltrated the TFG military forces or as the result of the sale of the weapons and ammunition on the black market.

Then, in August, U.S. Special Forces troops attacked and killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, an alleged al-Qaeda operative who was accused of being involved in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August, 1998 as well as other al-Qaeda operations in east Africa. The U.S. Special Forces troops carried out the attack from onboard several helicopters that had been launched from a U.S. Navy warship off the Somali coast, using machine guns and automatic assault rifles to strafe a convoy of four-wheel drive vehicles carrying Nabhan and his retinue. Following the initial assault, the helicopters landed so that they troops could seize Nabhan’s body for positive identification. It is likely that the Obama administration will conduct further military operations in Somalia since, in the words of Vice Admiral Robert Moeller, the deputy commander of Africom, “the threat posed by al-Shabaab is something that we pay very, very close attention to.”

And in October 2009, the Obama administration announced a major new security assistance package for Mali that was delivered on 20 October 2009. The package—valued at $4.5 to $5 million (2.3 billion CFA) includes 37 Land Cruiser pickup trucks, communication equipment, replacement parts, clothing and other individual equipment, is intended to enhance Mali’s ability to transport and communicate with internal security (counter-insurgency) units throughout the country and control its borders. The security assistance package is officially known as a “Counter Terrorism Train and Equip” (CTTE) program. Although ostensibly intended to help Mali deal with potential threats from AQIM (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), it is more likely to be used against Tuareg insurgent forces.

In addition, between April and June of 2009, 300 U.S. Special Forces personnel were deployed to Mali to train Malian military forces at three local bases and, according to Lt. Col. Louis Sombora, deputy commander of Mali’s 33rd Parachute Regiment (which was the recipient of the new U.S. military aid package), more than 95 percent of his soldiers have received U.S. military training. And in early November 2009, U.S. Air Force Brig. General Michael W. Callan, vice commander of the U.S. Air Force Africa (the Air Force contingent based in Europe and dedicated to Africom), visited Mali along with other U.S. military personnel in order to inspect local military forces (including the 33rd Parachute Regiment) and tour local military facilities. According to Lt. Col. Marshall Mantiply, defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Bamako, “we are working with the Mali ministry of defense on a ten-year plan,” to enhance the country’s military capabilities.

The aid package to Mali is just the latest instance of America’s growing military involvement in the Sahel region. In his testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Africa hearing on Counter-terrorism in the Sahel on 17 November 2009, Secretary of State for Africa Johnnie Carson identified Mali, along with Algeria, Mali, and Mauritania—as one of the “key countries” in the region for U.S. counter-terrorism strategy. “We believe that our work with Mali to support more professional units capable of improving the security environment in the country will have future benefits if they are sustained,” he stated.

It is clear, therefore, that President Barack Obama has decided to follow the path marked out for Africom by the Clinton and Bush administrations, based on the use of military force to ensure that America can satisfy its continuing addiction to oil and to deal with the threat posed by al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups, rather than to chart a new path passed on a partnership with the people of Africa and other countries that have a stake on the continent (including China) to promote sustainable economic development, democracy, and human rights in Africa and a global energy order based on the use of clean, safe, and renewable resources.

This is the consequence of two factors. To begin with, President Obama genuinely believes in the strategy of the Global War on Terrorism and thinks that Africa must be a central battlefield in America’s military campaign against al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups. Many analysts believe that terrorism does not constitute a significant threat to America’s national security interests and that it would be far more effective to treat terrorism as a crime and to reduce the threat of terrorism by employing traditional law enforcement techniques. But, as demonstrated by the president’s decision to escalate U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Mali, the Obama administration is determined to use military force instead, despite the fact that—as U.S. military analysts argue—this only helps to strengthen terrorist groups and jeopardizes other U.S. security interests.

And with regard to America’s growing dependence on African oil supplies, President Obama understands the danger of relying upon the importation of a vital resource from unstable countries ruled by repressive, undemocratic regimes, and the necessity of reducing America’s reliance on the use of oil and other non-renewable sources of energy. But, for understandable reasons, he has concluded that there is simply very little that he can do to achieve this goal during the limited time that he will be in office. He knows that it will take at least several decades to make the radical changes that will be necessary to develop alternative sources of energy, particularly to fuel cars and other means of transportation (if this is even technically feasible). And he knows that—in the meantime—public support for his presidency and for his party depends on the continued supply of reliable and relatively inexpensive supplies of gas and other petroleum-based energy to the American people, more than only other single factor. In the event of a substantial disruption in the supply of oil from Nigeria or any other major African supplier, he realizes that he will be under irresistible political pressure to employ the only instrument that he has at his disposal—U.S. military forces—to try to keep Africa’s oil flowing.

Professional military officers also know that the repressive, undemocratic regimes upon which the United States relies to maintain oil production are likely to fail and that, they are almost certain to find themselves sent into combat in Africa—whether they like it or not—if this leads to a major disruption of oil exports, and are already working on plans for direct military intervention in Africa. Thus, in May 2008, the Army Training and Doctrine Command, the Special Operations Command, and the Joint Forces Command conducted a war game scenario for Nigeria during war game exercise that it conducts each year at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

The scenario—set in the hypothetical year 2013—was designed to test the ability of the United States to respond to a crisis in Nigeria in which the Nigerian government fragments and rival factions within the Nigerian military begin fighting for control of the Niger Delta, creating so much violence and chaos that it would be impossible to continue oil production. The participants concluded that there was little the United States could do to bring about a peaceful resolution of the conflict and that, in the end, they would probably be ordered to send up to 20,000 American troops into the Niger Delta in what the participants clearly recognized would be a futile attempt to get the oil flowing again. The fact that the participants in the Nigerian war games decided to go public with this information suggests that they believe that this scenario is likely to become a reality in the near future and that their only hope of avoiding this is to tell the public in the hope that this will prevent the order from being issued.

But the professional military officers who would actually have to lead their troops into Africa are not the only people who understand that America’s reliance on the military to solve the energy dilemma and the threat of terrorism is a dangerous mistake. Members of the U.S. Congress are also increasingly skeptical about this strategy and are beginning to give Africom the critical scrutiny it deserves. Moreover, a number of concerned organizations and individuals in the United States and in Africa came together in August 2006 to create the Resist Africom campaign (http://www.resistafricom.org) in order to educate the American people about Africom and to mobilize public and congressional opposition to the new command. The Resist Africom campaign will continue to press the Obama administration to abandon its plan for Africom and pursue a policy toward Africa based on a genuine partnership with the people of Africa, international cooperation, democracy, human rights, and sustainable economic development.

*Daniel Volman (dvolman@igc.org) is the Director of the African Security Research Project in Washington, DC (www.concernedafricascholars.org/african-security-research-project and a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars. He is a specialist on U.S. military policy in Africa and African security issues and has been conducting research and writing on these issues for more than thirty years.

When Barack Obama took office as president of the United States in January 2009, it was widely expected that he would dramatically change, or even reverse, the militarized and unilateral national security policy toward Africa that had been pursued by the Bush administration. But, after a little more than one year in office, it is clear that the Obama administration is essentially following the same policy that has guided U.S. military involvement in Africa for more than a decade. Indeed, it appears that President Obama is determined to expand and intensify U.S. military engagement throughout Africa.

Thus, in its budget request for the State Department for FY 2010, the Obama administration proposed significant increases in funding for U.S. arms sales and military training programs for African countries, as well as for regional programs on the continent, and is expected to propose further increases in its budget request for FY 2011.

The FY 2010 budget proposed to increase Foreign Military Funding spending for Africa more than 300 percent, from just over $8.2 million to more than $25.5 million, with additional increases in funding for North African countries. Major recipients included Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Nigeria, and South Africa.

The FY 2010 budget request for the International Military Education and Training program proposed to increase funding for African countries from just under $14 million to more than $16 million, with additional increases for North African countries. Major recipients slated for increases include Algeria, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Liberia, Libya, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda.

The FY 2010 State Department budget request also proposed increased funding for several other security assistance programs in Africa, including the African Contingency Operations and Training Assistance program (which is slated to receive $96.8 million), the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement programs in Algeria, Cape Verde, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Morocco, Nigeria, Sierre Leone, Sudan, and Uganda, and Anti-Terrorism Assistance programs in Kenya, South Africa, and the Africa Regional program.

The same is true for funding in the Defense Department budget for the operations of the new Africa Command (Africom) which became fully operational in October 2008 and the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) forces which have been stationed at the U.S. military base in Djibouti since 2002. The Obama administration requested $278 million to cover the cost of Africom operations and Operation Enduring Freedom-Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership operations at the Africom headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. The administration also requested $60 million to fund CJTF-HOA operations in FY 2010 and $249 million to pay for the operation of the 500-acre base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, along with $41.8 for major base improvement construction projects. And the administration is now considering the creation of a 1,000-man Marine intervention force based in Europe to provide Africom with the capability to intervene in Africa.

The continuity with Bush administration policy is especially evident in several key regions. In Somalia, for example, the Obama administration has provided some $20 million worth of arms to the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and initiated a major effort to provide training to TFG troops at the CJTF-HOA base in Djibouti and in Europe. Furthermore, President Obama has continued the program initiated by the Bush administration to assassinate alleged al-Qaeda leaders in Somalia and, in August 2009, he authorized an attack by U.S. Special Forces units that killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, who was accused to being involved in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania by al-Qaeda in August 1998.

In the Sahel, the Obama administration has also sought increased funding for the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Program ($20 million in FY 2010) to and created begun a special security assistance program for Mali to provide that country with some $5 million of all-terrain vehicles and communications equipment. Administration officials have justified this escalating military involvement in the Trans-Saharan region by arguing that the increasing involvement of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in criminal activity (including kidnapping for ransom and drug trafficking) constitutes a growing threat to U.S. interests in this resource-rich area.

In Nigeria, which supplies approximately ten percent of U.S. oil imports, the Obama administration has decided to expand U.S. military support to Nigerian military forces, despite concerns about security in the Niger Delta, Islamic extremism in northern Nigeria, and the country’s fragile democratic institutions. Thus, during her visit to Nigeria in August 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised that the administration would consider any request by the Nigerian government for military support to enhance its capacity to repress armed militants in the Niger Delta region. The failure of the Nigerian government to implement major elements of its amnesty program in this vital oil-producing area has recently led to a resumption of violent incidents and attacks on oil installations in the Niger Delta.

In Central Africa and the Horn of Africa, the Obama administration is increasing security assistance to Uganda, Rwanda, the Kenya, Ethiopia, and other countries in the region, and has conducted major training exercises both in Uganda and in Djibouti for the new East African Standby Force (EASF). The EASF is a battalion-sized force authorized by the African Union for independent African peacekeeping operations and other missions, but it remains dependent upon external support—especially from the United States—and is not expected to be able to operate on its own for many years to come. And in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Obama administration has just authorized the deployment of U.S. Special Forces troops to train an infantry battalion at a base at Kisangani that was recently rehabilitated by the United States. The Obama administration has chosen to engage in this training program despite the continuing involvement of Congolese troops in gross human rights violations (including the rape and murder of civilians) and in the illegal exploitation of the country’s mineral resources.

This growing U.S. military engagement in Africa reflects the Obama administration’s genuine concerns about the threat posed by Islamic extremism and by instability in key resource-producing regions, and by its desire to help resolve conflicts throughout the continent. However, all these measures increase the militarization of Africa and tie the United States even more closely to unstable, repressive, and undemocratic regimes. Furthermore, despite President Obama’s rhetorical commitment to an approach that combines military and non-military activities, the administration lacks a comprehensive and effective plan to address the underlying issues—the lack of democracy and economic development—that lead to extremism, instability, and conflict in Africa.

This is chiefly because the Obama administration lacks the diplomatic and economic means to address these issues. The State Department and the Agency for International Development have been systematically starved of funding and other resources for years and simply lack the capacity to engage in Africa in the manner that would make such an effort possible. It will take many years and substantial increases in funding to build this capacity. And the Obama administration’s food security program—its one major new initiative for Africa—is highly problematic since it relies on the use of expensive petroleum-based fertilizers, the mechanization of agricultural production, and the use of genetically-modified seeds.

In the meantime, President Obama has decided that he has no choice except to rely primarily on military instruments and to hope that this can protect U.S. interests in Africa, at least in the short term, despite the risk that this military engagement will exacerbate existing threats. The Obama administration would be well advised to curtail its military engagement in Africa and devote its attention to developing the capacity for diplomatic and economic efforts to address Africa’s underlying problems (as Joint Chief of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen argued in a recent speech) and to working with the European Union, China, and other stakeholders on a cooperative engagement with Africa that will not further undermine African security and jeopardize America’s long-term interests.

When Barack Obama took office as president of the United States in January 2009, it was widely expected that he would dramatically change, or even reverse, the militarised and unilateral security policy that had been pursued by the George W. Bush administration toward Africa, as well as toward other parts of the world.

After one year in office, however, it is clear that the Obama administration is following essentially the same policy that has guided U.S. military policy toward Africa for more than a decade. Indeed, the Obama administration is seeking to expand U.S. military activities on the continent even further.

In its FY 2011 budget request for security assistance programmes for Africa, the Obama administration is asking for 38 million dollars for the Foreign Military Financing programme to pay for U.S. arms sales to African countries.

The Obama administration is also asking for 21 million dollars for the International Military Education and Training Programme to bring African military officers to the United States, and 24.4 million dollars for Anti-Terrorism Assistance programmes in Africa.

The Obama administration has also taken a number of other steps to expand U.S. military involvement in Africa.

In June 2009, administration officials revealed that President Obama had approved a programme to supply at least 40 tonnes of weaponry and provide training to the forces of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of Somalia through several intermediaries, including Uganda, Burundi, Djibouti, Kenya, and France.

In September 2009, Obama authorised a U.S. Special Forces operation in Somalia that killed Saleh Ali Nabhan, an alleged al Qaeda operative who was accused of being involved in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, as well as other al Qaeda operations in east Africa.

In October 2009, the Obama administration announced a major new security assistance package for Mali – valued at 4.5 to 5.0 million dollars – that included 37 Land Cruiser pickup trucks, communication equipment, replacement parts, clothing and other individual equipment and was intended to enhance Mali’s ability to transport and communicate with internal security forces throughout the country and control its borders.

Although ostensibly intended to help Mali deal with potential threats from AQIM (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), it is more likely to be used against Tuareg insurgent forces.

In December 2009, U.S. military officials confirmed that the Pentagon was considering the creation of a 1,000-strong Marine rapid deployment force for the new U.S. Africa Command (Africom) based in Europe, which could be used to intervene in African hot spots.

In February 2010, in his testimony before a hearing by the Africa Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Johnnie Carson declared, “We seek to enhance Nigeria’s role as a U.S. partner on regional security, but we also seek to bolster its ability to combat violent extremism within its borders.”

Also in February 2010, U.S. Special Forces troops began a 30-million-dollar, eight-month-long training programme for a 1,000-man infantry battalion of the army of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) at the U.S.-refurbished base in Kisangani.

Speaking before a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing in March 2010 about this training programme, General William Ward, the Commander of Africom, stated “should it prove successful, there’s potential that it could be expanded to other battalions as well.”

During the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Ward also discussed Africom’s continuing participation in Ugandan military operations in the DRC against the Lord’s Resistance Army. Despite the failure of “Operation Lightning Thunder,” launched by Ugandan troops in December 2008 with help of Africom (included planning assistance, equipment, and financial backing), Ward declared, “I think our support to those ongoing efforts is important support.”

And in March 2010, U.S. officials revealed that the Obama administration was considering using surveillance drones to provide intelligence to TFG troops in Somalia for their planned offensive against al-Shabaab. According to these officials, the Pentagon may also launch air strikes into Somalia and send U.S. Special Forces troops into the country, as it has done in the past.

This growing U.S. military involvement in Africa reflects the fact that counter-insurgency has once again become one of the main elements of U.S. security strategy.

This is clearly evident in the new Quadrennial Defence Review (QDR) released by the Pentagon in February.

According to the QDR, “U.S. forces will work with the military forces of partner nations to strengthen their capacity for internal security, and will coordinate those activities with those of other U.S. government agencies as they work to strengthen civilian capacities, thus denying terrorists and insurgents safe havens. For reasons of political legitimacy as well as sheer economic necessity, there is no substitute for professional, motivated local security forces protecting populations threatened by insurgents and terrorists in their midst.”

As the QDR makes clear, this is intended to avoid the need for direct U.S. military intervention: “Efforts that use smaller numbers of U.S. forces and emphasize host-nation leadership are generally preferable to large-scale counterinsurgency campaigns. By emphasizing host-nation leadership and employing modest numbers of U.S. forces, the United States can sometimes obviate the need for larger-scale counterinsurgency campaigns.”

Or, as a senior U.S. military officer assigned to Africom was quoted as saying in a recent article in the U.S. Air University’s Strategic Studies Quarterly, “we don’t want to see our guys going in and getting wacked…We want Africans to go in.”

Thus, the QDR goes on to say, “U.S. forces are working in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Colombia, and elsewhere to provide training, equipment, and advice to their host-country counterparts on how to better seek out and dismantle terrorist and insurgent networks while providing security to populations that have been intimidated by violent elements in their midst.”

Furthermore, the United States will also continue to expand and improve the network of local military bases that are available to U.S. troops under base access agreements.

The resurgence of Vietnam War-era counter-insurgency doctrine as a principal tenet of U.S. security policy, therefore, has led to a major escalation of U.S. military involvement in Africa by the Obama administration that seems likely to continue in the years ahead.

*Daniel Volman is the Director of the African Security Research Project in Washington, DC. He is the author of numerous articles and reports and has been studying US security policy toward Africa and African security issues for more than thirty years.

LINKS:

African Security Research Project
http://concernedafricascholars.org/african-security-research-project

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), Nigerian oil production averaged 1.94 million barrels per day (bbl/d) in 2008, although the EIA estimates that Nigeria’s effective oil production capacity was 2.7 million bbl/d. Of this, 990,000 bbl/d were exported to the United States. The United States, thus, imported 44 percent of Nigeria’s oil exports, making the country the fifth largest foreign oil supplier to the United States. Nigeria’s oil export blends are light, sweet crudes with low sulfur contents, meaning that they are highly viscous, easy to transport, and comparatively inexpensive to process into gasoline and other petroleum products.

In 1997, the Nigerian government created the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to manage oil production and exports. The majority of Nigeria’s major oil and natural gas projects (95 percent) are funded through joint ventures with the NNPC as the major shareholder. Shell Petroleum Development Company operates the largest joint venture in Nigeria. Additional foreign oil companies operating in joint ventures with the NNPC include ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Total, Agip, and Addax Petroleum.

The Link Between U.S. Oil Imports and U.S. National Security Policy

Compared to the Middle East, Africa possesses a relatively modest share of the world’s petroleum reserves: approximately 9.4 percent of proven world reserves, compared to 61.7 percent for the Middle East. Nevertheless, the world’s major oil-consuming nations, led by the United States, China, and the Western European countries, have exhibited extraordinary interest in the development of African oil reserves, making huge bids for whatever exploration blocks become available and investing large sums in drilling platforms, pipelines, loading facilities, and other production infrastructure. Indeed, the pursuit of African oil has taken on the character of a gold rush, with major companies from all over the world competing fiercely with one another for access to promising reserves. This contest represents “a turning point for the energy industry and its investors,” in that “an increasing percentage of the world’s oil supplies are expected to come from the waters off West Africa,” the Wall Street Journal reported in December 2005. By 2010, the Journal predicted, “West Africa will be the world’s number one oil source outside of OPEC.”

It is in this context that we must view the world’s growing interest in African oil. African oil output may never reaches the Olympian heights long associated with Middle Eastern production, but it is expected to continue growing in the years ahead at a time when output from many other areas is in decline—and this, more than anything else, makes it significant. According to the DoE, combined oil output by all African producers is projected to rise by 91 percent between 2002 and 2025, from 8.6 to 16.4 million bbl/d. Even if this projection proves overly optimistic, Africa will still figure among the very few major producing areas (the Caspian Sea basin is another) that are expected to post significant production increases in the years ahead. In an environment where any increment in output will be highly prized, Africa is thus a powerful magnet for the world’s giant oil companies.

The United State now obtains between 22 and 24 percent of its total oil imports from Africa, depending on periodic variations in production levels, particularly fluctuations in Nigerian oil production as a result of attacks on oil facilities by MEND and other political unrest in the Niger Delta. As a result, the United States now imports more oil from the African continent than from the entire Middle East, and is expected to get an even larger percentage of its oil imports from Africa in the coming years. In December 2000, the National Intelligence Council of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency concluded that Africa would be supplying 25 percent of America’s total oil imports by 2015. Most oil industry analysts now believe that this estimate was too conservative and that Africa will actually be supplying a considerably greater percentage of U.S. oil imports throughout the next decade.

Despite the inauguration of President Barack Obama in January 2009, U.S. government policy on the procurement of African oil is largely governed by the National Energy Policy Report—the final report of the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG)—which was issued on May 17, 2001. The NEPDG was chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney, a high-level body appointed by President Bush in February 2001, and its final document is often referred to as the “Cheney report.” In the most general terms, the report calls on the federal government to undertake numerous initiatives to substantially increase the nation’s supply of energy, including energy derived from petroleum. As is well known, these initiatives include measures aimed at increasing oil output from domestic U.S. sources, most notably by commencing drilling on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). But because America’s need for energy is expected to expand substantially in the years ahead, the report also calls for increasing U.S. reliance on foreign sources of energy.

In light of Africa’s unique ability to increase its oil output in the years ahead, the Cheney report highlighted Africa’s potential to supply an ever-increasing share of America’s energy needs. “West Africa is expected to be one of the fastest-growing sources of oil and natural gas for the American market,” the report states. Moreover, “African oil tends to be of high quality and low in sulfur, making it suitable for stringent refined product requirements.” Particular mention is made of the oil potential of Nigeria and Angola. Nigeria’s 2001 production is estimated at 2.1 million bbl/d in the report, and that country is said to harbor “ambitious production goals as high as 5 million barrels of oil per day over the coming decades.” Angola is also described as a “major source of growth,” with the potential “to double its exports over the next ten years.” On this basis, the Cheney report calls for vigorous action by the United States to promote increased oil output in Africa and to channel these additional supplies to markets in the United States. To accomplish this, American oil companies are encouraged to increase their investments in Africa and African countries are encouraged to welcome and facilitate such investment.

The Bush administration also sought to enhance U.S. access to African oil in order to reduce—to some degree, at least—American dependence on the ever-turbulent Middle East. While it is impossible to escape dependence on the Middle East altogether, the Cheney report notes, it is important to reduce U.S. vulnerability to supply disruptions caused by Middle Eastern instability as much as possible – a strategy known as “diversification.” “Concentration of world oil production in any one region of the world is a potential contributor to market instability,” the report notes. Accordingly, “encouraging greater diversity of oil production…has obvious benefits to all market participants.” In accordance with this outlook, the Cheney report calls for vigorous U.S. efforts to increase imports boost from all potential alternatives to the Middle East, but West Africa is viewed with particular favor in this regard because many of its most promising new fields are located offshore, in the Atlantic Ocean, and thus safely removed from the strife and disorder of the African mainland. “Technological advances will enable the United States to accelerate the diversification of oil supplies,” the report notes, “notably through deep water offshore exploration and production in the Atlantic Basin,” particularly West Africa.”

The direct linkage between growing U.S. dependence on oil imports from Africa—and particularly from Nigeria—is based on the assertion that U.S. national security—and our continued enjoyment of the “American way of life”—requires unimpeded access to African oil. Commenting on this development, the former U.S. ambassador to Chad, Donald R. Norland, told the Africa Subcommittee of the U.S. House International Relations Committee in April 2002, “It’s been reliably reported that, for the first time, the two concepts – ‘Africa’ and ‘U.S. national security’ – have been used in the same sentence in Pentagon documents.” Michael A. Westphal, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs, also noted this linkage in a Pentagon press briefing on April 2, 2002. “Fifteen percent of the U.S.’s imported oil supply comes from sub-Saharan Africa,” he declared, and “this is also a number which has the potential for increasing significantly in the next decade.” Walter Kansteiner, the Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, further acknowledged the national security implications of African oil during a visit to Nigeria in July 2002. “African oil is of strategic national interest to us,” he declared, and “it will increase and become more important as we go forward.”

As a result, the “Carter Doctrine,” proclaimed by President Jimmy Carter in January 1980 has been extended to Nigeria, the rest of Africa, and—indeed—the entire world. In his final State of the Union Address, President Carter designated the free flow of Persian Gulf oil as a “vital interest” of the United States and declared that this country would use “any means necessary, including military force,” to defend that interest. To implement this policy, widely known as the “Carter Doctrine,” the U.S. Department of Defense established the U.S. Central Command (Centcom) to oversee U.S. military operations in the Gulf area and built up a substantial military basing infrastructure in the region. Later presidents subsequently cited the Carter Doctrine as the basis for U.S. combat operations during the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the war in Afghanistan from 2001 until the present, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

U.S. Security Assistance to Nigeria, FY 1999-2010

In the late 1990s, when U.S. policymakers began to recognize the national security implications of America’s growing dependence on African oil (well before this linkage was explicitly and publicly acknowledged), the U.S. government began to dramatically increase U.S. military involvement in Africa to provide support to undemocratic and repressive African regimes in countries that were major sources of American oil imports–like the government of Nigeria—and to regimes that were willing to act as surrogates or proxies for the United States and use their military forces to protect U.S. interests on the continent, like the governments of Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda.

Thus, in 1997, President Bill Clinton established the Africa Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), the first of a whole array of new military programs aimed that have been created in the past decade to provide increasing amounts of U.S. security assistance to African regimes and to expand U.S. military activities on the continent. In 2004, ACRI was expanded and renamed the African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) program. American military involvement in Africa escalated rapidly after the inauguration of President Bush in 2001 and has been continued by the Obama administration.

Increasing levels of U.S. security assistance to Nigeria have been a central feature of this escalating military involvement. And it has been explicitly justified as a means to ensure that the United States continues to have access to the oil resources of the Niger Delta. Thus, the FY 2006 Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations notes Nigeria’s “importance as a leading supplier of petroleum to the U.S.” and the fact that “Nigeria is the fifth largest source of U.S. oil imports.” Therefore, according to the Budget Justification, “disruption of supply from Nigeria would represent a major blow to the oil security strategy of the U.S.” It is noteworthy that such honest explanations of U.S. security assistance to Nigeria have been omitted from the annual Budget Justifications since then. The following tables presents data on U.S. security assistance programs for Nigeria over the past decade.

Table One: FY 1999-2002
(Constant Dollars in Thousands)

Table Two: FY 2003-2006
(Constant Dollars in Thousands)

Table Three: FY 2007-2010
(Constant Dollars in Thousands)

Abbreviations:
CS = Commercial Sales
Est. = Estimate
FM = Foreign Military
FMF = Foreign Military Financing
FMS = Foreign Military Sales
IMET = International Military Education and Training
NA = Not Available

Sources: U.S. Defense Security Assistance Agency, Historical Facts Book as of September 30, 2008 and U.S. Department of State, Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations, Fiscal Year 2010.

In addition, the United States delivered four surplus U.S. Coast Guard Balsam-class coastal patrol ships in 2003 through the Excess Defense Articles program of the U.S. Defense Security Assistance Agency. These ships had a total value of more than $4.1 million at the time they were delivered to Nigeria.

Nigeria is also one of the countries that are eligible to receive additional U.S. security assistance through the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership program. And Nigeria receives further U.S. security assistance through ACOTA, the Anti-Terrorism Assistance program, and the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) program. The level of funding for Nigeria is not available for most of these programs. But we do know that Nigeria is scheduled to receive an estimated $720,000 in assistance through the INCLE program in FY 2009 and that the Obama administration requested $2 million in INCLE funding for Nigeria for FY 2010.

Future U.S. Security Assistance to Nigeria for Military Operations in the Niger Delta

On 12 August 2009, during her trip to Africa, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Nigerian Foreign Minister Ojo Maduekwe. Following the meeting she applauded the efforts of the Nigerian government to establish “security in the Niger Delta,” and stated, “We support the Nigerian Government’s comprehensive political framework approach toward resolving the conflict in the Niger Delta.” She went on to say that “the process, as it was explained to me by several of the ministers who were present, is incorporating the region’s stakeholders as absolutely essential, focusing on the region’s development needs, separating the militants and the unreconcilables from those who deserve amnesty and want to be part of building a better future for that part of Nigeria. And we have offered, again, our support and that of the international community.”

In answer to a reporter’s question, Secretary Clinton said that she had also met with the Nigerian Defense Minister, “and he had some very specific suggestions as to how the United States could assist the Nigerian Government in their efforts, which we think are very promising, to try and bring peace and security to the Niger Delta. We will be following up on those. There is nothing that has been decided. But we have a very good working relationship between our two militaries. So I will be talking with my counterpart, the [U.S.] Secretary of Defense, and we will, through our joint efforts, through our bi-national commission mechanism, determine what Nigeria would want from us for help, because we know that this is an internal matter, we know this is up to the Nigerian people and their government to resolve, and then look to see who we would offer that assistance.”

As this statement indicates, there is little doubt that the Obama administration will provide even more security assistance to the Nigerian government in the future. Moreover, it is clear that this security assistance will be intended specifically the Nigerian government to use for military operations in the Niger Delta.

U.S. Army Preparations for Possible Direct American Military Intervention in Nigeria

In May 2008, the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, hosted “Unified Quest 2008,” the Army’s annual war games to test the American military’s ability to deal with the kind of crises that it might face in the near future. “Unified Quest 2008” was especially noteworthy because it was the first time that the war games included African scenarios as part of the Pentagon’s plan to create a new military command for the continent: the Africa Command or Africom. No representatives of Africom were at the war games, but Africom officers were in close communication throughout the event.

The five-day war games—co-sponsored by the Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), the Special Forces Command, and the Joint Forces Command—were designed to look at what crises might erupt in different parts of the world in five to 25 years and how the United States might handle them. In addition to U.S. military officers and intelligence officers, “Unified Quest 2008” brought together participants from the State Department and other U.S. government agencies, academics, journalists, and foreign military officers (including military representatives from several NATO countries, Australia, and Israel), along with the private military contractors who helped run the war games: the Rand Corporation and Booz-Allen.

One of the four scenarios that were wargamed was a test of how Africom could respond to a crisis in Somalia—set in 2025—caused by escalating insurgency and piracy. Unfortunately, no information on the details of the scenario is available.

Far more information is available on the other scenario—set in 2013—which was a test of how Africom could respond to a crisis in Nigeria in which the Nigerian government is near collapse, and rival factions and rebels are fighting for control of the oil fields of the Niger Delta and vying for power in that oil-rich country, the sixth largest supplier of America’s oil imports.

The list of options for the Nigeria scenario ranged from diplomatic pressure to military action, with or without the aid of European and African nations. One participant, U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Mark Stanovich, drew up a plan that called for the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops within 60 days, which even he thought was undesirable. “American intervention could send the wrong message: that we are backing a government that we don’t intend to,” Stanovich said. Other participants suggested that it would be better if the U.S. government sent a request to South Africa or Ghana to send into Nigeria instead.

As the game progressed, according to former U.S. ambassador David Lyon, it became clear that the government of Nigeria was a large part of the problem. As he put it, “we have a circle of elites [the government of Nigeria] who have seized resources and are trying to perpetuate themselves. Their interests are not exactly those of the people.” (Brackets in original text)

Furthermore, according to U.S. Army Major Robert Thornton, an officer with the Joint Center for International Security Force Assistance at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, “it became apparent that it was actually green (the host nation government) which had the initiative, and that any blue [the U.S. government and its allies] actions within the frame were contingent upon what green was willing to tolerate and accommodate.”

As he explained in a detailed report that he posted on the web, “as the interactive process continued we realized that the host nation had much more tolerance than the design frame had accounted for: example one of the groups Red represented [the rival factions and the rebels] sponsored an assassination attempt from within the host nation’s V.P.’s [Vice President’s] body guard against the President—Blue thought this would be the event that convinced the President to accept our appraisal and recommendations—Green responded by hiring the best western protection service oil money can buy and by waging a brutal COIN [counterinsurgency] campaign against the primary opposition group of a type that would be politically and culturally unavailable to the U.S. but well within the tolerance of green. At that point we realized that the logic which underpinned the design frame was faulty—and a euphemism emerged “if your partner is lame, you must reframe.” While the logic said a government will not willingly create suicide might be sound, that logic did not extend to a government that did not see suicide as its only option. So while the framework identified the government as loosing control and failing, the host nation government did not believe it was. In other words the understanding of the host government’s tolerance was flawed. However, the process is what allowed that to come out.”

As a result, the Blue team began to discuss the possibility of direct American military intervention involving some 20,000 U.S. troops in order to “secure the Oil.” According to Thornton, “we also discussed the need to continue dialogue with Green as well as begin covert discussions with potential rivals (some of Red)—here you had an interesting emergence as some of Red’s goals are more in line with Blue than Green’s were, and a possibility that Red may become Green. Through interaction we found that Green would be willing to receive greater IO [international organization] and NGO aid to the Humanitarian Crisis in the North, which would allow it some freedom of maneuver (both politically and physically) in the Delta region– as such we explored ways to increase capacity of the IOs and NGOs through logistics, and C2 [command and control] while maintaining the lowest possible U.S. signature inside the host nation – e.g. build capacity in the broader distribution system and build interoperability in the C2 structure as well as thicken their networks and provide ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] support to the HR [humanitarian relief] effort.”

Then, Thornton reported, “the next event was the successful Coup by Red – which in turn meant Red became Green. The new Green now had a sincere interest in gaining legitimacy and credibility, and as such was more open to our increasing HR aid. The remainder of the Red Groups now saw an opportunity that did not exist before of new ways to realize their own political objectives and were willing to meet with the new host nation government, as such there was a window of stability. Our assessments now turned to establishing the tolerances of what form that increased assistance could take under the new government. We learned through the framing process that the system would only tolerate a certain amount of energy (you could also consider it as a question of how much capacity it could/would absorb) before the outcomes changed.”

This said Thornton “created a new opportunity for Blue. Blue offered Green increased aid and assistance, and created the conditions for a broader relationship that could be built upon as Blue built up trust, and a legitimatized Green now had to govern. Not a perfect ending – still some warts, but it did better achieve the political objective of energy security and regional stability by not protracting the conflict further through our own actions, as well as identifying and reinforcing new conditions that were more congruent with U.S., regional and partner political objectives.”

The game thus ended without direct U.S. military intervention on the ground, because one of the rival factions executed a successful coup and formed a new government that sought stability. As a result of the coup, “we no longer had tensions. Now what you had was a government interested in reconciliation between various tribal factions, NGOs, and multinational organizations to build capacity for humanitarian relief,” said Thornton.

The Pentagon is well aware that vital tasks of humanitarian relief, as well as post-conflict reconstruction and development are essential to the successful resolution of such conflicts. In fact, said Lieutenant Colonel John Miller of TRADOC, one of the aims of the exercise was to help agencies like the Departments of State and Justice “go to Congress and get the money so they are fully supported,” and thus ensure that the full burden of these tasks doesn’t fall on the military.

At the end of the war game the participants drew up a set of recommendations for the Army’s Chief of Staff, General George Casey, for him to present to President Bush. These recommendations do not appear to be publicly available, so we don’t know what the participants concluded as a result of the war games beyond the lessons mentioned in Thornton’s report. But we do know that since the war games took place in the midst of the presidential election campaign, General Casey decided to brief both John McCain and Barack Obama on the results of the exercise.

We can only wonder what Barack Obama thought of the wargame and what lessons he learned from General Casey’s briefing. One might hope that he came away with a new appreciation for the danger, if not the outright absurdity, of pursuing the strategy of unilateral American military intervention in Africa pioneered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who was retained as Defense Secretary by President Obama when he took office, and Army Chief of Staff General George Casey, who also kept his job under the Obama administration. But President Obama has decided instead to expand the operations of Africom throughout the continent. He has proposed a budget for FY 2010 that will provide increased security assistance to repressive and undemocratic governments in resource-rich countries like Nigeria, Niger, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and to countries that are key military allies of the United States like Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti, Rwanda, and Uganda. And he has actually chosen to escalate U.S. military intervention in Africa, most conspicuously by providing arms and training to the beleaguered Transitional Federal Government of Somalia as part of his effort to make Africa a central battlefield in the Global War on Terrorism. So it is clearly wishful thinking to believe that his exposure to the real risks of such a strategy revealed by these hypothetical scenarios gave him a better appreciation of the risks that the strategy entails.

There is mounting evidence that the government of Nigerian President Umaru Musa Yar’adua is set to launch a full-scale offensive in the Niger Delta when a ceasefire declared by rebels ends on 15 Sep 2009.

And this time, Nigerian military forces will be using special warships, helicopter gunships and troop transports, and unmanned drone intelligence planes and ships sold to Nigeria by Israeli, Malaysian, Singaporean, Dutch, and Russian companies.

Israeli and Russian instructors have been providing specialized training to Nigerian Navy and Air Forces sailors and pilots in how to operate the ships and helicopters over the past few months, and some of these instructors may help operate them during the offensive.

On 15 July 2009, President Yar’adua declared a 60-day amnesty for members of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), the armed group that has been conducing an insurgency campaign in the Delta for the past five years.  The amnesty offer is set to expire at midnight on 4 Oct 2009.

The insurgents say that they are fighting to protect the rights of the people who live in the Delta and to get them a fair share of Nigeria’s massive revenues from the sale of oil produced in the region.

Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer and currently exports some 1.7 million barrels of oil per day.  The United States imports 44 percent of Nigeria’s oil production, making the country America’s fifth largest foreign source of oil.  But the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that—if the insurgency ended—Nigeria’s effective oil production capacity could quickly be raised to around 2.7 million barrels per day.

When President Yar’adua announced the amnesty, government officials said that they expected between 8,000 and 10,000 insurgents to accept the amnesty.  But only a few hundred of the estimated 12,000-15,000 rebels have handed in their weapons.  Most members of MEND say that the government’s amnesty was not made in good faith and that they have no confidence that that the government will honor its promises to improve the lives of the Delta impoverished residents or to fix the massive environmental damage caused by decades of unregulated oil production.

One reason that MEND does not trust President Yar’adua is that the Nigerian government has recently been buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of sophisticated weaponry and military hardware in preparation for a new offensive in the Niger Delta.

These include deals worth $25 million for two 24.8-meter Shaldag MK-2 patrol boats from the Israeli firm, Israel Shipyards—one has already been delivered and the other is on its way—and another deal involves air and sea drones from Aeronautica Ventures, another Israeli company.  Shaldag MK-20 patrol boats are generally armed with artillery guns and machine guns.  80 Nigerian sailors are presently being trained in counter-insurgency operations at the northern Israeli port of Haifa.

Nigeria recently bought a surveillance system for the Delta that uses Aerostar unmanned drones and Seastar vessels produced by Israel’s Aeronautics Defense Systems/Aeronautics Ventures.  Nigeria acquired 20 troop-carrying catamarans from the Dutch firm, TP Marine, to transport soldiers up the creeks and small rivers of the Delta region.

The Nigerian Navy also recently took delivery of two 38-meter Manta-class patrol boats built by the Nautica Nova Shipbuilding yard in Malaysia.  These ships were officially commissioned on 12 April 2009.  Another four 17-meter Manta-class patrol boats have also been delivered to Nigeria from Singapore Technologies Marine.

The Nigerian Navy also recently procured 35 new machine-gun equipped fast patrol boats in a deal that was paid for by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, reportedly on the instructions of President Yar’adua.

The Nigerian Air Force has also received at least 15 Mi-24, Mi-34, and Mi-35 helicopter gunship and troop transport helicopters from Russia.  Some of these were reportedly delivered just before President Dimitri Medvedev’s visit to the country in June 2009.  These helicopters are armed with Gatling guns, machine guns, bombs, rocket launchers, and rockets, and can also carry up to eight soldiers at the same time.

Russian instructors are currently in Nigeria training Nigerian pilots how to operate these helicopters.  The training is reportedly not going very well, raising speculation that the Nigerian government may ask the Russian instructors to operate the helicopter gunships during the impending military offensive.

These helicopter gunships were used extensively by the Soviet Union during its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and which have been used more recently for counter-insurgency operations by the governments of Sierre Leone, Guinea, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and Chad.

It is clear, that the Nigerian government is getting ready to mount a massive military offensive in the Niger Delta, either when the MEND ceasefire ends on 15 Sep 2009 or when its own amnesty program ends on 4 Oct 2009.  Despite all the firepower and sophisticated weaponry that it has acquired in recent months, there is no reason to believe that this offensive will be any more successful in bringing the insurgency to an end than any of its previous military operations.

Moreover, by demonstrating that the Yar’adua government is committed to a military solution to the political, economic, and environmental crisis in the Niger Delta, the offensive is certain to lead to an explosion of violence not just in the Delta, but also throughout the country.

Tensions in other parts of the country have been mounting in recent months, most notably in the predominantly Muslim states in the north.  The repression of a violence by an Islamic extremist group in the north, which was marked by indiscriminant attacks that killed many innocent people and by the extra-judicial murder of the group’s leader in police custody, alienated many moderate Muslims who previously constituted the government’s base of support.

They are sure to be further alienated by the growing involvement of Israelis in supporting the government’s offensive against the people of the southern part of Nigeria, even if the victims of this offensive are predominantly Christian.

All this serves to confirm the assessment of American military officers, who increasingly have come to believe that the principal obstacle to a resolution of Nigeria’s continuing crisis is the Nigerian government itself and that the Nigerian elite is bent on committing suicide by continuing its futile and self-destructive efforts to hold on to power by military force.

*Daniel Volman is the Director of the African Security Research Project in Washington, DC, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars. He is also a contributing editor of the new website Niger Delta Rising (http://www.nigerdeltarising.org).

In May 2008, the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, hosted “Unified Quest 2008,” the Army’s annual war games to test the American military’s ability to deal with the kind of crises that it might face in the near future. “Unified Quest 2008” was especially noteworthy because it was the first time that the war games included African scenarios as part of the Pentagon’s plan to create a new military command for the continent: the Africa Command or AFRICOM. No representatives of AFRICOM were at the war games, but AFRICOM officers were in close communication throughout the event.

The five-day war games—co-sponsored by the Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), the Special Forces Command, and the Joint Forces Command—were designed to look at what crises might erupt in different parts of the world in five to 25 years and how the United States might handle them. In addition to U.S. military officers and intelligence officers, “Unified Quest 2008” brought together participants from the State Department and other U.S. government agencies, academics, journalists, and foreign military officers (including military representatives from several NATO countries, Australia, and Israel), along with the private military contractors who helped run the war games: the Rand Corporation and Booz-Allen.

One of the four scenarios that were wargamed was a test of how AFRICOM could respond to a crisis in Somalia—set in 2025—caused by escalating insurgency and piracy. Unfortunately, no information on the details of the scenario is available.

Far more information is available on the other scenario—set in 2013—which was a test of how AFRICOM could respond to a crisis in Nigeria in which the Nigerian government is near collapse, and rival factions and rebels are fighting for control of the oil fields of the Niger Delta and vying for power in that oil-rich country, the sixth largest supplier of America’s oil imports.

The list of options for the Nigeria scenario ranged from diplomatic pressure to military action, with or without the aid of European and African nations. One participant, U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Mark Stanovich, drew up a plan that called for the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops within 60 days, which even he thought was undesirable. “American intervention could send the wrong message: that we are backing a government that we don’t intend to,” Stanovich said. Other participants suggested that it would be better if the U.S. government sent a request to South Africa or Ghana to send into Nigeria instead.

As the game progressed, according to former U.S. ambassador David Lyon, it became clear that the government of Nigeria was a large part of the problem. As he put it, “we have a circle of elites [the government of Nigeria] who have seized resources and are trying to perpetuate themselves. Their interests are not exactly those of the people.” (Brackets in original text)

Furthermore, according to U.S. Army Major Robert Thornton, an officer with the Joint Center for International Security Force Assistance at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, “it became apparent that it was actually green (the host nation government) which had the initiative, and that any blue [the U.S. government and its allies] actions within the frame were contingent upon what green was willing to tolerate and accommodate.”

As he explained in a detailed report that he posted on the web, “as the interactive process continued we realized that the host nation had much more tolerance than the design frame had accounted for: example one of the groups Red represented [the rival factions and the rebels] sponsored an assassination attempt from within the host nation’s V.P.’s [Vice President’s] body guard against the President—Blue thought this would be the event that convinced the President to accept our appraisal and recommendations—Green responded by hiring the best western protection service oil money can buy and by waging a brutal COIN [counterinsurgency] campaign against the primary opposition group of a type that would be politically and culturally unavailable to the U.S. but well within the tolerance of green. At that point we realized that the logic which underpinned the design frame was faulty—and a euphemism emerged “if your partner is lame, you must reframe.” While the logic said a government will not willingly create suicide might be sound, that logic did not extend to a government that did not see suicide as its only option. So while the framework identified the government as loosing control and failing, the host nation government did not believe it was. In other words the understanding of the host government’s tolerance was flawed. However, the process is what allowed that to come out.”

As a result, the Blue team began to discuss the possibility of direct American military intervention involving some 20,000 U.S. troops in order to “secure the Oil.” According to Thornton, “we also discussed the need to continue dialogue with Green as well as begin covert discussions with potential rivals (some of Red)—here you had an interesting emergence as some of Red’s goals are more in line with Blue than Green’s were, and a possibility that Red may become Green. Through interaction we found that Green would be willing to receive greater IO [international organization] and NGO aid to the Humanitarian Crisis in the North, which would allow it some freedom of maneuver (both politically and physically) in the Delta region– as such we explored ways to increase capacity of the IOs and NGOs through logistics, and C2 [command and control] while maintaining the lowest possible U.S. signature inside the host nation – e.g. build capacity in the broader distribution system and build interoperability in the C2 structure as well as thicken their networks and provide ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] support to the HR [humanitarian relief] effort.”

Then, Thornton reported, “the next event was the successful Coup by Red – which in turn meant Red became Green. The new Green now had a sincere interest in gaining legitimacy and credibility, and as such was more open to our increasing HR aid. The remainder of the Red Groups now saw an opportunity that did not exist before of new ways to realize their own political objectives and were willing to meet with the new host nation government, as such there was a window of stability. Our assessments now turned to establishing the tolerances of what form that increased assistance could take under the new government. We learned through the framing process that the system would only tolerate a certain amount of energy (you could also consider it as a question of how much capacity it could/would absorb) before the outcomes changed.”

This said Thornton “created a new opportunity for Blue. Blue offered Green increased aid and assistance, and created the conditions for a broader relationship that could be built upon as Blue built up trust, and a legitimatized Green now had to govern. Not a perfect ending – still some warts, but it did better achieve the political objective of energy security and regional stability by not protracting the conflict further through our own actions, as well as identifying and reinforcing new conditions that were more congruent with U.S., regional and partner political objectives.”

The game thus ended without direct U.S. military intervention on the ground, because one of the rival factions executed a successful coup and formed a new government that sought stability. As a result of the coup, “we no longer had tensions. Now what you had was a government interested in reconciliation between various tribal factions, NGOs, and multinational organizations to build capacity for humanitarian relief,” said Thornton.

The Pentagon is well aware that vital tasks of humanitarian relief, as well as post-conflict reconstruction and development are essential to the successful resolution of such conflicts. In fact, said Lieutenant Colonel John Miller of TRADOC, one of the aims of the exercise was to help agencies like the Departments of State and Justice “go to Congress and get the money so they are fully supported,” and thus ensure that the full burden of these tasks doesn’t fall on the military.

At the end of the war game the participants drew up a set of recommendations for the Army’s Chief of Staff, General George Casey, for him to present to President Bush. These recommendations do not appear to be publicly available, so we don’t know what the participants concluded as a result of the war games beyond the lessons mentioned in Thornton’s report. But we do know that since the war games took place in the midst of the presidential election campaign, General Casey decided to brief both John McCain and Barack Obama on the results of the exercise.

We can only wonder what Barack Obama thought of the wargame and what lessons he learned from General Casey’s briefing. One might hope that he came away with a new appreciation for the danger, if not the outright absurdity, of pursuing the strategy of unilateral American military intervention in Africa pioneered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who was retained as Defense Secretary by President Obama when he took office, and Army Chief of Staff General George Casey, who also kept his job under the Obama administration. But President Obama has decided instead to expand the operations of AFRICOM throughout the continent. He has proposed a budget for FY 2010 that will provide increased security assistance to repressive and undemocratic governments in resource-rich countries like Nigeria, Niger, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and to countries that are key military allies of the United States like Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti, Rwanda, and Uganda. And he has actually chosen to escalate U.S. military intervention in Africa, most conspicuously by providing arms and training to the beleaguered Transitional Federal Government of Somalia as part of his effort to make Africa a central battlefield in the Global War on Terrorism. So it is clearly wishful thinking to believe that his exposure to the real risks of such a strategy revealed by these hypothetical scenarios gave him a better appreciation of the risks that the strategy entails.

About the Author
*Daniel Volman (dvolman1@veizon.net) is the Director of the African Security Research Project in Washington, DC, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars. He has been studying U.S. security policy toward Africa and U.S. military activities in Africa for more than thirty years.

In October 2008, Human Rights Watch rated Somalia the most ignored tragedy in the world. Almost 1.5 million Somalis are internally displaced, and an additional half million are refugees. Two decades of instability, including a U.S.-backed intervention by Ethiopian troops in December 2006, have failed to put Somalia on the map.

If the American public has thought about Somalia at all this decade, it was as the setting of the popular 2001 movie Blackhawk Down, based on the October 1993 battle in Mogadishu between U.S. troops and Somali militia, rather than as a real place where Washington’s policies were fueling conflict and prolonging suffering.

It took the drama of high seas piracy to bring Somalia back into the media spotlight. The hijacking of a Saudi supertanker in November was followed by the capture and sensational rescue of U.S. merchant ship Captain Richard Phillips in April.

“Kill the Pirates,” screamed a Washington Post op-ed by Reagan-era hawk Fred C. Iklé. On Fox News, George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, called for attacking the pirates’ bases on land to “really end this problem once and for all.”

After Navy sharpshooters rescued Captain Phillips, killing three pirates in the action, the media clamor abated. Once again, the debate on Somalia retreated to inside-the-beltway obscurity. (You can view the spike in public attention by searching for “Somalia” on Google Trends at www.google.com/trends.)

But for Somalis, the crisis continues. So does the danger that Washington may be tempted into military intervention that would be damaging for Somalis, for U.S. relations with Africa and for U.S. security. That risk exists, despite commendable caution thus far by Obama administration policymakers, who are aware of the potential for military actions to backfire.

The pirate problem

Piracy alone is unlikely to provoke such intervention, even if U.S. citizens are captured again. (Most captives have been from developing countries–especially the Philippines, which supplies about a third of merchant seamen worldwide.) Even after the bloody rescue of Captain Phillips, Somali pirates did not change their policy of holding out for ransom rather than threatening the lives of hostages. For the shipping companies, ransoms are a minor expense compared to the much larger costs associated with worldwide economic downturn.

Top U.S. naval commanders have clearly voiced agreement with the consensus among diplomats that military options are limited. Speaking to a conference in Bahrain on Gulf security in December 2008, Vice Admiral Bill Gortney, commander of the U.S. 5th Fleet, was skeptical about attacking pirate bases on land. “I see people looking for an easy military solution to a problem that demands a non-kinetic [non-combat] solution,” Gortney said. The high risks of collateral damage, he added, “cannot be overestimated.”

In January the Navy set up Combined Task Force 151, a multilateral naval command directed against piracy in the region, headed by the Turkish navy since May. Outlining U.S. counter-piracy policy in April, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stressed multilateral measures, including collaboration with the United Nation’s Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia. And witnesses at congressional hearings on April 30, including Captain Phillips and representatives of the U.S. Department of Defense and Coast Guard, called for incremental measures to improve security.

Some pirates have claimed they act as a de facto coast guard, protecting Somalia from illegal fishing and dumping of toxic wastes. Those problems are real, and some of those initially recruited as pirates were fishermen whose livelihood was damaged. But most pirates declare openly that their primary motives are financial.

What is indisputable is that the lack of a functioning government in Somalia has fostered an environment in which weapons are easily available and piracy is among the few profitable career paths open to youth. On May 5, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Theresa Whelan told Congress, “The root causes of Somali piracy lie in the poverty and instability that continue to plague that troubled country, and addressing these root causes will be a lengthy, complicated and difficult process.”

The military option

Yet, Somalia’s chronic instability could provide an opportunity for hawks to prevail. Obama’s new emphasis on diplomacy coexists uneasily with the revival of enthusiasm for counterinsurgency doctrine in the Pentagon that has resulted from the U.S. military’s challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This situation is uncomfortably reminiscent of the 1960s, when “the best and the brightest” of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier team similarly embraced counterinsurgency as the key to winning Cold War conflicts in developing countries such as Vietnam. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the counterinsurgency mindset holds sway among American military commanders, it is likely that U.S. hopes for military victory will prove just as illusory as in Vietnam in the 1960s.

Compared to Afghanistan, Somalia is a sideshow for U.S. military strategists. But the fact that some anti-government insurgents in Somalia have links with al Qaeda makes it possible to slot the conflict there into the global-war-on-terror framework, even if the Obama administration has renounced that label as misleading.

The new administration, moreover, has inherited a newly formalized military command for Africa, AFRICOM, which has developed its own institutional momentum. Writing in the Boston Globe on April 15, former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania Charles Stith called for the administration to boldly use the new capacity for intervention in Africa. “While AFRICOM has met some resistance,” Stith wrote, “this latest hostage-taking involving an American might be just the opportunity to jump-start conversations about how AFRICOM might be more effectively engaged.”

However, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Johnnie Carson, who took office in May, told the BBC on May 16, “I think there would be no case of the U.S. re-engaging on the ground with troops [in Somalia].” But four days later Carson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the United States was committing $10 million on the ground in Somalia. Earlier, on May 3, AFRICOM’s deputy for military operations, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller, said that AFRICOM would be able to provide U.S. military trainers for Somalia if Washington decided to provide such training.

The current Somali government was established in January, under moderate Islamist Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmad, after the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops and the resignation of unpopular President Abdullahi Yusuf. The government enjoys virtually unanimous support from major international bodies, including the African Union, the Arab League and the United Nations. It has also gained the backing of a wide range of Somalis, who were disillusioned with the hard-line, al-Islamist insurgents who had garnered support by opposing Ethiopia.

But after a new insurgent offensive in May, the Somali government again stood on the brink of military defeat. Foreign fighters with links to al Qaeda had reinforced the insurgent ranks, reportedly receiving supplies from Eritrea. Defeat of government forces, or their continued weakness, could strengthen arguments that U.S. military action is needed to counter terrorism. “There is little the U.S. can do to shape the outcome of the current fighting,” says Ken Menkhaus, a U.S. expert on Somalia. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 20, he warned that U.S. military intervention would likely weaken, rather than strengthen, an inclusive Somali government and would thus play into the hands of insurgents. Many in the U.S. military understand that reality well. “When the United States embraces a government in Somalia, we delegitimize it,” a senior U.S. defense official told Reuters in late April.

History matters

To understand why the United States has so few options in Somalia, one only needs to glance at the historical record. Somalis have good reason to distrust the outcome of U.S. intervention, even if it is bundled with pledges of respect for Somali sovereignty and the authority of a multilateral mandate. For decades, Somalis have experienced the bungled interventions–alternating with neglect–of outside powers.

Somalis are historically united by language, culture and religion. But since independence in 1960, struggle for control of the post-colonial state has torn the country apart. When outsiders tried to promote reconciliation, they often wound up deepening political divisions by favoring power-hungry leaders and failing to involve a cross-section of Somali civil society. Somali-American scholar Abdi Samatar, professor of geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota, notes a parallel between the Cold War and the current “war on terrorism” periods. In both eras, the nationalist thrust for Somali unity has run up against divisions between both Somali elites and outside forces that have backed different internal factions. Outside involvement has thus reinforced divisions and stoked conflict inside the country.

After independence, Somalia was a parliamentary democracy until 1969, when Muhammed Siad Barre seized power in a military coup. Siad Barre initially enjoyed some legitimacy because of widespread disgust with the corruption and factionalism of the parliamentary period. He also won support with popular initiatives, such as the expansion of education in the Somali language. Internationally, Siad Barre aligned himself with the Soviet Union. But after his forces invaded Ethiopia in 1977, in a bid to absorb the Somali-speaking section of that country, he turned to the United States as his new patron. Somalis have not forgotten that Washington gave military support to the dictator as he stepped up repression and violence to stay in power.

Since Siad Barre was ousted in 1991 by clan warlords, Somalis have at times appealed for international help. But they have also suffered greatly from erratic outside involvement. For a short period in 1992, Algerian diplomat Mohamed Sahnoun, leading the first U.N. mission to Somalia, skillfully built momentum for reconciliation among Somalis. But he was forced to resign when he ran afoul of the U.N. bureaucracy.

Between May 1992 and March 1995 there were two rounds of U.N. peacekeeping, overlapping and badly coordinated with two U.S. military missions (the first to secure famine relief deliveries from December 1992 to May 1993, and the second to provide support for the United Nations from May 1993 to March 1994). The U.S. forces and the second U.N. mission, which was commanded by U.S. Adm. Jonathan Howe, paid little attention to diplomacy. Howe chose friends and made enemies among Somali’s warlords, actively targeting General Mohamed Farah Aideed.

The result was the Blackhawk Down debacle in 1993, when 18 U.S. soldiers and more than 1,000 Somalis died in Mogadishu. That was followed by the gradual retreat of both the United States and the United Nations from anything more than marginal humanitarian engagement with Somalia–for a time, at least.

On June 8, 2006, the New York Times reported that the CIA had been funding a coalition of Somali warlords in exchange for the warlords’ promise to hunt down suspected terrorists. The CIA saw the emerging Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which aimed to build Somali unity based on Islam, as a dangerous alternative even though it was a broad coalition involving moderate as well as hard-line factions. Then led by current president Sheikh Sharif and by Sheikh Hassan Aweys (now one of the leaders of the anti-government insurgents), the ICU quickly won popular support and defeated the CIA-backed warlord alliance. For the rest of 2006, the Somali capital saw its most prolonged period of relative peace in more than 15 years.

The interlude came to an end when Ethiopian troops, backed by the United States, invaded in December 2006. Hundreds of civilians were killed in the fighting, and more than 300,000 were displaced. The U.S. military provided intelligence to Ethiopia in support of the invasion. It also used military facilities in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya to launch air raids and missile strikes against al Qaeda suspects at several sites in Somalia in 2007 and 2008. The air attacks killed several dozen Somali civilians and injured hundreds more, and they made U.S. backing for the invasion highly visible.

Ethiopia withdrew its troops in December 2008. A small African Union military mission currently protects Somalia’s besieged government.

Kenyan journalist and former U.N. official Salim Lone summed up the consensus view among African and international analysts: “Instead of engaging with the Islamists to secure peace, the United States has plunged a poor country into greater misery.”

The current crisis

At this writing in early June 2009, the situation in Somalia remains volatile. On May 26, the U.N. Security Council unanimously reconfirmed the mandate of the African Union peacekeepers. The African Union, for its part, called on the Security Council to go even further and impose sanctions against Eritrea.

But insurgents denounce both Sheikh Sharif’s coalition government and the African Union as tools of anti-Islamic Western powers. The military situation on the ground remains highly uncertain. The United Nations reported that more than 67,000 people had been newly displaced by the fighting in Mogadishu in May.

Scenarios projected for the next few months range from complete collapse of the internationally backed government, on the one extreme, to significant weakening of the insurgent forces through defections, on the other. What is certain is that outside forces, including the United States, will need flexibility and patience as well as good intentions to avoid mistakes that could make the situation much worse. Unfortunately, there is no sure formula for getting it right.

The Obama administration currently tilts toward diplomacy and pragmatism. On April 11, the Washington Post reported that some in the U.S. military are “frustrated by what they see as a failure to act” and are advocating air strikes against insurgent training camps.

But on April 13, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking at the Marine Corps War College in the midst of the pirate hostage crisis, stressed that “there is no purely military solution” to Somali piracy.

The appointment of Johnnie Carson as assistant secretary of state for African affairs significantly increases the chances that cooler heads will prevail. A career foreign service officer who served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania in the 1960s, Carson is undoubtedly the person with the widest range of Africa experience ever to hold the assistant secretary post. He is respected in Washington and Africa’s diplomatic community. And he has good contacts with activists as well, dating back to his work as a staff member of the House Africa Subcommittee in 1979-1982, when it was a leading player in the anti-apartheid movement. Under his leadership, the State Department’s Africa Bureau will undoubtedly have a stronger voice in policy.

Yet one cannot rule out the possibility that events could precipitate U.S. military actions that heighten, rather than dampen, conflict in Somalia. The capacity is there. Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), which oversees as many as 2,000 American service members, has operated out of Djibouti since 2002, becoming part of AFRICOM in October 2008. The CJTF-HOA has coordinated U.S. military actions in Somalia and the region, such as the air attacks in 2007 and 2008, and includes special forces with the capacity for commando raids.

The United States has close military ties with Ethiopia and Kenya, both traditional enemies of Somalia. If Somali insurgents were implicated in future terrorist-style attacks on neighboring countries, the pressure for a U.S. military response would grow.

Even if U.S. forces are not involved in combat, multilateral security efforts could go wrong, indirectly implicating the United States. For example, Human Rights Watch has documented abuses by Somali police trained under a U.N.-sponsored program that started in 2007.

Reinforcing government security forces without mechanisms to ensure accountability can easily fuel justified Somali resentment of outsiders. Even if more U.S. engagement were seen as a way to fix such problems, it would be a mistake for U.S. “support” to edge into training or advising either government or multilateral forces on the ground in Somalia.

The crisis in Somalia well illustrates the fundamental alternatives for U.S. security policy toward the continent. Will a focus on anti-terrorism and counter-insurgency fuel conflict or reinforce oppressive regimes? Or will Washington give priority to building multilateral capacity to respond to Africa’s urgent security needs?

Counter-insurgency thinking has little relevance in solving the diverse conflicts that Africa faces in Darfur and Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or the Niger Delta. It is even more irrelevant to the structural problems Africa shares with the rest of the world, such as poverty, global warming, pandemic disease and violence against women.

The election of a son of Africa to the U.S. presidency has raised African hopes for a new era in U.S. engagement with Africa. When Barack Obama makes his first visit as president to sub-Saharan Africa in July, he will be greeted with excitement and high expectations.

If his administration is to meet those expectations, both Washington and African states must reject counterproductive military options. Instead, they must take on the far broader goal of ensuring inclusive human security. That requires decisive steps to end openly violent conflicts. But it also demands the will and resources to meet needs in health and education, create jobs and foster accountable governments.

These are formidable challenges, but Africans are eager for change. Americans should insist that our government first do no harm.

MEMO TO OBAMA RE: SOMALIA

DO:

√ Take a long-term perspective, stressing that stability and prosperity in Somalia are in the interest of both Somalis and Americans.

√ Solicit a wide range of opinions from Somalis in Somalia and in the diaspora, particularly Somali-Americans.

√ Continue to engage with the African Union, the United Nations and other relevant actors to maximize diplomatic options for reducing conflict in Somalia and the Horn of Africa region.

√ Provide adequate funding for humanitarian relief in Somalia and among Somali refugees.

√ Provide adequate funding and logistical support for the African Union peacekeeping force, and for a United Nations peacekeeping force, should they be approved.

DON’T:

X Be panicked into a military response, even if pirate attacks escalate or groups linked to al Qaeda gain ground in Somalia.

X Attack Somali pirate bases or suspected terrorists in Somalia with U.S. military forces, either with commandos or with air attacks.

X Send U.S. troops, advisers or military trainers into Somalia.
parties.

X Demonize opponents and rule out diplomatic options, even for insurgents formally labeled as terrorists or countries supporting them.

X Endorse favorites among Somali politicians or neighboring states.

About the authors

William Minter is the editor of AfricaFocus Bulletin, an independent electronic publication on African issues. His most recent book, co-edited with Gail Hovey and Charles Cobb, Jr., is No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950-2000 (Africa World Press, 2007).

Daniel Volman is the director of the African Security Research Project in Washington, D.C., and a member of the board of directors of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars.

At the beginning of May 2009, President Obama submitted his first budget request to Congress. The Obama administration’s budget for FY 2010 proposes significant increases in U.S. security assistance programs for African countries and for the operations of the new U.S. Africa Command or AFRICOM. This shows that—at least initially—the administration is following the course laid down for AFRICOM by the Bush administration, rather than putting these programs on hold until it can conduct a serious review of U.S. security policy towards Africa. This article outlines the administration’s plans for Africa in the coming year and the money it intends to spend on military operations on the continent. For more information, see the Department of State, Summary and Highlights for International Affairs Function 150: Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Request (http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/122513.pdf) and the Department of Defense, Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Request: Summary Justification (http://www.defenselink.mil/comptroller/defbudget/fy2010/fy2010_SSJ.pdf).

Foreign Military Financing

The Obama administration proposes maintaining or significantly increasing funding for the Foreign Military Financing program, which provides loans for the sale of weaponry and other military equipment to a number of African countries. The administration’s request raises the total funding for arms sales to Africa from $8.3 million in FY 2009 to $25.6 million in FY 2010. The new funding includes funding for arms sales to Chad ($500,000), the Democratic Republic of Congo ($2.5 million), Djibouti ($2.5 million), Ethiopia ($3 million), Kenya ($1 million), Liberia ($9 million), Nigeria ($1.4 million), South Africa ($800,000), and African regional programs ($2.8 million).

International Military Education and Training

The Obama administration proposes small increases in the International Military Education and Training (IMET) programs for African counties, raising the total funding for this program from $13.8 million in FY 2009 to $16 million in FY 2010. Significant increases in funding are requested for Chad ($400,000), Djibouti ($350,000), Ethiopia ($775,000), Ghana ($850,000), Kenya ($1,050,000), Liberia ($525,000), Mali ($350,000), Niger ($250,000), Nigeria ($1,100,000), Rwanda ($500,000), Senegal ($1,100,000), South Africa ($900,000), and Uganda ($550,000). The United States will continue its major IMET program in the Democratic Republic of Congo ($500,000). And the Obama administration is proposing to start new IMET programs in Equatorial Guinea ($40,000), Somalia ($40,000), and Zimbabwe ($40,000).

Peacekeeping Operations

The Obama administration proposes major new funding for security assistance provided through the Peacekeeping Operations program. The FY 2010 budget proposal includes increasing funding for the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership—from $15 million in FY 2009 to $20 million in FY 2010—and for the East Africa Regional Strategic Initiative—from $5 million in FY 2009 to $10 million in FY 2010. It also includes $42 million to continue operations in support of the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Accords in southern Sudan, $10 million to continue operations to create a professional 2,000 member armed force in Liberia, $21 million to continue operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo to reform the military (including the creation of rapid reaction force for the eastern Congo), and $3.6 million for the Africa Conflict Stabilization and Border Security Program, which will be used to support monitoring teams, advisory assistance, training, infrastructure enhancements, and equipment in the Great Lakes region, the Mano River region, the Horn of Africa, Chad, and the Central African Republic. The budget request also includes $67 million to support the African Union Mission in Somalia. And it contains a request for $96.8 million for the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI). The request for GPOI includes funding for the African Contingency Operations and Training Assistance Program (ACOTA)—which provides training and equipment to African military forces to enhance their peacekeeping capabilities—although the specific amount requested for ACOTA is not provided in the budget summary.

International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement

The budget request for International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) programs contains $24 million for Sudan to support implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Accords (CPA) in southern Sudan and to assist programs to stabilize Darfur by providing technical assistance and training for southern Sudan’s criminal justice sector and law enforcement institutions as well as contribute to UN civilian police and formed police units in southern Sudan and Darfur. It also includes funds for police reforms in the DR Congo; for training, infrastructure, and equipment for police units in Liberia; to operate the American-run International Law Academy in Gaborone, Botswana; and to create a Regional Security Training Center for West, Central, and North Africa. The Obama administration is also asking for funding to be provided through the INCLE programs for the first time to provide security assistance to countries participating in the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Niger, Chad, and Nigeria.

Nonproliferation, Anti-Terrorism, Demining, and Related Programs

The Obama administration proposes to almost double funding for counter-terrorism programs. These include the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program, which provides training to countries throughout the world; the Terrorist Interdiction Program/Personal Identification, Secure Comparison, and Evaluation System Program, which supports identification and watch listing systems to eighteen countries (including Kenya); the Counterterrorism Financing Program, which helps partner countries throughout the world stop the flow of money to terrorists; and the Counterterrorism Engagement Program, which is intended to strengthen ties with key political leaders throughout the world and “build political will at senior levels in partner nations for shared counterterrorism challenges.”

AFRICOM

The Obama administration proposed FY 2010 budget for the Department of Defense requests some $300 million in Operation and Maintenance funds to cover the cost of AFRICOM operations and Operation Enduring Freedom-Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership operations at the AFRICOM headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. The administration is also requesting $263 million to provide additional manpower, airlift, and communications support to AFRICOM. And the budget includes a request for a total of $451 million to replace or upgrade facilities at enduring CENTCOM and AFRICOM locations, but does not provide separate figure for AFRICOM. According to the budget, the administration intends to carry out significant investment at Camp Lemonier in FY 2010. In addition, the administration is requesting $30 million to pay the annual lease for the 500-acre base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti and $170 million to cover the annual operational budget of the base.

The administration is requesting some $400 million for Global Train and Equip (Section 1206) programs, some $200 million for Security and Stabilization Assistance (Section 1207) programs, and some $1 million for the Combatant Commander’s Initiative Fund. This money will be used primarily to pay for emergency training and equipment, the services of personnel from the State Department, and humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi and Afghani armed forces, but it will be available for the use of AFRICOM as well. The administration’s budget request also contains $1.9 billion to buy three Littoral Combat Ships and another $373 million to buy two Joint High Speed Vessels, ships that will play a crucial role in U.S. Navy operations off the coast of Africa. It also includes $44 billion to fund U.S. Navy operations throughout the world—of which a significant proportion will be needed to cover the costs of U.S. Navy operations in African waters—but the budget does not provide enough information to estimate these costs.

Obama Administration Security Policy Toward the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia

Obama administration officials have not said anything in public to explain why they are proceeding with the Bush administration’s plan to increase U.S. security assistance to African countries and expand U.S. military activities on the continent. General William Ward, commander of AFRICOM, at a news conference that he held during his visit to Kinshasa in April 2009, provided one of the few pieces of evidence we have about administration’s thinking. The United States will continue working in training and advising the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo “to help the host nation build capacity to more effectively conduct its military operations and provide for its own security.” The United States currently has a seven-member mobile training team training Congolese military officers. This training, Ward said at the news conference, is intended “to support the increased professionalization of the Congolese armed forces as best we can as they work to bring security and stability here in Congo.” This suggests that President Obama—despite his rhetorical commitment to multilateralism and “soft power” and the abysmal record of military incompetence and human rights violations by the Congolese armed forces—is convinced that unilateral U.S. military involvement can still work and that he can succeed where his predecessor failed.

The only other indication we have about the president’s true intentions is provided by his decision to authorize the use of force to rescue the kidnapped captain of the Maersk Alabama in May 2009. When he was a candidate, President Obama declared that he believed that “there will be situations that require the United States to work with its partners in Africa to fight terrorism with lethal force.” But his action during the kidnapping episode show that he is also willing to use military force in situations that have nothing to do with terrorism. According to recent news articles, a debate is currently underway within the administration about the wisdom of direct U.S. military intervention against Somali pirates or against the al-Shabaab insurgents. Top administration officials and military officers are convinced that, in the words of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “there is no purely military solution” to piracy and political conflict in Somalia. And Johnnie Carson, the president’s new Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, told the BBC that “there would be no case of the U.S. re-engaging on the ground with troops” in Somalia. But some in the military and a number of prominent neo-conservative leaders contend that the United States must strike back at the pirates and the insurgents to prevent future acts of piracy and terrorism against Americans. It would be a mistake to assume that Obama will not take further military action if the situation in Somalia escalates.

* Daniel Volman (dvolman@igc.org) is the Director of the African Security Research Project in Washington, DC, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (concernedafricascholars.org). He is a specialist on U.S. security policy toward Africa and African security issues.

On 6 February 2007, President Bush announced that the United States would create a new military command for Africa, to be known as Africa Command or Africom. Throughout the Cold War and for more than a decade afterwards, the U.S. did not have a military command for Africa; instead, U.S. military activities on the African continent were conducted by three separate military commands: the European Command, which had responsibility for most of the continent; the Central Command, which oversaw Egypt and the Horn of Africa region along with the Middle East and Central Asia; and the Pacific Command, which administered military ties with Madagascar and other islands in the Indian Ocean.

Until the creation of Africom, the administration of U.S.-African military relations was conducted through three different commands. All three were primarily concerned with other regions of the world that were of great importance to the United States on their own and had only a few middle-rank staff members dedicated to Africa. This reflected the fact that Africa was chiefly viewed as a regional theater in the global Cold War, or as an adjunct to U.S.-European relations, or—as in the immediate post-Cold War period—as a region of little concern to the United States. But when the Bush administration declared that access to Africa’s oil supplies would henceforth be defined as a “strategic national interest” of the United States and proclaimed that America was engaged in a Global War on Terrorism following the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, Africa’s status in U.S. national security policy and military affairs rose dramatically.[1]

According to Theresa Whelan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs—the highest ranking Defense Department official with principal responsibility for Africa at the Pentagon, who has supervised U.S. military policy toward Africa for the Bush administration—Africom attained the status of a sub-unified command under the European Command on 1 October 2007, and is scheduled to be fully operational as a separate unified command no later than 1 October 2008. The process of creating the new command will be conducted by a special transition team—which will include officers from both the State Department and the Defense Department—that will carry out its work in Stuttgart, Germany, in coordination with the European Command.

What is Africom?

Africom will not look like traditional unified commands. In particular, there is no intention, at least at present, to assign the new command control over large military units. This is in line with ongoing efforts to reduce the presence of large numbers of American troops overseas in order to consolidate or eliminate expensive bases and bring as many troops as possible back to the United States where they will be available for deployment anywhere in the world that Washington wants to send them. Since there is no way to anticipate where troops will be sent and the Pentagon has the ability to deploy sizable forces over long distances in a very short time, Washington plans to keep as many troops as possible in the United States and send them abroad only when it judges it necessary. This, however, was exactly the intention when the Clinton and Reagan administrations created the Central Command and based it in Tampa, Florida; and now the Central Command is running two major wars in southwest Asia from its headquarters in Qatar.

Africom will also be composed of both military and civilian personnel, including officers from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the commander of the new command will have both a military and a civilian deputy. On 10 July 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that the President had nominated four-star General William E. “Kip” Ward to be the commander of Africom. General Ward, an African-American who was commissioned into the infantry in 1971, is currently serving as the deputy commander of the European Command. Previously he served as the commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry) in Mogadishu, Somalia during “Operation Restore Hope” in 1992-1994, commander of the NATO-led Stabilization Force in Bosnia during “Operation Joint Forge” in 2002-2003, and chief of the U.S. Office of Military Cooperation at the American Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. The novel structure of the new command reflects the fact that Africom will be charged with overseeing both traditional military activities and programs that are funded through the State Department budget.

What Is Africom’s Mission?

The Bush administration has emphasized the uniqueness of this hybrid structure as evidence that the new command has only benign purposes. In the words of Theresa Whelan, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in August 2007, while “there are fears that Africom represents a militarization of U.S. foreign policy in Africa and that Africom will somehow become the lead U.S. Government interlocutor with Africa. This fear is unfounded.”[2] Therefore, Bush administration officials insist that the purpose of Africom is misunderstood.

As Theresa Whelan put it in her congressional testimony,

Some people believe that we are establishing Africom solely to fight terrorism, or to secure oil resources, or to discourage China. This is not true. Violent extremism is cause for concern, and needs to be addressed, but this is not Africom’s singular mission. Natural resources represent Africa’s current and future wealth, but in a fair market environment, many benefit. Ironically, the U.S., China and other countries share a common interest—that of a secure environment. Africom is about helping Africans build greater capacity to assure their own security.

DoD recognizes and applauds the leadership role that individual African countries and multi-lateral African organizations are taking in the promotion of peace, security and stability on the continent. For example, Africom can provide effective training, advisory and technical support to the development of the African Standby Force. This is exactly the type of initiative and leadership needed to address the diverse and unpredictable global security challenges the world currently faces. The purpose of Africom is to encourage and support such African leadership and initiative, not to compete with it or discourage it. U.S. security is enhanced when African nations themselves endeavor to successfully address and resolve emergent security issues before they become so serious that they require considerable international resources and intervention to resolve. [3]

On closer examination, however, the difference between Africom and other commands—and the allegedly “unfounded” nature of its implications for the militarization of the continent—are not as real or genuine as the Bush administration officials would have us believe. Of course Washington has other interests in Africa besides making it into another front in its Global War on Terrorism, maintaining and extending access to energy supplies and other strategic raw materials, and competing with China and other rising economic powers for control over the continent’s resources. These include helping Africans deal with the HIV/AIDS epidemic and other emerging diseases, strengthening and assisting peacekeeping and conflict resolution efforts, and responding to humanitarian disasters. But it is simply disingenuous to suggest that accomplishing these three objectives is not the main reason that Washington is now devoting so much effort and attention to the continent.

Indeed, General Ward, his military deputy Vice Admiral Robert Moeller, and the other professional military offices who will actually run Africom have made it clear in their public statements that they are under no illusion about the purpose of Africom or about its primary missions. Thus, General Ward cited America’s growing dependence on African oil as a priority issue for Africom when he appeared before the House Armed Services Committee on 13 March 2008 and went on to proclaim that combating terrorism would be “Africom’s number one theater-wide goal.”[4] He barely mentioned development, humanitarian aid, peacekeeping, or conflict resolution. And in a presentation by Vice Admiral Moeller at an Africom conference held at Fort McNair on 18 February 2008, he declared that protecting “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market” was one of Africom’s “guiding principles” and specifically cited “oil disruption,” “terrorism,” and the “growing influence” of China as major “challenges” to U.S. interests in Africa.[5]

And of course Washington would prefer that selected friendly regimes take the lead in meeting these objects, so that the United States can avoid direct military involvement in Africa, particularly at a time when the U.S. military is so deeply committed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and preparing for possible attacks on Iran. The hope that the Pentagon can build up African surrogates who can act on behalf of the United States is precisely why Washington is providing so much security assistance to these regimes and why it would like to provide even more in the future. Indeed, this is actually one of the main reasons that Africom is being created at this time.

Why is Africom Being Created Now?

So why is Africom being created and why now? First, the Bush administration would like to significantly expand its security assistance programs for regimes that are willing to act as surrogates, for friendly regimes—particularly in countries with abundant oil and natural gas supplies—and for efforts to increase its options for more direct military involvement in the future; but it has had some difficulty getting the U.S. Congress and the Pentagon to provide the required funding or to devoting the necessary attention and energy to accomplish these tasks. Using a number of new security assistance channels—which are described in detail below—the Bush administration has increased the value of U.S. arms deliveries and military training programs for Africa from about $100 million in 2001 to approximately $600-800 million in 2008. But the administration wants Africom to spend far more money on security assistance in the coming years—as well as on U.S. military exercises in Africa; the operations of the Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa—including continuing attacks on Somalia—conducted from the U.S. base in Djibouti and base improvements at the U.S. base in Djibouti and at local military facilities elsewhere on the continent; expanded naval operations, particularly off the Gulf of Guinea; and setting up the new Africom headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany (including the creation of a Joint Intelligence Operations Center, a Theater Special Operations Command for Africa, and regional Africom offices in five African countries).

The creation of Africom will allow the White House to go to the U.S. Congress and argue that the establishment of Africom demonstrates the importance of Africa for U.S. national security and the administration’s commitment to give the continent the attention that it deserves. If Africa is so important and if the administration’s actions show that it really wants to do all sorts of good things for Africa, it hopes that the next president will be in a much stronger position to make a convincing case that the legislature must appropriate substantially greater amounts of money to fund the new command’s operations. And within the Pentagon, the establishment of Africom as a unified command under the authority of a high-ranking officer with direct access to the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff will put the new command in a much stronger position to compete with other command for resources, manpower, and influence over policymaking.

Secondly, key members of the Bush administration, a small, but growing and increasingly vocal group of legislators, and influential think tanks have become more and more alarmed by the growing efforts of China to expand its access to energy supplies and other resources from Africa and to enhance its political and economic influence throughout the continent. These “alarmists” point to the considerable resources that China is devoting to the achievement of these goals and to the engagement of Chinese officials at the highest level—including President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, both of who have made tours of the continent and have hosted high-level meetings in Beijing with African heads of state—as evidence of a “grand strategy” on the part of China that jeopardizes U.S. national security interests and that is aimed, ultimately, at usurping the West’s position on the continent. The creation of Africom, therefore, should be seen as one element of a broad effort to develop a “grand strategy” on the part of the United States that will counter, and eventually defeat, China’s efforts. It should also be understood as a measure that is intended to demonstrate to Beijing that Washington will match China’s actions, thus serving as a warning to the Chinese leadership that they should restrain themselves or face possible consequences to their relationship with America as well as to their interests in Africa.

What Will Africom Do?

So, what will Africom actually do when it becomes fully operational? Basically, it will take over the implementation of a host of military, security cooperation, and security assistance programs, which are funded through either the State Department or the Defense Department.

Bilateral and Multilateral Joint Training Programs and Military Exercises

The United States provides military training to African military personnel through a wide variety of training and education programs. In addition, it conducts military exercises in Africa jointly with African troops and also with the troops of its European allies to provide training to others and also to train its own forces for possible deployment to Africa in the future. These include the following:

Flintlock 2005 and 2007

These are Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) exercises conducted by units of the U.S. Army Special Forces and the U.S. Army Rangers, along with contingents from other units, to provide training experience both for American troops and for the troops of African countries (small numbers of European troops are also involved in these exercises). Flintlock 2005 was held in June 2005, when more than one thousand U.S. personnel were sent to North and West Africa for counter-terrorism exercises in Algeria, Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Chad that involved more than three thousand local service members. In April 2007, U.S. Army Special Forces went to Niger for the first part of Flintlock 2007 and in late August 2007, some 350 American troops arrived in Mali for three weeks of Flintlock 2007 exercises with forces from Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Tunisia, Burkina Faso, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP)

Both Flintlock exercises were conducted as part of Operation Enduring Freedom—Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP) which now links the United States with eight African countries: Mali, Chad, Niger, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. In 2004, the TSCTP was created to replace the Pan-Sahel Counter-Terrorism Initiative, which was initiated in 2002. The TSCTP also involves smaller, regular training exercises conducted by U.S. Army Special Forces throughout the region. Although changing budgetary methodology makes it difficult to be certain, it appears that the TSCTP received some $31 million in FY 2006, nearly $82 million in FY 2007, and $10 million in FY 2008.

East Africa Counter-Terrorism Initiative (EACTI)

The East Africa Counter-Terrorism Initiative is a training program similar to the TSCTP. Established in 2003 as a multi-year program with $100 million in funding, the EACTI has provided training to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Djibouti, Eritrea, and Ethiopia.

Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance Program (ACOTA)

This program, which began operating in 2002, replaces the African Crisis Response Initiative launched in 1997 by the Clinton administration. In 2004, it became part of the Global Peace Operations Initiative. ACOTA is officially designed to provide training to African military forces to improve their ability to conduct peacekeeping operations, even if they take place in hostile environments. But since the training includes both defensive and offensive military operations, it also enhances the ability of participating forces to engage in police operations against unarmed civilians, counter-insurgency operations, and even conventional military operations against the military forces of other countries.

By FY 2007, nineteen African countries were participating in the ACOTA program (Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia). In 2004, ACOTA became a part of the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI) and the Bush Administration’s FY 2008 budget includes a request for a little more than $40 million for ACOTA activities. The GPOI itself, a multilateral, five-year program that aims to train 75,000 troops—mostly from African countries—by 2010, will receive more than $92 million under the president’s FY 2008 budget, which also provides $5 million to reorganize the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, $16 million to reorganize the Liberian military, and $41 million to help integrate the Sudan People’s Liberation Army into the national army as part of the peace process for southern Sudan.

International Military Education and Training Program (IMET)

The IMET program brings African military officers to military academies and other military educational institutions in the United States for professional training. Nearly all African countries participate in the program—including Libya for the first time in FY 2008—and in FY 2006 (the last year for which country figures are available—it trained 14,731 students from the African continent (excluding Egypt) at a cost of $14.7 million.

U.S. Private Military Contractors in Africa

In FY 2003, the State Department awarded five-year contracts worth $500,000 each to DynCorp and to Pacific Architects and Engineers to train and equip the new Liberian armed forces, to train and equip the Southern Sudanese military as part of the implementation of the peace agreement for Southern Sudan, and to train and equip African troops from all over the continent as part of the GPOI and ACOTA programs. In February 2008, the State Department announced that it would be awarding more than $1 billion worth of contracts in Africa for the next five-year period (2009-2013) to as many as four private military contractors.[6]

Foreign Military Sales Program (FMS)

This program sells U.S. military equipment to African countries; such sales are conducted by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency of the Defense Department. The U.S. government provides loans to finance the purchase of virtually all of this equipment through the Foreign Military Financing Program (FMF), but repayment of these loans by African governments is almost always waived, so that they amount to free grants. In FY 2006, sub-Saharan African countries received a total of nearly $14 million in FMF funding, and the Maghrebi countries of Morocco and Tunisia received almost another $21 million; for FY 2007, the Bush administration requested nearly $15 million for sub-Saharan Africa and $21 million for the Morocco and Tunisia; and for FY 2008, the administration requested nearly $8 million for sub-Saharan Africa and nearly $6 million for the Maghreb.

Direct Commercial Sales Program (DCS)

Under this program, the Office of Defense Trade Controls of the Department of State licenses the sale of police equipment (including pistols, revolvers, shotguns, rifles, and crowd control chemicals) by private U.S. companies to foreign military forces, paramilitary units, police, and other government agencies. In FY 2008, American firms are expected to deliver more than $175 million worth of this kind of hardware to Algeria through the DCS program, along with $2 million worth for Botswana, $3 million worth for Kenya, $19 million worth for Morocco, $17 million worth for Nigeria, and $61 million worth for South Africa. Citing the commercial nature of these sales, the State Department refuses to release any further information on these transactions to the public on the grounds that this is “proprietary information,” i.e. this information is the private property of the companies involved.

African Coastal and Border Security Program (ACBS)

This program provides specialized equipment (such as patrol vessels and vehicles, communications equipment, night vision devices, and electronic monitors and sensors) to African countries to improve their ability to patrol and defend their own coastal waters and borders from terrorist operations, smuggling, and other illicit activities. In some cases, airborne surveillance and intelligence training also may be provided. In FY 2006, the ACBS Program received nearly $4 million in FMF funding, and Bush administration requested $4 million in FMF funding for the program in FY 2007. No dedicated funding was requested for FY 2008, but the program may be revived in the future.

Excess Defense Articles Program (EDA)

This program is designed to conduct ad hoc transfers of surplus U.S. military equipment to foreign governments. Transfers to African recipients have included the transfer of C-130 transport planes to South Africa and Botswana, trucks to Uganda, M-16 rifles to Senegal, and coastal patrol vessels to Nigeria.

Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program (ATA)

The ATA program was created in 1983—under the administration of the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security—to provide training, equipment, and technology to countries all around the world to support their participation in America’s Global War on Terrorism. In FY 2006, Sub-Saharan Africa received $9.6 million in ATA funding; for FY 2007, the administration requested $11.8 million and for FY 2008, the request was $11.5.

The largest ATA program in Africa is targeted at Kenya, where it helped created the Kenyan Antiterrorism Police Unit (KAPU) in 2004 to conduct anti-terrorism operations, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in 2004 to coordinate anti-terrorism activities (although the unit was disbanded by the Kenyan government in 2005, and is now training and equipping members of a multi-agency, coast guard-type unit to patrol Kenya’s coastal waters. Between 2003 and 2005 (the most recent years for which this information is available), ATA provided training both in Kenya and in the United States to 454 Kenyan police, internal security, and military officers in courses on “Preventing, Interdicting, and Investigating Acts of Terrorism,” “Crisis Response,” “Post-Blast Investigation,” “Rural Border Operation,” and “Terrorist Crime Scene Investigation.” The creation of the KAPU was financed with $10 million in from the FY 2003 Peacekeeping Operations Appropriation for Kenya, along with $622,000 from ATA; the ATA spent $21 million on training for Kenya in FY 2004 $3.5 in FY 2005, and another $3.2 in FY 2006. The administration requested $2.9 for FY 2007 and an additional $5.5 in FY 2008.

The second largest ATA program in Africa at present is one used to help fund the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP). For FY 2007, the administration requested $7.2 million in ATA funding for the TSCTP and for FY 2008 requested another $6 million in ATA funding for FY 2008 for Africa Regional activities, most of which may be used to fund the TSCTP.

ATA programs are also being used to train and equip police, internal security, and military forces in a number of other African countries, including Tanzania ($2.1 million in FY 2006), Mauritius ($903,000 in FY 2006), Niger ($905,000 in FY 2006), Chad ($625,000 in FY 2006), Senegal ($800,000 in FY 2006), Mali ($564,000 in FY 2006), Liberia ($220,000 in FY 2006), Ethiopia ($170,000 in FY 2006). Training courses provided to these countries includes topics like “Investigation of Terrorist Organizations,” “Rural Border Operations,” “Antiterrorism Instructor Training,” Terrorist Crime Scene Investigation,” and “Explosive Incident Countermeasures.” In Djibouti, this training helped to create the country’s National Crisis Management Unit, within the Ministry of the Interior, to respond to major national emergencies.

ATA utilizes training facilities at three International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) centers, one located in Botswana. In 2003, students from Botswana, Ethiopia, and Tanzania attended a course on “Terrorist Investigations” at the Botswana ILEA center. In 2004, students from Djibouti, Malawi, Uganda, and Zambia took the same course there. In 2005, students from Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania attended a course on “Combating Domestic and Transnational Terrorism at the Botswana ILEA center and students from Angola, Mozambique, Uganda, and Zambia took a course on the “Police Executive Role in Combating Terrorism.”

Section 1206, 1207, and 902 Programs

These programs are funded through the Defense Department budget and are named for provisions approved by Congress in the FY 2006 and FY 2007 National Defense Authorization Acts. The Section 1206 program—known as the Global Equip and Train program—was initiated in FY 2007 and permits the Pentagon—on its own initiative and with little congressional oversight—to provide training and equipment to foreign military, police, and other security forces to “combat terrorism and enhance stability.” The program received $200 million in FY 2007 and has been authorized to spend $300 million in FY 2008 for programs in fourteen countries, including Algeria, Chad, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sao Tome and Principe. In addition to paying for the cost of sending private military contractors to recipient countries to provide training, the fund is also being used to supply radar systems, surveillance equipment and sensors, GPS navigation devices, radios and other communications systems, computers, small boats, trucks, and trailers.

The Section 1207 program—known as the Security and Stabilization Assistance program—was also started in FY 2007. It allows the Defense Department to transfer equipment, training, and other assistance to the State Department to enhance its operations. The program received $100 million in FY 2007 and has been authorized to spend another $100 million in FY 2008. It has been used in Somalia and in Trans-Saharan Africa. The Section 902 program—known as the Combatant Commanders’ Initiative Fund—was created by Congress in FY 2008. It can be used by the commanders of Africom and other combatant commands to fund their own relief and reconstruction projects, rather than relying on the State Department or the Agency for International Development to undertake these efforts. The program received $25 million in FY 2008.

The Bush administration’s FY 2009 budget request calls for total funding for these programs to be increased to $800 million: $500 for the Equip and Train program, $200 million for the Security and Stabilization Assistance program, and $100 million for the Combatant Commanders’ Initiative Fund. Of this, an estimated $300-$400 million will go to provide training and equipment to military, paramilitary, and police forces in Africa.

Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA)

In October 2002, the U.S. Central Command played the leading role in the creation of this joint task force that was designed to conduct naval and aerial patrols in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the eastern Indian Ocean as part of the effort to detect and counter the activities of terrorist groups in the region. Based at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, long the site of a major French military base, the CJTF-HOA is made up of approximate 1,400 U.S. military personnel—primarily sailors, Marines, and Special Forces troops—that works with a multi-national naval force composed of American naval vessels along with ships from the navies of France, Italy, and Germany, and other NATO allies.

The CJTF-FOA provided intelligence to Ethiopia in support of its invasion of Somalia in January 2007 and used military facilities in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya to launch air raids and missile strikes in January and June of 2007 and May of 2008 against alleged al-Qaeda members involved in the Council of Islamic Courts in Somalia. The command authority for CJTF-HOA, currently under the U.S. Central Command, will be transferred to Africom by 2008. Under the initial five-year agreement with Djibouti, the CJTF-HOA base occupied less than a hundred acres, but under a new five-year agreement signed in 2007, the base has expanded to some five hundred acres.

In addition, the CJTF-HOA has established three permanent contingency operating locations that have been used to mount attacks on Somalia, one at the Kenyan naval base at Manda Bay and two others at Hurso and Bilate in Ethiopia.[7] A U.S. Navy Special Warfare Task Unit is currently based at Manda Bay, where it is providing training in anti-terrorism operations and coastal patrol missions.[8]

Joint Task Force Aztec Silence (JTFAS)

In December 2003, the U.S. European Command created this joint task force under the commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet (Europe) to carry out counter-terrorism operations in North and West Africa and to coordinate U.S. operations with those of countries in those regions. Specifically, JTFAS was charged with conducting surveillance operations using the assets of the U.S. Sixth Fleet and to share information, along with intelligence collected by U.S. intelligence agencies, with local military forces. The primary assets employed in this effort are a squadron of U.S. Navy P-3 “Orion” based in Sigonella, Sicily. In March 2004, P-3 aircraft from this squadron and reportedly operating from the southern Algerian base at Tamanrasset were deployed to monitor and gather intelligence on the movements of Algerian Salafist guerrillas operating in Chad and to provide this intelligence to Chadian forces engaged in combat against the guerrillas.[9]

And, in a particularly ominous incident, in September 2007, an American C-130 “Hercules” cargo plane stationed in Bamako, Mali, as part of the Flintlock 2007 exercises was deployed to resupply Malian counter-insurgency units engaged in fighting with Tuareg forces and was hit by Tuareg groundfire. No U.S. personnel were injured and the plane returned safely to the capital, but the incident constitutes a major extension of the U.S. role in counter-insurgency warfare and highlights the dangers of America’s deepening involvement in the internal conflicts that persist in so many African countries.[10]

Naval Operations in the Gulf of Guinea

Although American naval forces operating in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea and other areas along Africa’s shores are formally under the command of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, based in the Mediterranean, and other U.S. Navy commands, Africom will also help coordinate naval operations along the African coastline. As U.S. Navy Admiral Henry G. Ulrich III, the commander of U.S. Naval Forces (Europe) put it to reporters at Fort McNair in Washington, DC, in June 2007, “we hope, as they [Africom] stand up, to fold into their intentions and their planning,” and his command “will adjust, as necessary” as Africom becomes operational.[11]

The U.S. Navy has been steadily increasing the level and pace of its operations in African waters in recent years, including the deployment of two aircraft carrier battle groups off the coast of West Africa as part of the “Summer Pulse” exercise in June 2004, when identical battle groups were sent to every ocean around the globe to demonstrate that the United States was still capable of bringing its military power to bear simultaneously in every part of the world despite its commitment to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

More recently, American naval forces led an unprecedented voyage by a NATO fleet that circumnavigated the African continent from August to September 2007. Under the command of its flagship, the guided missile cruiser U.S.S. Normandy, the ships of Standing NATO Maritime Group One—composed of warships from Denmark, Portugal, the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, and the United States—conducted what were described as “presence operations” in the Gulf of Guinea, then proceeded to South Africa, where they participated in the Amazolo exercises being held by the South African Navy, and then sailed to the waters off the coast of Somalia to conduct more “presence operations” in a region which has experienced an upsurge in piracy. Later that same month, the guided missile destroyer U.S.S. Forrest Sherman arrived off South Africa to engage in a separate joint training exercise with the South African Navy frigate S.A.S. Amatola.

And in another significant expansion of U.S. Navy operations in Africa, the U.S.S. Fort McHenry amphibious assault ship began a six-month deployment to the Gulf of Guinea in November 2007, the first phase of the Africa Partnership Station Initiative. The U.S.S. Fort McHenry was accompanied by the High Speed Vessel HSV-2 “Swift” (the prototype for a new fast assault ship capable of operating in shallow, coastal waters) and two maritime prepositioning ships— the U.S.N.S. 2nd Lieutenant. John P. Bobo and U.S.N.S. Lance Corporal Roy M. Wheat—from Maritime Prepositioning Ship Squadron 1, one of three prepositioning squadrons used to stockpile equipment at strategic locations around the world. The ships made ports of call in Senegal, Liberia, Ghana, Cameroon, Sao Tome and Principe, Gabon, and Angola, and trained more than 1,200 sailors and other military personnel from these countries.

During their deployment, the ships conducted three weeks of amphibious assault exercises off Monrovia, Liberia, (known as Western Africa Training Cruise 2008) in March 2008 and conducted similar exercises off of Dakar, Senegal, in April 2008 before returning to Norfolk, Virginia. Its mission was to serve as a “floating schoolhouse” to train local forces in port and oil-platform security, search-and rescue missions, and medical and humanitarian assistance. According to Admiral Ulrich, the deployment matched up perfectly with the work of the new Africa Command. “If you look at the direction that the Africa Command has been given and the purpose of standing up the Africom, you’ll see that the (Gulf of Guinea) mission is closely aligned,” he told reporters in June 2007.[12]

In February 2008, the U.S. 6th Fleet conducted seven days of joint maritime exercises (known as Exercise Maritime Safari 2008) at Nigeria’s Ikeja Air Force Base with the Nigerian Navy and Air Force as part of the African Partnership Station Initiative. The American forces involved included P-3 “Orion” aerial surveillance aircraft from the squadron based in Sigonella, Sicily, and elements of the 6th Fleet’s Maritime Patrol Operations Command Center. The highlight of the exercises was a search and rescue exercise off of Lagos.

The U.S.S. Forrest Sherman and the U.S.S. Normandy, as part of the 6th Fleet’s Southeast Africa Task Force, made the first tour by American warships of the waters off East Africa in 2007 with visit to eight countries. The Southeast Africa Task Force made its second voyage in April 2008, when the landing ship dock U.S.S. Ashland visited Madagascar, Mauritius, and Reunion.

Base Access Agreements for Cooperative Security Locations and Forward Operating Sites

Over the past few years, the Bush administration has negotiated base access agreements with the governments of Botswana, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, Namibia, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierre Leone, Tunisia, Uganda, and Zambia. Under these agreements, the United States gains access to local military bases and other facilities so that they can be used by American forces as transit bases or as forward operating bases for combat, surveillance, and other military operations. They remain the property of the host African government and are not American bases in a legal sense, so that U.S. government officials are telling the truth—at least technically—when they deny that the United States has bases in these countries.

In addition to these publicly acknowledged base access agreements, the Pentagon was granted permission to deploy P-3 “Orion” aerial surveillance aircraft at the airfield at Tamanrasset in southern Algeria under an agreement reportedly signed in during Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s visit to Washington in July 2003.[13] The Brown and Root-Condor, a joint venture between a subsidiary of the American company, Halliburton, and the Algerian state-owned oil company, Sonatrach, is currently under contract to enlarge the military air bases at Tamanrasset and at Bou Saada. In December 2006, Salafist forces used an improvised mine and small arms to attack a convoy of Brown and Root-Condor employees who were returning to their hotel in the Algerian town of Bouchaaoui, killing an Algerian driver and wounding nine workers, including four Britons and one American.[14]

Where Will Africom’s Headquarters Be Based?

Over the coming year, there is one major issue related to the new command that remains to be resolved: whether and where in Africa will Africom establish a regional headquarters. A series of consultations with the governments of a number of African countries—including Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Djibouti, Nigeria, and Kenya—following the announcement of Africom found than none of them were willing to commit to hosting the new command. The public response throughout Africa was so unanimously hostile to the idea of a permanent and highly visible American military presence on the continent that no African government—except that of Liberia—was willing to take the political risk of agreeing to host the new command.

This constitutes a signal victory for civil society all across the continent and an important demonstration that the dynamics of global relations and political relations within states have changed radically since the end of the Cold War. Even in Africa—once treated as a convenient arena for manipulation and intervention by both superpowers—the United States can no longer rely on compliant regimes to do its bidding and faces growing opposition from popular political organizations and civic institutions (political parties; newspapers and other independent media; churches, mosques, and other religious institutions; trade unions; community associations; human rights organizations; environmental groups; and private business interests) that are gaining more and more power to challenge U.S. policy. Privately, however, many African rulers have assured the United States that they are still eager to collaborate with the Pentagon in less visible ways, including participating in U.S. security assistance programs and agreeing to allow U.S. forces to use local military bases in times of crisis.

As a result, the Pentagon has been forced to reconsider its plans and in June 2007 Ryan Henry, the Principal Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, told reporters that the Bush administration now intended to establish what he called “a distributed command” that would be “networked” in several countries in different regions of the continent.[15] Under questioning before the Senate Africa Subcommittee on 1 August 2007, Deputy Assistant Secretary Whelan said that Liberia, Botswana, Senegal, and Djibouti were among the countries that had expressed support for Africom—although only Liberia has publicly expressed a willingness to play host to Africom personnel—which suggests that at least some of these countries may eventually agree to accommodate elements of Africom’s headquarters staff.[16]

For the time being, therefore, Africom’s headquarters will be set up in Stuttgart, Germany. In its FY 2009 budget request, the Bush administration is asking for $398 million to create and staff the new command. This will cover the cost of creating an Africom intelligence capacity, including a Joint Intelligence Operations Center; launching a stand-alone Theater Special Operations Command for Africom; deploying support aircraft to Africa; building a limited presence on the African continent that is expected to include the establishment of two of five regional offices projected by Africom; and conducting training, exercises, and theater security cooperation activities over the coming year.

However, the Pentagon is already experiencing enormous difficulty assembling a staff for Africom—which was originally expected to total some 1,300 personnel—because it has so few officers with the required training and expertise. Moreover, the Pentagon has had to cut back its ambitious plan to undertake more development and relief work in Africa because of growing resistance from the State Department and the Agency for International Development, as well as increasing opposition from private U.S. aid agencies. Even Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates recently conceded, “I think in some respects we probably didn’t do as good a job as we should have when we rolled out Africom.” Gates noted that Africom was created by his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and argued that as the United States proceeded with the creation of Africom, “I don’t think we should push African governments to a place they don’t really want to go in terms of relationships.”[17]

What Is To Be Done With Africom?

Africom became fully operational on 1 October 2008, just a month before the election of Senator Barack Obama to succeed President Bush. Thus, it will be up to president-elect Barack Obama to decide whether or not to follow the path marked out by the Bush administration—a strategy based on a determination to depend upon the use of military force in Africa and elsewhere to satisfy America’s continuing addiction to oil—or to chart a new path based on an international and multi-lateral partnership with African nations and with other countries that have a stake in the continent (including China and India) to promote sustainable economic development, democracy, and human rights in Africa and a new global energy order based on the use of clean, safe, and renewable resources.

The best indications that we have about what course the Obama administration will pursue on Africom come from the answers that the Senator Obama gave to the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation in response to their Presidential Town Hall Meeting Africa Questionnaire in October 2007 and in the remarks made by Whitney W. Schneidman (Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Clinton administration and adviser on Africa to the Obama campaign) to the Constituency for Africa’s 2008 Ronald H. Brown African Affairs Series at the National Press Club on 24 September 2008.

In his response to the Sullivan Foundation questionnaire, Senator Obama maintained that Africom “should serve to coordinate and synchronize our military activities with our other strategic objectives in Africa.” But he contended “there will be situations that require the United States to work with its partners in Africa to fight terrorism with lethal force.” And he went on to assert “having a unified command operating in Africa will facilitate this action.”[18]

This statement, when considered alongside Senator Obama’s campaign statements on the need to intensify U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan and on the right of the United States to make unilateral military strikes into Pakistan against alleged members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist organizations in violation of that country’s sovereignty, demonstrate that he is genuinely convinced of the necessity and legitimacy of the Global War on Terrorism and, at least implicitly, of the necessity and legitimacy of recent U.S. military attacks on Somalia. Since Vice Admiral Moeller cites the attacks on Somalia as a model for the type of activity that Africom expects to conduct all across the continent, this suggests that the Obama administration will continue to expand the entire spectrum of U.S. military operations in Africa, including increasing U.S. military involvement in the internal affairs of African countries (including both counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations) and the direct use of U.S. combat troops to intervene in African conflicts.

Therefore, according to Whitney Schneidman, the Obama administration “will create a Shared Partnership Program to build the infrastructure to deliver effective counter-terrorism training, and to create a strong foundation for coordinated action against al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Africa and elsewhere.” He explained that the proposed program “will provide assistance with information sharing, operations, border security, anti-corruption programs, technology, and the targeting of terrorist financing.” In particular, Schneidman argued “in the Niger Delta, we should become more engaged not only in maritime security, but in working with the Nigerian government, the European Union, the African Union, and other stakeholders to stabilize the region.”[20]

In addition, President Obama is certain to come under pressure from business interests and lobbyists (especially from the oil companies); certain think tanks and NGOs; officials at the State Department, the Agency for International Development, and the Pentagon; and from some African governments to pursue the plan for Africom initiated by the Bush administration. It is likely, therefore, that the Obama administration will continue the militarization of U.S. policy toward Africa unless it comes under pressure to change direction. However, members of the U.S. Congress are now beginning to give Africom the critical scrutiny it deserves and to express serious skepticism about its mission and operations. Moreover, a number of concerned organizations and individuals in the United States and in Africa—the Resist Africom Campaign—came together in August 2006 to educate the American people about Africom and to mobilize public and congressional opposition to the creation of the new command. And the Resist Africom Campaign will continue to press the Obama administration to abandon the Bush plan for Africom and pursue a policy toward Africa based on a genuine partnership with the people of Africa, multi-lateralism, democracy, human rights, and grass-roots development.[21]

About the Author

*Daniel Volman (dvolman@igc.org) is the Director of the African Security Research Project in Washington, DC, (www.concernedafricascholars.org/african-security-research-project), and a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars. He is a specialist on U.S. military policy in Africa and African security issues and has been conducting research and writing on these issues for more than thirty years.

Notes

1. Daniel Volman, “The Bush Administration and African Oil: The Security Implications of US Energy Policy,” Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 30, No. 98 (December 2003), pp. 573-584; Michael Klare and Daniel Volman, “Africa’s Oil and American National Security,” Current History, Vol. 103, No. 673 (May 2004), pp. 226-231; Daniel Volman, “The African ‘Oil Rush’ and the Scramble for Africa’s Oil,” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 4 (May 2006), pp. 609-628; and Michael Klare and Daniel Volman, “America, China and the Scramble for Africa’s Oil,” Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 33, No. 108 (June 2006), pp. 297-309; Daniel Volman, “Africom: The New U.S. Military Command,” online article posted on Pambazuka.org on 7 November 2007 and on AllAfrica.com on 9 November 2007; Daniel Volman, “U.S. to Create New Regional Military Command for Africa: Africom,” Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 34, No. 114 (December 2007), pp. 737-744; Daniel Volman, “Why America Wants Military HQ in Africa,” New African, No. 469 (January 2008), pp. 36-40; and Daniel Volman, “Africom: What Is It and What Will It Do?” Bulletin of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars, No. 78 (August 2008).

2. Theresa Whelan, Exploring the U.S. Africa Command and a New Strategic Relationship with Africa, Testimony Before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Subcommittee on African Affairs, Washington, DC, 1 August 2007, electronic version accessed at www.loc.gov on 6 August 2007.

3. Theresa Whelan, Exploring the U.S. Africa Command and a New Strategic Relationship with Africa, Testimony Before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Subcommittee on African Affairs, Washington, DC, 1 August 2007, electronic version accessed at www.loc.gov on 6 August 2007.

4. General William E. Ward, Written Statement, Testimony Before the House Armed Services Committee, 13 March 2008, pp. 6-9, electronic version accessed at www.loc.gov on 14 March 2008.

5. Vice Admiral Robert Moeller, United States Africa Command: Partnership, Security, and Stability, Powerpoint Presentation at the Conference on Transforming National Security: Africom—An Emerging Command organized by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Forces Transformation and Resources and by the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University, Fort McNair, Washington, DC, 18 February 2008, pp. 3-4.

6. Office of Logistics Management, Department of State, AFRICAP Program Re-Compete, 21 February 2008, electronic version accessed at www.fbo.gov on 5 March 2008; see also, David C. Walsh, “Africom: Stabilizing a Region in Chaos,” Serviam, Vol. 3, No. 2), pp. 6-12.

7. Thomas P. M. Barnett, “Africa Command: Inside the Mission,” Esquire, 19 June 2007, electronic version accessed at www.esquire.com/features on 3 May 2007 and “The Americans Have Landed,” Esquire, 27 June 2007, pp. 4-9, electronic version accessed at www.esquire.com/features on 3 May 2008.

. 8. Steve Cline, “Across Kenya, U.S. Forces share knowledge, assistance,” U.S. Central Command news release, 2 May 2008, electronic version accessed at www.hoa.cencom.mil on 7 May 2008.

. 9. “US deploys further forces in Africa,” Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst, 4 August 2004, electronic version accessed at www.jiaa.janes.com on 24 October 2004 and “US to bolster counter-terrorism assistance to Africa,” Jane’s Defense Weekly, 6 October 2004, electronic version accessed at www.jiaa.janes.com on 24 October 2004.

. 10. Tiemoko Diallo, “U.S. plane hit by gunfire on resupply flight in Mali,” Washington Post, 13 September 2007, electronic version of Reuters news service article accessed at www.washingtonpost,com on 14 September 2007 and Almahady Cisse, “Gunmen Hit U.S. Military Plane in Mali, Washington Post, 13 September 2007, electronic version of Associated Press news service article accessed at www.washingtonpost.com on 14 September 2007.

. 11. Gerry Gilmore, “U.S. Naval Forces Europe Prepares for AFRICOM Stand Up,” American Forces Press Service, 1 June 2007, electronic version accessed at www.defenselink.mill on 4 September 2007.

12. Gerry Gilmore, “U.S. Naval Forces Europe Prepares for AFRICOM Stand Up,” American Forces Press Service, 1 June 2007, electronic version accessed at www.defenselink.mill on 4 September 2007.

13. “US deploys further forces in Africa,” Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst, 4 August 2004, electronic version accessed at www.jiaa.janes.com on 24 October 2004, “US to bolster counter-terrorism assistance to Africa,” Jane’s Defense Weeky, 6 October 2004, electronic version accessed at www.jiaa.janes.com on 24 October 2004, and Craig S. Smith, “U.S. Training African Forces to Uproot Terrorists,” New York Times, 11 May 2004, accessed at www.nytimes.com on 14 May 2004.

14 .Craig S. Smith, “Qaeda-Linked Group Claims Algerian Attack,” New York Times, 13 December 2006, electronic version accessed at www.nytimes.com on 13 December 2006.

15. Simon Tisdall, “Africa united in rejecting U.S. request for military HQ,” Guardian, 26 June 2007, electronic version accessed at www.guardian.co.uk on 30 August 2007 and Craig Whitlock, “North Africa Reluctant to Host U.S. Command,” Washington Post, 24 June 2007, electronic version accessed at www.washingtonpost.com on 24 June 2007.

16. Deborah Tate, “US Officials Brief Congress on New Military Command for Africa, Voice of America, Voice of America News, 1 August 2007, electronic version accessed at www.voanew.com on 30 August 2007.

17. Karen DeYoung, “U.S. Africa Command Trims Its Aspirations,” Washington Post, 1 June 2008, p. 18, electronic version accessed at www.washingtonpost.com on 20 June 2008.

18. Senator Barack Obama, “Presidential Town Hall Meeting Africa Questionnaire,” Undated, but posted in October 2007, electronic version accessed at www.thesullivanfoundation.org/foundation on 9 July 2008.

19 .Vice Admiral Robert Moeller, United States Africa Command: Partnership, Security, and Stability, Keynote Address at the Conference on Transforming National Security: Africom—An Emerging Command organized by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Forces Transformation and Resources and by the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University, Fort McNair, Washington, DC, 18 February 2008.

20. Whitney W. Schneidman, “Obama’s Three Objectives for Continent,” Online Guest Column for AllAfrica.Com, 29 September 2008, electronic version accessed at www.allafrica.com on 10 November 2008.

21. For more information about the Resist Africom Campaign, go to the website at www.resistafricom.org.

Paper Prepared for Nordic Africa Institute Conference: “China-India-Africa Relations: New Strategic Encounters”, Uppsala, Sweden, 22-23 September 2008

1) The growing economic, political, and military involvement of China, India, and other external powers in Africa, particularly the interest of their governments and corporations in access to African supplies of oil and other strategic resources.

In recent years, China, India, and a number of other external powers have dramatically increased their economic, political, and military involvement in Africa. The main reason for this, of course, is the desire of their governments and corporations to gain and expand their access to supplies of oil, natural gas, uranium, copper, cobalt, coltan, gold, platinum, diamonds, and other strategic resources.

The importance of these resources for the economic development and political stability of these industrializing countries is well known and there are specialists here who know far more than I about the details of this, so I won’t repeat it here. What is needed is some perspective on the significance of this in the broader context of Africa’s economic relations with the rest of the world. For example, China’s growing role in oil production in Africa is often cited as the most important example of how these new powers are usurping the place of the United States and European countries and threatening to “expel” the west from Africa. But China still only gets less than 9% of sub-Saharan Africa’s total oil exports; while 32% of Africa’s oil still goes to the United States and 33% still goes to Europe. China does obtain significant amounts of oil from African countries—some 30% of its total imports, primarily from Sudan, Angola, and Nigeria—but it actually gets more of its imported oil from the Middle East, specifically from Saudi Arabia where oil production is dominated by American firms. So the situation is a little more complicated than the picture that is often presented.

One of China’s smaller, but most noteworthy, endeavors is in Ethiopia, where the Chinese firm Zhongyuan Petroleum Exploration Bureau (part of the the China Petroleum and Chemical Company [SINOPEC]) is conducting a seismic survey to explore for oil and gas deposits in the Ogaden region—which is populated mostly by Somalis—under a contract from the Malaysian firm Petronas and South-West Energy, an Ethiopian company licensed in Hong Kong. In April 2007, hundreds of members of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (the ONLF, which is fighting to make the region a part of Somalia) attacked the company’s premises in Abole, overpowering 50 Ethiopian Army troops who were guarding the facility and killing 65 Ethiopians—mostly laborers—and nine Chinese technicians. Seven Chinese oil workers were kidnapped and then released to Red Cross five days after attack. The Ethiopian government launched a major military offensive against the ONLA in June 2007, but in November 2007, Zhongyuan announced that it would not return to resume work in the Ogaden. Petronas is now expecting to hire Iranian firm named Oil Exploration Operation Company to continue exploration work in Ogaden. Pexco, another Malaysian firm, is also expected to begin gravity survey work in January 2008 on two exploration blocks in the Ogaden. American companies are also active in this volatile region. In August 2008, Titan Resources Corporation (owned by Nelson Bunker Hunt) announced that it had signed a twenty-five year production-sharing agreement with Ethiopia for the right to explore oil and gas in two blocks in the Ogaden basin and the Blue Nile basin in the north of the country and that it expected to invest as much as $60 million in the project.

China and India are also interested in acquiring access to uranium, copper, and other minerals. For example, Chinese and Indian firms are now exploring for uranium in Niger. In July 2007, Tuareg rebels kidnapped a Chinese executive of the China Nuclear International Uranium Corporation to protest Chinese operations in Niger and alleged Chinese arms sales to the government; he was later released unharmed. And in September 2008, China signed a deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo to loan $5 billion to rehabilitate the mining industry, construct railways and roads, and build hospitals and other infrastructure projects. In exchange, China will receive copper, cobalt, nickel, gold, and timber.

It is important to recognize that China, India, and other countries have other reasons for expanding their involvement in Africa besides economic self-interest. China and India have longstanding historic ties to Africa. They both have an ideological and political interest in contesting Western dominance of the global economic and political order and in countering American claims to hegemony based on its assertion that it is the “world’s only remaining superpower.” They both have a genuine interest in promoting economic development and social progress on the continent. They both hope to use their relationships with Africa to enhance their global status as great powers in their own right. And they both seek to reduce internal economic, political, and social conflicts by providing new opportunities in Africa for their corporations and their citizens.

It is also important to recognize that China and India do invest in projects besides resource extraction and that many of these projects can or may contribute significantly to the economic development of African countries. The Chinese investment plan for the DR Congo, for instance, includes the rehabilitation of the mining industry and the construction of major infrastructure projects including transportation and power production projects. China’s increasing willingness to fund these projects demonstrates that China has been sensitive to criticism of its initial focus on resource extraction and that China does respond to pressure for the reform of its investment practices in Africa.

2) The use of military programs—arms sales, military training programs, and other security assistance programs—by these countries as a means of pursuing these objectives and increasing their influence in Africa.

China has used military programs to strengthen the military capacities of key African allies and to expand its influence in oil-producing countries. Sudan has received F-6 and F-7 fighter aircraft, T-62 light tanks, anti-aircraft systems, trucks, and other weapons. Zimbabwe has received at least nine J-7 fighter aircraft, six K-8 trainer aircraft, 10 T-69 tanks, 30 T-59 tanks, and as many as 100 T-63 armored transport vehicles. Nigeria purchased 15 F-7 fighter aircraft from China in 2005 for a reported $251 million. Angola has ordered eight Su-77 fighter aircraft. China sold over $1 billion worth of sophisticated weaponry to Ethiopia and Eritrea between 1998 and 2000—including Su-77 fighter aircraft for Ethiopia—in violation of the U.N. arms embargo imposed during the bloody border war between the two countries. China has also supplied military equipment to Algeria, Zambia, Namibia, and Mauritania, including C-802 ship-to-ship missiles for Algeria as well as K-8 trainer aircraft for Zambia (which received eight) and Namibia (which received four).

In addition, Chinese military ties with the Nigerian government were significantly expanded in September 2004 when the Chinese arms producer Poly Technology announced that it would enter into a partnership with the government-owned Defense Industries Corporation of Nigeria (DICON) to modernize Nigeria’s domestic arms industry. After years of neglect, the Nigerian government wants to revive DICON and expects to resume production of small arms, grenades, ammunition, and other light weapons for the Nigerian military.

These actions have led to criticism of China’s role in Africa, particularly from “alarmists” in the United States who emphasize China’s ties with repressive regimes and its willingness to invest without imposing the types of conditions imposed by the World Bank and other international financial institutions or by Western governments. While these critiques are valid, China’s practices are not unique. The United States has used the same means to build ties with repressive African regimes—particularly in oil producing countries like Algeria, Nigeria, Angola, Chad, and Equatorial Guinea—and has noticeably reduced its pressures for democratization, respect for human rights, and financial transparency in recent years.

India has also begun to dramatically expand its military presence in Africa (particularly its naval presence) and also in the Indian Ocean, through which the oil tankers that carry nearly all of India’s oil imports—along with those of China, Japan, Malaysia, Korea, and other developed and developing industrial powers in Asia—must travel. India has announced that it intends to build up its naval forces in the Indian Ocean in order to protect the flow of oil and expects to acquire a fleet of modern aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines over the next decade. In addition to the purchase of a refurbished Russian aircraft carrier in 2008 (see below), India also bought a refurbished American warship, the 17,000-ton amphibious transport dock U.S.S. Trenton.

India established a listening post in northern Madagascar in July 2007, which consists of a radar surveillance station equipped with a high-tech digital communications system and which is intended, at least in part, to monitor Chinese activities. In 2003, India signed a defense cooperation agreement with Seychelles; and, in 2006, it signed a defense agreement with Mozambique to provide arms and to conduct regular naval patrols off Mozambique’s coast. According to a recent report by Chatham House, India new military policy toward Africa is motivated, to a certain extent, by “concerns about Chinese expansionism” and “this shift in policy comes in part because of India’s desire to compete with China’s growing influence in the region.”

3) The re-emergence of Russia as a major power in Africa with regard to both energy supplies and security issues and its impact.

While considerable attention has been paid to the emerging role of China, India, and other new powers in Africa, far less notice has been taken of the re-emergence of Russia as a significant power in Africa. Russia essentially withdrew from Africa at the end of the Cold War, but under President Putin and the new administration headed by President Medvedev, Russia has undertaken major new initiatives in Africa.

In September 2008, Russia’s state natural gas company, Gazprom, signed a memorandum of understanding with the state-owned Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation for oil and gas exploration, production, and transportation, processing of gas, and construction of power plants in Nigeria; Gazprom expects to spend between $1 billion and $2.5 billion on these projects in the coming years.

Earlier this year, Russia held preliminary talks with Nigeria about a multi-million dollar pipeline that will run for 2,850 miles (4,128 kilometers) across the Sahara and will be used to transport Nigerian gas across Niger and Algeria to Algerian export terminals for deliver to Europe by way of Spain. The proposed deal is expected to cost $10 billion for the pipeline and $3 billion for other installations, and will be capable of delivering up to 30 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe annually.

During then-President Putin’s visit to Libya in April 2008, the two countries signed deals on energy cooperation, military assistance, and construction of a 310-mile (500-kilometer) railway line between Sirte and Benghazi. The railway line is expected to cost $3.8 billion. Gazprom plans large-scale exploration and production projects in cooperation with Libya’s national energy company, including the construction of liquified natural gas installations and gas-fired electricity plants in Libya. Russia has also cancelled Libya’s $4.5 billion debt for arms purchases from the Soviet Union and announced plans to sell Libya $3 billion worth of new weaponry, including fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, and submarines.

In March 2006, Russia signed a $8 billion deal with Algeria to cancel that country’s debt for past arms sales in exchange for a commitment to buy Russian military equipment, including 32 MiG-29 SMT fighter aircraft, 28 Su-30MK fighter aircraft, 16 Yak-130 trainer aircraft, four S-300PMU2 anti-aircraft systems, 38 Pantsir-S1 air defense missile-and-gun systems, 185 T-90S tanks, and 216 Komet-E anti-tank missiles. In March 2008, Algeria announced that it intended to return the 12 MiG-29s delivered the previous year to Russia because they did not meet Algeria’s technical expectations and it is still unclear exactly what aircraft Russia will deliver in the future to complete the contract. Deliveries of the Yak-130 trainer aircraft to Algeria are expected to begin in January 2009.

As mentioned above, in 2008, Russia signed an agreement with India to sell the surplus aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov to India. Russia is currently refurbishing the warship (which will be renamed the Vikramadtiya) and expects to deliver it to India sometime after 2011, along with MiG-29 aircraft and Ka-27 Helix-A and Ka-31 Helix-B anti-submarine helicopters.

4) The response of the United States and European powers to the activities of these new (and re-emerging) actors in Africa and to the challenges posed by their activities.

Most foreign policymakers in Washington—including leading members of the Bush administration—remain convinced that China’s actions in Africa do not threaten vital U.S. national security interests and that the United States and China can cooperate in developing the continent’s natural resources in a way that is mutually beneficial. But a growing and increasingly vocal group of legislators, and influential think tanks insist that China has become a strategic global rival to the United States and that its actions—especially in Africa—represent a direct challenge to the United States.

These “alarmists” point to the considerable resources that China is devoting to Africa and to the engagement of Chinese officials at the highest level—including President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, both of who have made tours of the continent and have hosted high-level meetings in Beijing with African heads of state—as evidence of a “grand strategy” on the part of China that jeopardizes vital U.S. national security interests and that is aimed, ultimately, at usurping the West’s position on the continent. “Amidst all of this hoopla over China’s rapidly growing economy, there is a dark side to [that] country’s economic expansion,” Representative Christopher Smith (Republican of New Jersey) told the House International Relations Committee hearing on “China’s Influence in Africa” in July 2005. “China is playing an increasingly influential role on the continent of Africa, and there is concern that the Chinese intend to aid and abet African dictators, gain a stranglehold on precious African natural resources, and undo much of the progress that has been made on democracy and governance in the last 15 years in African nations.”

Although the “non-alarmist” view of China continues to guide U.S. policy toward Africa, the Bush administration has pursued a strategy in Africa that relies on the use of military force to protect U.S. interests on the continent—particularly its interest in free flow of African oil to world markets—and to counter the growing involvement of potential global competitors—and in particular the one country that could realistically become a rival global peer, i.e. China—in Africa. Based on this strategy, the Bush administration has radically increased U.S. military activities in Africa and, in February 2006, announced that it would create a new U.S. military command for Africa—Africa Command or Africom—to oversee America’s growing military presence on the continent. While the principal missions of Africom will be to protect access to strategic raw materials in Africa and to make the continent a major front in the Global War on Terrorism, the creation of Africom should also be seen in part as one element of a broad effort by the Bush administration to develop a “grand strategy” of its own that will contain China’s efforts. It should also be understood as a measure that is intended to demonstrate to Beijing that Washington will match China’s actions, thus serving as a warning to the Chinese leadership that they should restrain themselves or face possible consequences to their relationship with America as well as to their interests in Africa.

So what will Africa actually do? When Africom becomes fully operational in October it will take over the implementation of a wide range of ongoing military, security cooperation, and security assistance programs that have already led to a series of U.S. air raids on Somalia as well as the establishment of a new U.S. military base in Africa—located at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti—and a vastly enlarged U.S. naval presence, particularly in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea. The Bush administration has also dramatically increased funding for U.S. arms sales to Africa and created a host of new programs to provide weaponry and military training to African allies. Over the past seven years, the value of U.S. security assistance to Africa has risen from about $100 million each year to an annual level of approximately $800 million. The Pentagon would like to avoid direct military intervention in Africa whenever possible, preferring to bolster the internal security capabilities of its African friends and to build up the military forces of key states that can act as surrogates for the United States. But it is also preparing for the day when a disruption of oil supplies or some other crisis will lead to further direct military intervention. The Bush administration has substantially increased the size and frequency of U.S. military exercises in Africa and negotiated agreements to gain access to local military bases in a number of African countries, including Algeria, Gabon, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, Tunisia, Namibia, Sao Tome, Senegal, Uganda, and Zambia.

5) The implications of these developments for African security, political reform, and economic development. What are the benefits and liabilities for Africa of the emergence of new players and of growing competition?

–Allows African governments to play off China, India, and Russia against the US and Europe

–Provides new sources of development assistance

–Provides new markets for African energy and other raw materials

–Undermines African producers of textiles and other goods

–Exacerbates internal domestic political conflict

–Bolsters repressive and undemocratic regimes in Africa that violate human rights and encourages use of force to maintain regimes in power

–Makes Africa more of a battlefield in the global competition between the US, Europe, China, India, and Russia

About the Author
*Director African Security Research Project, Washington, DC USA