The stance of the United States with respect to the rest of the world has changed radically under the ”conservative” administration of George W Bush. The latest indication of the militarisation that is at the forefront of this shift came on December 13, when then-defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that within ”one to two months” the US military would establish an African Command — adding a sixth region to the existing five US geographic combat commands.
In the thinking of Pentagon and White House officials, the world today is too dangerous a place not to be policed by Washington. And given this notion — viewed by Bush administration decision-makers as an urgent global political necessity — there are not enough American policemen (indeed, there can never be enough). So a restructuring of the capacity for force and violence has been under way for the past seven years.
One of the important shifts within this process is abandonment of the post-World War II idea that the US and Europe are co-equal partners in military matters. Rumsfeld ”had a certain contempt for the Europeans,” the International Herald Tribune recently quoted Jens van Scherpenberg, an expert on trans-Atlantic relations at Berlin’s German Institute for International and Security Affairs, as saying.
In Rumsfeld’s view — and despite his politically expedient departure, the administration continues to believe — the US government requires a second tier of more pliable allies accepting of American leadership. A quick sense of this thinking can be gained by observing who is allied with the US in Iraq. The United Kingdom’s support notwithstanding, Western Europe in general and France in particular have been, to put it mildly, cool toward this US effort. In the admini-stration’s view, they are unreliable.
Back in 2003, Rumsfeld performed the remarkable feat of unifying France and Germany, angering both continental powers when he said they were part of an unrepresentative ”old Europe”. The Bush admini-stration counts heavily on the ”new Europe” of former Soviet satellites for support of its Iraq mission.
The White House is also counting on a ”new Africa”. The establishment of ”Africom,” as the Pentagon and state department are already calling it, is being driven by two main strategic concerns: first, the growing demand for African oil and gas (Africa is expected to be supplying 25% of US hydrocarbon imports by 2015) and the vulnerability of those supplies, concentrated as they are in some of Africa’s most unstable states; and second, the perceived danger of Islamic radicals.
The top brass have concluded that the old Nato concerns are outdated: in the 21st century, threats will come from the South and East.
The location of the Africa Command is ”still in the planning process”, says Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer, as is the timing of its launch. State department personnel have also been deeply involved in planning for Africom, and the European Command’s Deputy Commander, General William E (Kip) Ward heads the list of possible commanders.
The five existing commands — which in their areas of military responsibility cover the globe — are the Northern Command, based in Colorado; the Pacific Command, based in Hawaii; the Central Command, based in Florida; the European Command, based in Germany; and the Southern Command, also based in Florida.
It’s easy enough to see that having one command for Africa makes for a certain logistical coherency. Currently, three of the commands share responsibility for the continent.
Discussion of the need for an Africa Command began long before the Bush administration — Bill Clinton’s military people talked about it too. But the question is whether this development will be a good thing for the continent.
I think not.
First, without significant and protective checks and balances, excessive ”security” tends to erode, if not crush, civil liberties, and those governments on the continent that already show little inclination to support democratic freedoms will almost certainly use ”security” as an excuse to clamp down on things they don’t like. This is already happening in the US, where despite checks and balances there is a steady erosion of constitutional rights in the name of ”homeland security”.
A second and related point is that no other command will be as politically defined. None of the five other military commands will require as much, or as direct, intervention in the political affairs of their region. We already see this in Somalia, where US strategic concerns trump local needs. US money helped prop up the warlords, enabling them to continue the chaos that keeps that tragic nation trapped in failure as a state, even though the transitional government the warlords are part of was trying to install itself in Mogadishu. The US needed the warlords to help fight Islamic ”terrorists”. Never mind that those warlord militias were terrorising Somalis.
A few years ago, this was played out in a different way in the effort to crush Algeria’s Islamist rebel organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat. A chase across the Sahara in 2004 involving US, Algerian, Malian and Chadian soldiers resulted in a huge swathe of the Sahara-Sahel today being described as an anti- terror front aimed at al-Qaeda. In the future, Africom would be involved in such an operation. The problem is that the Salafist Group has little to do with al-Qaeda and a great deal to do with trying to topple the Algerian regime in order to set up an Islamist state — a local matter from my viewpoint, although I personally would not like to see the Algerian government toppled, nor am I in favour of religious states. Still, you cannot say that if a state is Islamist, it is by definition, ”terrorist”. And US soldiers certainly don’t belong on the ground in local conflicts.
After years of reporting, the cynic in me concludes that there is no more dangerous combination than foreign-backed military power and foreign alignment with the political goals of local regimes. You can always count on the worst oppression rising to the surface as the norm in the name of security and stability.
And that leads to the final reason for looking with suspicion at Africom. Ultimately, it simply does not seem to serve genuine US interests in Africa: fostering economic growth, fighting chronic disease, conveying the idea that military muscle and the willingness to use it ruthlessly is not a path to stability.
All these will surely be reduced to rhetoric about what needs to be done after Africa is ”secure”.
Charles Cobb Jnr is senior correspondent for allAfrica.com. His book Civil Rights Trail: A Movement Veteran’s Travel Guide and Narrative, will be published in December