Armed Humanitarians (34 page)

For African militaries, this kind of desktop exercise could have tangible professional benefits. It gave them a chance to work inside a modern, computerized command post. More important, participants from different countries could exchange cell-phone numbers with their counterparts. The next time there was a regional crisis or a violent border incident, a military officer or a border patrolman might be able to call his opposite number to coordinate a response. That kind of collaboration could have application for peacekeeping, disaster relief, and other kinds of emergencies.

Flintlock 2007 and the training exercise in Timbuktu were also part of a deepening U.S. military interest in the region. Part of the idea was to counter cross-border problems: terrorism, human trafficking, narcotics smuggling. But it was also what U.S. government officials liked to call “capacity building,” helping vulnerable, impoverished governments in Africa build competent militaries and capable government institutions. That was a more sweeping state-building project, in which the U.S. military was taking the lead.

Colonel Mark Rosengard, a gruff Green Beret officer with a flat Boston accent, a thick black mustache, and a hockey player's build, was one of the officers observing from the sidelines in Timbuktu. As we watched the Malian troopers go through their paces on the training ground, he told me that the drill was a first step toward building a professional military for Mali. The country needed armed forces and border guards that were equipped to train and work in this austere, forbidding place, and capable of distinguishing between legitimate cross-border trade and more nefarious activity. “The important elements of security in this part of the world are pretty simple,” he said. “[The Special Forces team] are here to help them establish procedure, how to shoot, move, and communicate more effectively.”

Rosengard had long experience in the Balkans and Afghanistan, and he was observing this training mission as a representative of U.S. Special Operations Command Europe. The training in Timbuktu was in many respects a classic Special Forces “foreign internal defense” mission, an assignment known as Joint Combined Exchange Training, or JCET. Green Berets routinely performed these JCET missions around the globe.

But the mission to Timbuktu was taking place as the U.S. military was preparing to activate a brand-new military command for Africa, U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM. The new headquarters was slated to reach “initial operating capability” the following month, October 2007. This rollout was a sort of beta version of the organization, based out of U.S. European Command in Stuttgart. The command became a fully activated unitary command one year later, on October 1, 2008.

In some respects AFRICOM represented a simple streamlining and reorganization of U.S. military activity in Africa. Before AFRICOM, three different commands divided responsibility for watching Africa. U.S. European Command oversaw most of sub-Saharan Africa; it tended to view Africa as an extension of former European colonial territories. U.S. Central Command, focused primarily on the Middle East, was responsible for the countries bordering on the Red Sea. The island of Madagascar was under U.S. Pacific Command, a seeming afterthought. The creation of the new command signaled a major foreign policy shift. Instead of dealing with Africa through dozens of embassies, the U.S. government could approach the continent through a powerful, unified military command. The reasoning was the main problems in Africa were transnational. Migration, resource wars, ethnic conflict, HIV/AIDS—all cut across borders, and AFRICOM would offer a more coherent approach to dealing with them than the embassies could. That mission required a new kind of organization. Unlike a traditional military command, AFRICOM focused heavily on humanitarian and development issues. Its staff would include a large contingent of civilians, and one of the top officials, the deputy to the commander for civil-military affairs, would be a senior Foreign Service officer. After the failures of nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan, AFRICOM offered a clean slate, a hybrid civil-military organization optimized to respond to crises in the region before they required full-blown military intervention. Africa was the new laboratory for “getting it right.”

AFRICOM's planners in the Pentagon envisioned its main goal as “preventive” security: Instead of stationing U.S. troops on the continent, the United States through AFRICOM would boost the ability of local governments to police their own borders, participate in peacekeeping operations, and, when necessary, organize the response to the next Somalia or Rwanda. It would also mean a new infusion of U.S. dollars on the continent, where the U.S. Agency for International Development had once been the primary vehicle for development assistance to Africa. Now, the new command would help direct millions more in “security assistance” funds to African governments, as well as oversee development projects. U.S. aid to the continent would take on a much more military flavor.

The training exercise in Mali was just one modest example. The U.S. teams were able to make the training in Timbuktu much more “event-intensive” by supplying ammunition for live-fire exercises and providing extra fuel for the trucks. The course of instruction was very basic: The Malian soldiers received classroom instruction on land navigation and the laws of armed conflict, practiced rifle marksmanship and communication, and took part in field exercises. But this modest investment could make a major difference for cash-strapped African militaries.

Still, the Malian military had a long way to go before they became self-sufficient. The U.S. trainers concluded the morning's exercise with a weapons inspection. While the Malian soldiers stood in formation, the Green Berets inspected their rifles, an assortment of corroded-looking SKS rifles and AK-47s. Across the courtyard, in a bare classroom, a medic gave a lecture on battlefield first aid. The Malians had no overhead projector or practice tools for the students. And it seemed difficult to maintain an atmosphere of military discipline as barefoot children wandered around the training grounds. While his colleagues examined the weapons, racking back the slides to inspect the breeches, the Green Beret team leader offhandedly muttered a joke: “They're probably surprised to see a truck with fuel.”

The U.S. military had been an intermittent presence in Africa, but U.S. involvement in Africa ramped up dramatically after September 11, 2001. In late 2002, U.S. Marines established a task force at Camp Lemonier, a former French army outpost in Djibouti. The Djibouti task force, called Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa, occupied a critical piece of geography near the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, along transit routes that might be used by al-Qaeda as they fled Central Asia or the Middle East. The task force was also heavily involved in Civil Affairs missions and military-to-military training, overseeing medical and veterinary clinics, digging wells, and providing security training for countries in the region. Still, momentum for this new Africa command did not really build within the Pentagon until after the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan pushed military planners to embrace the tools of nation building and development, and laid bare the lack of civilian capability for repairing failed states. Like Iraq, Africa presented problems that defied simple military solutions, and the continent seemed to cry out for the “whole of government” treatment promoted by the counterinsurgents.

The idea of dividing up the globe into unified U.S. military commands dated back to the immediate postwar era, when the U.S. military began to confront its wartime ally, the Soviet Union. The original “Outline Command Plan” of 1946 established seven unified commands (Far East Command, Pacific Command, Alaskan Command, Northeast Command, Atlantic Fleet, Caribbean Command, and European Command). That scheme overlooked Africa entirely. It was not until 1952 that part of Africa was assigned to a unified geographic command, when European Command assumed responsibility for contingencies in France's
départments
in Algeria, along with the French colonies of Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya.
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That did not mean that the United States had no military involvement on the continent. During the Suez Crisis in 1956, a Marine battalion evacuated U.S. nationals from Alexandria, Egypt; in 1964, Belgian paratroopers parachuted out of U.S. transport planes during a hostage crisis in Stanleyville, Congo; and in 1986, President Ronald Reagan sent U.S. warships to confront Libya. U.S. involvement during the Cold War was not limited to brief military interventions: As part of its proxy war with the Soviet Union the United States provided long-term support to anti-Communist guerrillas such as Angola's UNITA, and for several decades the Army maintained a large listening post at Kagnew Station, near Asmara, Ethiopia (now part of Eritrea).

In the 1990s, U.S. military involvement in Africa saw a steady uptick. In response to widespread disorder in Zaïre in 1991, U.S. aircraft transported Belgian troops and equipment to Kinshasa; in 1992, U.S. forces evacuated Americans from Sierra Leone after the government was overthrown; U.S. aircraft evacuated noncombatants and diplomats during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. More emergency airlifts followed during crises in Liberia (1996), Congo and Gabon (1997), and Sierra Leone (1997 and 2000).
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The proliferation of cheap small arms—particularly the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle, a rugged, simple weapon that any stoned teenager could operate—made local conflicts much more lethal, and the United Nations was often powerless to stop the violence. Peacekeeping missions such as the 25,000-strong UN force in the Democratic Republic of Congo or the African Union mission in Somalia were often short of resources and had limited mandates. Terrorism was also a rising threat. A U.S. joint task force deployed to Kenya and Tanzania following the al-Qaeda–orchestrated bombings of U.S. embassies in 1998. The biggest involvement was in Somalia, where President George H. W. Bush first deployed armed forces in response to a humanitarian crisis in 1992. After the 1993 “Black Hawk down” debacle, in which nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed in a firefight in Mogadishu, President Bill Clinton ordered the U.S. task force home, but American forces returned briefly to Somalia again in March 1995 to assist in the withdrawal of UN forces. In the 1990s U.S. armed forces deployed to the continent at least eighteen times.
4

The idea for a unified command for Africa gained momentum during the latter half of the 1990s, as the U.S. military witnessed a cascading series of crises in Africa. Civil wars in Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo cost millions of lives, and displaced millions more. The Rwanda genocide had forced something of a rethink in international relations theory, spurring arguments in favor of military intervention to halt mass atrocities. Military involvement in Africa could potentially be benign. A relatively small early intervention could stop a local conflict from turning into a mass outbreak of violence. Scott Feil, a retired Army officer, argued in a 1998 study that a five thousand–strong task force from a modern, Western military would have been enough to stop the killing in Rwanda.
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Better yet, a longer-term presence in conflict-prone regions, coupled with swifter, more empowered international peacekeeping missions could keep such violence from starting in the first place.

In early 2001, Commander Richard Catoire, a naval aviator, wrote an article for
Parameters
, the journal of the Army War College, reflecting the Pentagon's new thinking on Africa:

Because of the increased US engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, and because the current regional unified commands are principally focused elsewhere, the time has come to rethink the Unified Command Plan as it regards Africa. The current plan cannot effectively protect America's security interests on that continent. It is unlikely to realize the articulated policy objectives of the United States in the region, and it should be revised to better secure those objectives.
6

Catoire's article included a map of a proposed new command that would monitor all of the continent except five north African countries, which would remain under U.S. European Command. As Catoire outlined it, the United States would be stepping in to fill the shoes of France, which had provided much of the security assistance and training on the continent, especially to francophone countries, of which Mali was one. The piece also took note of new factors, particularly the rising dependence of the United States on African oil exports:

The region has tremendous mineral wealth, huge hydro-electrical power reserves, and significant underdeveloped ocean resources. The better part of the world's diamonds, gold, and chromium are produced in countries at the southern end of the continent. Some 20 percent of America's oil now is imported from Africa. Copper, bauxite, phosphate, uranium, tin, iron ore, cobalt, and titanium are also mined in significant quantities. The waters off both coasts of the continent support huge fisheries. The continent's potential as a market and as a source of important commodities is great.
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In mid-2006, John Hillen, assistant secretary of state for political military affairs, was invited to working group meetings on AFRICOM at the Pentagon. From his post in the State Department, Hillen saw the push for AFRICOM as a reform initiative similar to the new Army and the Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual, an opportunity to bridge the “pol-mil divide” by forcing the military and civilian bureaucracies to work more closely together to integrate their efforts. “I always saw AFRICOM as a new kind of command, an interagency command that would be a better vehicle for delivering programs to Africa that were bent on nonkinetic goals than EUCOM had been,” he said. “So to me it was very pragmatic. And I got Condi [Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] on board; she said, ‘Great, we'll play.' ”

Hillen found an ally in the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Jendayi Frazer, who was a strong supporter of the concept. Frazer had even included the idea of an Africa Command in Governor George W. Bush's debate points during the 2000 election campaign. But Hillen and Frazer ran into resistance from the rank-and-file within the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs, where the new initiative was seen as another bureaucratic “land grab” by the Defense Department.