Vultures Dreaming

Africom - Intelligence HQ based in the UK

Stars and Stripes has confirmed that Africom's Joint Intelligence Operations Center (JIOC) is based at RAF Molesworth near Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire. RAF Molesworth was a US cruise missile base up until 1988 and is currently home to US European Command's (EUCOM) Joint Analysis Center and NATO's Intelligence Fusion Centre.

As EUCOM was until recently responsible for Sub-Saharan Africa it already was the home to a team of Africa specialists who have been joined by Africom military staff, as well as a large number of civilian contractors provided by L3 Communications and Northrop-Grumman.

There have been suggestions that a key source feeding the centre is the National Security Agency's facility at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire - perhaps the most important site in the world for the interception of communications both from and within Africa.

While Africom's PR machine churns out regular news from and about the command on its website, it has not yet mentioned this base.

US Presidential Foreign Affairs Debate

Here's a nice way to view the issues discussed (created by Wordle which is a great toy).

How many times was Africa mentioned? Not Once.

Somalia - Why does Africa Partnership Station not help against the pirates?

The Africa Partnership Station (APS), AFRICOM's naval element, now has an almost permanent presence in the Gulf of Guinea, where it is indeed very busy: training up local navies, installing a network of Maritime Domain Awareness sensors, painting schools, hugging natives (hadn't this 'hearts and minds' stuff already passed its sell-by-date in Vietnam?) and no doubt preparing a few contingency plans to protect energy supplies.

I would have thought a spell in the Indian Ocean would do AFRICOM's foundering PR campaign a world of good. Although APS doesn't need a land base it would have both Camp Lemonier in Djibouti and a 'lily pad' in Mombassa nearby.

And the whole world agrees that pirates are criminals and deserve to be dealt with: the whole world does not agree that Al-Shabaab are terrorists or that missile attacks against civilians are a good idea, even if they are aimed at an Al Qaeda suspect.

The EU, led by French action, has approved plans for a naval mission. US bluewater forces are already involved in a coalition patrolling international waters but could do with the brownwater capacity of APS.

AFRICOM - The 'misunderstanding' won't go away

There is a line put out by AFRICOM that the original search for an African headquarters led to a terrible misunderstanding, on the part of African Governments, as to AFRICOM's intentions. And to clarify, there will be no bases and no forces. This line has been repeated endlessly over the past six months.

And it's come up again. During Condoleezza Rice's visit to Libya she reported that Colonel Qadhafi expressed

"concerns about what the United States was doing with AFRICOM, were we looking to military bases on the African continent, were we looking to a large military presence."

Sounding somewhat exasperated, Rice said she told Qadhafi

"that we clearly weren't getting through about what we meant for AFRICOM; that this was to be -- to help Africans help themselves in peacekeeping, in counterterrorism work. We were able to clear up misunderstandings of that kind."

Three points.

• Africans don't get it because they don't believe it.
• No bases is not true. The AFRICOM position is no bases for the moment.
• Help developing peacekeeping forces is much needed, but counterterrorism? Surely this is best handled by intelligence, law and order, and justice?

US Counterterrorism in Sub-Saharan Africa

The US Army War College has again published a paper critical of the AFRICOM mission (see here for my comment on Dennis Penn's paper).

US Counterterrorism in Sub-Saharan Africa: Understanding Costs, Cultures and Conflicts is by Donovan Chau, Assistant Professor of Political Science at California State University. This is his second paper on the subject (the first was for an Institute for Security Studies seminar in 2006).

Chau argues that development and defense are

"fundamentally divergent theoretical approaches to US counterterrorism policy in SSA" which are "mutually exclusive".

In his book the defense approach

"involves any and all uses of the military; this includes the use of the military for nonmilitary purposes such as humanitarian assistance and intervention."

Since 2001 the Pentagon has been winning the policy debate and

"AFRICOM was certainly and is a victory for DoD within the USG interagency process."

"Operationally and tactically, AFRICOM may make humanitarian operations in SSA more succinct and logistically feasible. The situation nevertheless leaves DoD as the lead strategic planning organization for counterterrorism in SSA, to the overall detriment of the development approach to counterrorism."

While recognising that the defense approach has the resources at its disposal and "the expeditionary nature of the US military naturally lends itself to tackle problems facing US interests abroad.", Chau argues that the costs outweigh the benefits. The perception of military involvement and the military's lack of "substantial depth and breadth of knowledge of foreign peoples and lands, especially in SSA" count heavily against the defense approach.

Given the views of terrorism and counterterrorism in SSA, as well as the state of civil-military and civil-law enforcement relations, the defense approach is not the most prudent one in the long term. Moving DoD operations into the development realm (the so-called "Phase Zero" strategy) does not alter the fact that the U.S. military remains the primary organization conducting operations in SSA. This is not a balance between the two approaches; rather, it is the dominance of one over the other. In the long view, the development approach to counterterrorism in SSA is more sustainable and would have a more lasting impact.

... if the USG and DoD had a better comprehension of civil-military (and civil-law enforcement) relations in SSA, creating a separate unified command would not have been such a priority or as publicly touted."

While perhaps bringing him to the correct conclusions, the "Cultures" part of the essay allows Chau to hoist himself by his own petard. A twenty page journey around the religious and cultural perceptions of Africa (political perceptions don't appear to exist) is highlighted by such gems as

"West Africa may be characterized by 'chronic armed conflict, extremely high rates of poverty, porous border security and governmental inefficiency and corruption'".

Well now we know all we need to know about West Africa then ...

The Militarisation of US Foreign Policy

The latest issue of Joint Force Quarterly contains a valuable article by NSA analyst Dennis Penn titled USAFRICOM: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy? The article is based on an essay written at the US Army War College earlier in the year for which Penn won an award for Outstanding Strategy Research Paper.

The analysis is not new. The most impressive to date has been the work of Stewart Patrick and Kaysie Brown at the Center for Global Development who in "The Pentagon and Global Development: Making Sense of the DOD's Expanding Role" last November pointed out that the de facto dominance of GWOT, Afghanistan and Iraq in US Policy pushed resources in the direction of the military. While Penn describes the increasing importance of non-military "Phase Zero" pre-conflict operations, Patrick and Brown focus on post-conflict non-military operations in Afhanistan and Iraq.

[T]he Pentagon has also pioneered an innovative new institutional vehicle to promote greater integration of US-government-wide stabilization and reconstruction efforts in those countries, called Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs).... The idea was to create small teams comprised of the military and civilian agencies that would provide security while running quick-impact projects that would win the hearts and minds of the local population. ... Although touted as a marriage of equals between civilian and military actors, PRTs in Afghanistan are overwhelmingly military in scope and operation.

On Africa Patrick and Brown conclude

Generally speaking, the US military is not well equipped, by its mandate and personnel, to expertly address the structural sources of underdevelopment, alienation and instability in target countries.

A third study, testimony by John Pendleton of the GAO before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in July, voices civilian concerns.

Although DOD has often stated that AFRICOM is intended to support, not lead, US diplomatic and development efforts in Africa, State Department officials expressed concern that AFRICOM would become the lead for all US government activities in Africa, even though the US embassy leads decision-making on US government non-combat activities conducted in that country. Other State and USAID officials noted that the creation of AFRICOM could blur traditional boundaries among diplomacy, development and defense(3D), thereby militarizing US foreign policy.

Penn himself concludes

The critical question is why the military is leading an organisation whose stated mission is, by definition, largely the responsibility of State. ... Intentional or not, the Government is, via its implementation of USAFRICOM, feeding the perception of a militarization of US foreign policy.

All three studies recognise that the civilian agencies are so understrength - there are more people employed as musicians in military bands than in the entire foreign service! - and under-resourced that they are incapable of meeting their side of the bargain in interagency projects. Pendleton reports that AFRICOM initially planned to staff 25 percent of its headquarters with non-DOD personnel, reduced this to 4 percent (52 positions) but has actually only employed 13.

Penn takes his conclusions one step further than the other studies. He plunges, correctly I believe, beyond foreign assistance reform, into the more central issue of National Security Reform.

To improve unity of effort, reduce peer competition, and mitigate perceptions of the militarization of foreign policy, a forward-deployed National Security Council (NSC)-level representative should be established to oversee 3D efforts in each region.

The US Army Key Strategic Issues List 2008

Every year the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College publishes its Key Strategic Issues List (KSIL), which "offers military and civilian researchers a ready reference of topics that are of particular interest to the Department of the Army and the Department of Defense". You can see the July 2008 list here and here are the lists for 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004.

I've put together a table summarising the key issues covered over the past five years for Africa here.

Compared to previous years the focus of topics is narrowing, reflecting perhaps some progress made by AFRICOM in covering the broad terrain.

Obama - Africa's Misplaced Optimism?

There are murmurs of optimism rippling around parts of Africa that seem to be expecting an Obama presidency to deliver something fresh to the continent. Dream on. It’ll be a long time coming, if at all.

Firstly Africa will be low priority. There’s a domestic agenda to put into place. There’s a war to redeploy from Iraq to Afghanistan. There’s Iran, Korea, GWOT. There’s a whole load of foreign policy agendas that will push Africa to the backburner. In the Democratic Party Platform "advancing democracy and development" comes sixth out of seven strategic goals:. a platform whose three paragraphs on Africa are as bland as a bowl of overcooked rice.

Secondly much of Obama’s idealism has steadily been remoulded over the past months into electoral pragmatism. His Middle East policy is unrecognisable from what it was at the outset of the primaries. The freshman approach to politics has been replaced with the hiring of Joe Biden as running mate: the best connected Washington insider and pro-War, pro-Israel stalwart to boot. The "pragmatic" approach to Africa is to do and change as little as possible.

Thirdly, there is still an opportunity, before it is too late and it becomes self-perpetuating, for the administration to accept that AFRICOM has been a badly conceived, chaotically planned and abominably marketed exercise. It has little credibility in Africa. The US Government Accountability Office questions "whether DOD’s concept for developing enduring relationships on the continent can be achieved.". It could and should be scrapped, but it won’t be.

Fourthly, a change in Africa policy requires human resources, only achievable through a radical restructuring of the national security and foreign service environment. The controversies surrounding AFRICOM are symptomatic of a broader, fundamental problem – the militarisation of foreign policy caused primarily by the total imbalance of financial, logistic and personnel resources available to the Pentagon compared with the rest of the administration. Democrat policy recognises the need to "build the capacity of US civilian agencies", but spends the larger part of its paragraph on the topic to espouse a new volunteer Civilian Assistance Corps. Replacing ‘hard power’ with ‘smart power’ is going to require a bit more commitment than a revamped Peace Corps.

To put my cynicism aside for a moment there are a few good things to expect: generally a more intelligent dialogue, respect for multilateral institutions, an ideology-free AIDS support package. I’m sure there are others, but you will find they don’t add up to much.