AFRICOM: America's Military Foot in Africa's Doorway

[chlamor]

On October 1 the US launched AFRICOM, the Pentagon's outpost in Africa. Commanded by a Black American general and incorporating State Department and other civilian personnel from top to bottom it is billed as a “new kind” of US military command.

Incorporating nearly all US civilian programs in Africa under its umbrella, from trade to aid to public information, AFRICOM marks the militarization of US policy toward what is already the most war-torn region in the world. AFRICOM's planners offer their twelve year intervention in Somalia, where a million out of ten million have died due to US intervention, as a "model" for the continent.

AFRICOM: America's Military Foot in Africa's Doorway
by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon

Since the end of the second world war, the US has been the dominant foreign power in Africa. Between 1950 and 1989, Africa was the target of more than a billion and a half dollars in US military aid. The Clinton administration ramped the militarization of Africa to unprecedented levels, funneling enormous quantities of arms, training and other military assistance to 50 out of the 53 nations in Africa. The Bush regime has further escalated the quantities of arms and aid and on October 3, 2008 inaugurated Africom, the Pentagon's eyes, ears, mouth, wallet and foot on the African continent.

As Asad Ismi and Kristin Schwartz in the Ravaging of Africa told us last year:

“Africa is the most war-torn region in the world, with armed conflicts going on in nine countries; Ethiopia with Somalia, civil war in Ethiopia, Uganda, Chad, Nigeria, Morocco with Western Sahara, and Algeria. The US has provided arms and military training to participants in all of these nine wars. Washington has done the same in another five wars that ended during 2002-2006. These are the long civil wars in Angola, Sierra Leone, Burundi and Liberia, as well as that in Congo-Brazzaville.

Thanks to half a century of pouring US arms stockpiles into Africa, the price of an assault rifle in Africa has for some time been cheaper than anyplace else on the planet. US military assistance programs, American arms, American general_william_ward_africomcorporations and America's insistence upon privatization of military functions are everywhere to be found in Africa. At the end of August, Africom's commander, General William E. “Kip” Ward was keynote speaker of the graduation exercises of Liberia's military training facility, which is jointly run by Lockheed-Martin subsidiary Pacific Engineering & Architecture, and DynCorp, which supplies mercenaries and torturers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Congo, Colombia, Darfur, and elsewhere. Africom then, seems to follow the traditional American practice of requiring that as much of America's military and non-military “aid” as possible is spent with politically influential US corporations.

Africom is unlike other US military commands around the world in that its command structure includes both civilian and military officials from the top to the bottom, and in that Africom will openly and directly administer all civilian programs funded through the US Dept. of State. Africom's deputy commander is Ambassador Mary C. Yates, and Africom will be in charge of all State Department, USAID and a number of other US government civilian programs in Africa, reflecting a militarization of US Africa policy from top to bottom.

In an essay titled “What is Africom Really About?” earlier this year, Daniel Volman reported attending a conference of US and African government officials at the National Defense University aimed at getting Africom up and running.

“The conference was very much a nuts-and-bolts discussion of all the practical matters of making Africom work.

“The first interesting thing was the discussion of how they define Africom's mission. The presentation on this were based on internal DoD presentations, so they were much more honest and revealing than the kind of thing that comes from the public pronouncements. The presentation specifically cited the challenge of preventing disruptions in African oil production and exports as one of Africom's six chief missions, along with meeting the challenge of China, controlling ungoverned regions and transnational extremism, dealing with instability in the Horn of Africa, dealing with instability in the Great Lakes region, and dealing with the situation in Chad/Sudan.

“A couple of other interesting points they made was to say that they saw the Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (the people who are spearheading U.S. involvement in Somalia and Ethiopia) as a model for what Africom could do in the rest of the continent. They admitted that they had made no attempt to consult with anyone at the UN while they were developing Africom and hadn't really consulted with anyone in Africa either.

“It was clear from their statements that they were very surprised and unhappy about the public response from Africans to Africom and that this was the reason that they were going to have to keep the Africom HQ in Stuttgart for the time being, although they will continue to look for African hosts and will also work on ways to station Africom staff people in less obvious and provocative ways like sending small groups to liaison with selected African military forces. They want to believe that this is just a problem of public relations and that they just have to do a better job of explaining themselves. One of the new buzzwords in Africom is 'active listening,' i.e. pretending to care what other people think.”

The fact that Africom's planners would cite Somalia as a model they'd like to extend to the rest of the continent is more than a little instructive. US involvement in that unhappy country since the 1991 overthrow of Siad Barre has resulted in constant civil war and man-made famines, topped off by a US funded invasion by Ethiopia that have killed a million people, about a tenth of Somalia's population, and driven another million from their homes. Coincidentally, Somalia is just across the Gulf of Aden from Arabia and the Gulf States, and sits atop a virtually untapped lake of oil.

Evidently, keeping Africa barefoot, hungry, sick and at war with itself is good for American business. During the bloody Congolese war, in which the US supported armies of nine nations invaded and pillaged the Congo killing at least five million of its inhabitants, US policy was focused on keeping the timber, gold, titanium, and other strategic minerals flowing to the US and its allies, regardless of the civilian death toll. At the same time, a conflict in Darfur, with somewhere between one twentieth and one fiftieth of the Congo's death toll has rallied the bipartisan US foreign policy establishment to call for open US military involvement in Darfur, perhaps because some of Sudan's oil is going to China.

Africans are not fools, and despite the clamor of a few of the continent's most discredited and craven regimes to locate Africom in their countries, probably as the ultimate insurance against coups and revolutions, Africom has not yet found an African host country. Most African governments fear being labeled as abject stooges of Africom. They fear the wrath of their own people, which is as it should be.

The questions for Americans concerned about the nation's policies in Africa are stark. The militarization of Africa, and of US policy toward Africa is a matter of bipartisan consensus, no matter who will be president come next January. Africans can be expected to resist the extension of the Somalia “model” to the rest of the continent. By now, this is business as usual. The only question is whether activists on this side of the water are prepared to somehow raise the cost of “business as usual” beyond what America's otherwise unaccountable rulers are willing to pay.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index. ... 4&Itemid=1

[stefano]

Good news is that no-one will have them (except Djibouti), so they're still in Germany.

[MinM]

President Obama stands at the "Door Of No Return" during a tour of Goree Island in Senegal Dakar

[JackRiddler]

As of 2014:

AFRICAtaylor.jpg

Through the year a bunch of threads have been started on this but none seem to have ever taken off. Here's a search result:

https://www.google.com/search?q=africom ... channel=sb

Shall we try to consolidate posts on U.S. (and also other non-African) interventions in Africa into a single thread henceforth?

Here's the rundown of current U.S. military interventions, with the official pretexts:

MAP: The U.S. military currently has troops in these African countries

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wor ... countries/

By Adam Taylor
May 21 at 8:05 pm

President Obama's announcement that United States has deployed 80 troops to Chad came as a surprise to many. But as my colleague Craig Whitlock points out, the United States already has boots on the ground in a surprising number of African countries.

This map shows what sub-Saharan nations currently have a U.S. military presence engaged in actual military operations.

It should be noted that in most of these countries, there is a pretty small number of troops. But it is a clear sign of the U.S. Africa Command's increasingly broad position on the continent in what could be described as a growing shadow war against al-Qaeda affiliates and other militant groups. It also shows an increasingly blurred line between U.S. military operations and the CIA in Africa.

More details of the troops deployed are below.

Burkina Faso

The United States has a base in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, since 2007. The base acts as a hub of a U.S spying network in the region, with spy planes departing form the base to fly over Mali, Mauritania and the Sahara, where they search for fighters from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

Congo

The United States has troops in Congo assisting the nation in the search for Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army.

Central African Republic

In April 2013, the United States had around 40 troops in Central African Republic assisting the search for the LRA.

Chad

On Wednesday, Washington announced that it would be sending 80 troops to Chad to help with the search for Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by militant Islamist group Boko Haram.

Djibouti

The U.S. military has a major base in Djibouti, Camp Lemonnier. There are around 4,000 troops there, including lots of aircraft and drones.

Ethiopia

The United States has had a military drone base at Arba Minch since 2011. The base is used to fly Reaper drones over East Africa.

Kenya

Camp Simba, near the border with Somalia, had around 60 military personnel stationed as of November 2013.

Mali

In April 2013, 10 U.S. troops were deployed to war-torn Mali to provide “liaison support” to French and African troops. The Pentagon insisted they would not be engaging in combat.

Niger

The U.S. Air Force set up a drone base in Niamey, Niger, in 2013. The White House says it has around 100 military personnel in the country on an “intelligence collection” mission.

Nigeria

At the beginning of May, a small team of U.S. troops and civilian advisers was deployed to Nigeria to join the search for the abducted schoolgirls. According to the Associated Press, these troops joined around 70 military personnel in Nigeria, with 50 regularly assigned to the U.S. Embassy, and 20 Marines there for training.

Somalia

In early 2014, the United States deployed fewer than two dozen regular troops to Somalia for training and advising purposes.

South Sudan

In December 2013, the United States deployed 45 military personnel to South Sudan to protect U.S. citizens and property in the country.

Uganda

The United States has a base in Entebbe that it uses to fly PC-12 surveillance aircraft in search of Kony's LRA. The total number of U.S. troops in Uganda is said to be around 300, and they are officially in the country to “provide information, advice and assistance” to an African Union force searching for Kony.

[stefano]

I think there's a US air base in Botswana. The last time the subject came up, if I remember right, the Botswana government denied it. The government under the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) comes in for criticism that it's too friendly to foreign interests; a large part of its revenue comes from a joint venture with De Beers (old City of London money and linked to what Carrol Quigley calls the 'Anglo-American Establishment') on diamonds.

As to the air base, maybe there isn't one if the WaPo doesn't mention it, but I've often heard about one. This is the first result from a search, about US involvement in building a facility on a Botswanan base.

US army builds P100m facility at Thebephatshwa air base
by Sunday Standard Reporter
13-10-2013

Botswana Government has given the American military permission to start construction of facilities inside the Thebephatshwa air base, the United States Embassy in Gaborone has confirmed.
...
The facilities which will cost close to P100 million will be the first known involvement of American military presence inside Thebephatshwa.

Since its inception, the premier air base, which is also a key security entry point, has been dogged by international speculation that it was a proxy American asset.

During the base’s early days there were also allegations of French involvement, all of them strenuously denied by Botswana Government.

Thebephatshwa military airbase is often adduced by international detractors including in Southern Africa and the continent at large that Botswana is an American client state.

Under pressure to prove non-American involvement the Government of Botswana has in the past conducted international media tours across the base to sell the storyline that there was no American presence inside the installation.

While no tangible evidence has ever been produced to prove the involvement of America, that stigma has however persisted.

It was on the back of such sustained perceived American involvement that to this day Botswana has continued to be derided and jibed by many states in SADC and the African Union as a puppet of the West.

“The United States, working with the Botswana Defence Force (BDF), has contracted the construction of facilities to support future, mutually-agreed bilateral and multilateral exercises at Thebephatshwa Airbase, Molepolole, Botswana,” said the American Deputy Ambassador to Gaborone, Michael Murphy in response to Sunday Standard enquiries.

Close to half a dozen military, intelligence and diplomatic sources contacted for this story said they suspected the significance of the installation could herald greater American presence in Botswana which could become a shoo-in for future transfer of the American military Africa Command (AFRICOM).

This assertion has however been dismissed by Murphy.

“We are not constructing a U.S. military base, and we are not planning to relocate AFRICOM headquarters to Botswana… This project, a direct result of Botswana hosting Exercise SOUTHERN ACCORD in August 2012, underscores the close and ongoing partnership between the BDF and United States,” continued Murphy.
...
Botswana has often been mentioned in the international media as a candidate for relocation of AFRICOM should the command have to leave Stuttgart, Germany where it is currently headquartered.

Any heavy American military presence in Botswana will conjure memories when the then President, Festus Mogae rejected gestures by the Americans in 2007 to set up in Botswana.

Mogae said at the time that he could not come up with plausible reasons to sell and justify the establishment of AFRICOM in the country.

Thebephatshwa is just across the South African border from the world's biggest (by far) platinum reserves, where labour issues at the moment are threatening to force the closing of shafts. The biggest miners are Anglo Platinum (Anglo-American group, long history with De Beers) and Lonmin (Lonrho - London and Rhodesian - also City and Rhodes/Milner connections).

Shall we try to consolidate posts on U.S. (and also other non-African) interventions in Africa into a single thread henceforth?

All non-African interventions in Africa is a bit wide, I think. US presence is a good topic for one though.

[JackRiddler]

Shall we try to consolidate posts on U.S. (and also other non-African) interventions in Africa into a single thread henceforth?

All non-African interventions in Africa is a bit wide, I think. US presence is a good topic for one though.

Africa is perpetually the subject of an imperialist great game or "scramble," with new powers such as China entering in recent years, so the different interventions tend to be related.

Very recent threads of relevance:

Kony 2012
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34193

The Obama's Plea To "Save the Girls"
viewtopic.php?p=542818

War A Africa
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=38083

[seemslikeadream]

Radical Nigerians or a CIA front?

By Askia Muhammad -Senior Editor- | Last updated: May 30, 2014 - 10:18:20 AM

A coalition of Kenyan women’s groups stage a protest in solidarity with their counterparts in Nigeria and demanding the release of the hundreds of schoolgirls abducted in Nigeria by the Muslim extremist group Boko Haram, in downtown Nairobi, Kenya, May 15. Nigeria’s government is ruling out an exchange of more than 270 kidnapped schoolgirls for detained Islamic militants, Britain’s top official for Africa said May 21, but Nigeria’s government will talk to the militants on reconciliation, British foreign office minister Mark Simmonds said, talking after a meeting with Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan.


WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) - “Boko Haram,” literally translated it means “books or Western education are forbidden.”
The North African terror faction calling itself Boko Haram has seared its way into world-wide attention, provoking anger, shock, fear and repudiation.

French President Francois Hollande, center, delivers his speech during the joint press conference ending the Paris Summit for security in Nigeria at the Elysee Palace, in Paris, May 17. Leaders from Africa as well as officials from the United States, Britain and France meet to coordinate a response to Boko Haram, the fundamentalist group that abducted more than 300 girls and is accused of hundreds of deaths in the past year alone.
‘Beyond what we know from the Wikileaks report, what many Nigerians do not know is that US embassy’s subversive activities in Nigeria fits into the long term US government’s well camouflaged policy of containment against Nigeria the ultimate goal of which is to eliminate Nigeria as a potential strategic rival to the U.S. in the African continent.’
They have shamed the government of Nigeria, the richest and most populous nation on the African continent. And they have literally hijacked the Islamic faith, resulting in denunciations of their merciless, violent tactics—most recently the kidnapping in mid-April of nearly 300 teenage girls from their boarding school in northeastern Nigeria—from Muslim scholars and faith leaders, especially those in the United States.
Their gruesome attacks have killed thousands—1,500 in Nigeria in 2014 alone.

And while U.S. officials—most notably First Lady Michelle Obama—have joined the viral social media and official diplomatic campaigns to bring about the release of the more than 200 schoolgirls who still remain in captivity, Boko Haram may in fact be a tool of U.S. Africa policy which has “killed two birds with one stone”—immobilizing the feckless Nigerian government of President Goodluck Jonathan, whose government they predict will disintegrate before elections scheduled for 2015; and tarnishing the good name of Islam.

“There’s been a long history of the U.S. government collaborating with those who have been described as religious extremists, with Afghanistan from 1978 till at least a decade later, if not longer, being ‘Exhibit A’ in that regard,” Dr. Gerald Horne, Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston told The Final Call. “Part of the U.S. strategy has been to try to disrupt and deflect those who are pushing for expansion of democratic rights or redistribution of the wealth by backing groups that tend to disrupt and destabilize such movements.

“And to that extent I would say that Boko Haram fits that prototype, particularly since the Nigerian economy has just been adjudged to be the most substantial economy on the African continent, passing that of South Africa. And given that Nigeria is a major oil producer, and oil interests wield disproportionate influence upon U.S. foreign policy, this tragic event in Nigeria, involving the abduction of girls should be considered and contemplated in that context,” Dr. Horne said.

In fact, there is ample evidence dating back at least five years that the CIA itself has been involved in the launch, the growth and the spread of Boko Haram in Northern Africa. A source with the complete library of the Wikileaks files—which were disclosed by Austrailian publisher and journalist Julian Assange—verified, when contacted by The Final Call that beginning in 2009 alone there were at least six CIA cables about Boko Haram. Two of those files were classified “For Your Eyes Only,” which is “above Top Secret,” the source said. The source did not give The Final Call permission to release its identity.


An author “LordElNu” and other sources provided this: “Wikileaks claims Boko Haram is a CIA covert operation: On June 29, 2009 a United States cable leaked by Wikileaks showed that the CIA predicted the onslaught of a deadly terrorist attack by Boko Haram two months before Boko Haram started terrorist actions.” Similar reports have been documented on AllAfrica.com and others online.

“We have already been regaled with reports provided by the Wikileaks which identified the U.S. embassy in Nigeria as a forward operating base for wide and far reaching acts of subversion against Nigeria which include but not limited to eavesdropping on Nigerian government communication, financial espionage on leading Nigerians, support and funding of subversive groups and insurgents, sponsoring of divisive propaganda among the disparate groups of Nigeria and the use of visa blackmail to induce and coerce high ranking Nigerians into acting in favor of US interests,” an anonymous author wrote on the blog “Cyber Pen” located at wonuolatahjdeen.wordpress.com.

“But beyond what we know from the Wikileaks report, what many Nigerians do not know is that US embassy’s subversive activities in Nigeria fits into the long term US government’s well camouflaged policy of containment against Nigeria the ultimate goal of which is to eliminate Nigeria as a potential strategic rival to the U.S. in the African continent.

“In this regard, the report further recalled Nigeria’s role in helping to liberate the southern African countries in the 70s and 80s in clear opposition and defiance to the interests of the United States and its western allies which resulted in setback for Western initiatives in Africa at the time,” the writer continued.

“Years, later the CIA while tactically taking advantage of growing sectarian violence in Nigeria, recruited jobless Islamic extremists through Muslim and other traditional leaders offering training indirectly to the group by use of foreign-based terror groups. A detailed analysis (follows): In December 2011 an Algerian based CIA wing gave out 40 million Naira (Nigerian currency) as a planned Long term partnership with Boko Haram with a PLEDGE TO DO MORE; Disregarding advices (sic) from experts the US armed Saudi Arabia who in turned armed Libyan rebels that in turn armed Malian rebels and Boko Haram, a chain tactically predicted by the CIA,” the report, cited by various online sites continued.

“I think you’ve touched upon something,” said Dr. Gerald Horne. “As already noted, Nigeria already has the largest economy on the African continent. Nigeria also features some wildly radical mal-distributions of wealth. That is to say you have dollar billionaires in Nigeria at the same time you have poor children by the thousands forced to labor for pennies at most. So obviously this creates favorable and fertile conditions, I’m afraid for the kind of rhetoric and kind of action that is exemplified by the group that is referred to as Boko Haram.”

Various sources, including Amnesty International have reported that the Nigerian government had a four-hour advance warning that Boko Haram would attack the girls’ school in Chibok in northeastern Nigeria, but failed to even muster a force to prevent the attack, in part because of fear among Nigerian troops that Boko Haram has weapons superior to those used by the oil-rich government’s troops.

Meanwhile, Muslims—including in one instance, even Al Qaeda—have been left to condemn the group’s horrific tactics and the kidnapping of the schoolgirls as un-Islamic, and contrary to the Holy Qur’an (the book of Islamic scripture), as well as the teachings and personal example of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad ibn Abdullah (PBUH). “Absolutely no. Absolutely no. The teaching of Islam is that, whoever teaches a girl, whoever educates a girl would be rewarded as educating a whole community. But if you educate a man, you educated one person,” Imam Kareem Finnih, who himself hails from northern Nigeria, and who now presides over a mosque in suburban Maryland, just outside of Washington told The Final Call.

“There is no contradiction. This is a group of people who have no knowledge; they do not have knowledge of Islam. What Islam says about community action—I said this in a lecture today,” Imam Finnih said of the khutbah (sermon) he delivered at the Friday Jumu’ah Prayers at his mosque. “Islam says that it is forbidden for you to kill a fellow Muslim. And it is forbidden for you to kill other religious people, unless they (have violated) you, like killing you,” he added.

“What they are saying is completely wrong. Most of these people, they are ignorant. They do not have any education. So, what are we left with, a bunch of hooligans, someone who has no life,” said Imam Finnih.

Other Islamic authorities agree. “Many groups, like Boko Haram, are distorting Sharia (Islamic law) to serve their own interests,” Dr. Sam Hamod, former Director of The Islamic Center in Washington told The Final Call. “The way they are acting and the kidnapping of the young girls is wrong, and against Islam.

“Islam makes clear in the Qur’an that innocents are not to be taken in bondage or as hostages; you fight only the soldiers of the opposition not innocent children. Too many alleged ‘imams’ are spouting lies and distorting Islam, in the name of power and money, but too few will stand up to them, even governments are afraid of them, and many Muslims stay quiet out of fear, but some must stand up or this will get worse and worse for everyone in the world,” he continued.

“It is clear to me that these Salafists like Boko Haram, Jihadis, and others are wearing a mask of Allah/God but working for the devil,” said Dr. Hamod, who is a former professor of English at Howard University.

Finally, the CIA’s, the U.S. governments, and other Western nations’ handprints are all over the formation and the arming of Boko Haram. “It’s apparent that the NATO overthrow of the Ghadhafi regime in 2011 in Libya has had manifold implications for that entire region,” Dr. Horne said. “We all know how the Ghadafi overthrow led directly to certain allies—Boko Haram seizing power in northern Mali—and we all know how that led to a French-led intervention in Mali, that has barely contained the unrest there.”

Dr. Horne continued, “I also find it striking to note, that even though Washington has offered to help to find these abducted girls, Washington supposedly has been looking for Joseph Kony, the Ugandan rebel, for months now, apparently with no success, which is quite curious because with the alleged talents of the National Security Agency and their ability to engage in surveillance, and the ability—we are told—about drones, it’s quite striking that Washington has not been able to find Joseph Kony, which makes us curious about why they would offer to try to find these abducted girls,” Dr. Horne said.

“Perhaps this is a pretext to interfere more aggressively in the internal affairs of African states, particularly oil-rich Nigeria. And I submit that in that regard, the regime of Mr. Goodluck Jonathan, the leader of Nigeria, is rather shaky,” he continued.

“You know, in Nigeria they’ve had this de facto system whereby, oftentimes the president is chosen from the North, and then there is a rotation, and the president is chosen from the Lagos region, which is further South, etc. What happened is that a leader from the North preceded Mr. Goodluck Jonathan, but he was quite ill and was forced to step down. As a result, Mr. Goodluck Jonathan succeeded him. Now those from the North say that he should step aside for the next election. He’s not willing to step aside. That’s contributing to political instability in the country, and with the mal-distribution of wealth, and this political instability it creates fertile and favorable grounds for the rise of a group like Boko Haram,” Dr. Horne concluded

[seemslikeadream]

Is the US Mil. Training of African Special Ops a prelude to disaster?
By contributors | May. 31, 2014 |

By William R. Polk
With everyone’s attention focused either on the European elections, President Obama’s speech at West Point or the Ukraine, a story by Eric Schmitt in The International New York Times of Tuesday, May 27, 2014 may not have caught your attention. I believe, however, that it provides an insight into some of the major problems of American foreign policy.
What Mr. Schmitt reports is that the US has set up covert programs to train and equip native teams patterned on their instructors, the US Army Delta Force in several African countries. The program was advocated by Michael A. Sheehan who formerly was in charge of special operations planning in the Department of Defense and is now, according to Mr. Schmitt, holder of the “distinguished chair at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.” Mr. Schmitt quotes him as saying, “Training indigenous forces to go after threats in their own country is what we need to be doing.” So far allocated to this effort, Mr. Schmitt writes, is $70 million, and the initial efforts will be in Libya, Niger, Mali and Mauritania.
How to do this, according to the senior US officer in Africa, Major General Patrick J. Donahue II, is complex: “You have to make sure of who you’re training. It can’t be the standard, ‘Has the guy been a terrorist or some sort of criminal?’ but also, what are his allegiances? Is he true to the country or is he still bound to his militia?”
So let me comment on these remarks, on the ideas behind the program, its justification and the history of such efforts. I begin with a few bits of history — Disclosure: I am in the final stages of a book that aims to tell the whole history, but the whole history is of course much too long for this note.
Without much of the rhetoric of Mr. Sheehan and General Donahue and on a broader scale, we have undertaken similar programs in a number of countries over the last half century. Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, Guatemala, Egypt, Iraq, Thailand, Chad, Angola to name just a few. The results do not add up to a success almost anywhere. Perhaps the worst (at least for America’s reputation) were Chad where the man we trained, equipped and supported, Hissène Habré, is reported to have killed about 40,000 of his fellow citizens. In Indonesia, General Suharto, with our blessing and with the special forces we also had trained and equipped, initially killed about 60,000 and ultimately caused the deaths of perhaps 200,000. In Mexico, the casualties have been smaller, but the graduates of our Special Forces program have become the most powerful drug cartel. They virtually hold the country at ransom.
Even when casualties were not the result, the military forces we helped to create and usually paid for carried out the more subtle mission of destroying public institutions. If our intention is to create stability, the promotion of a powerful military force is often not the way to do it. This is because the result of such emphasis on the military often renders it the only mobile, coherent and centrally directed organization in societies lacking in the balancing forces of an independent judiciary, reasonably open elections, a tradition of civil government and a more or less free press.
Our program in pre-1958 Iraq and in pre-1979 Iran certainly played a crucial role in the extension of authoritarian rule in those countries and in their violent reactions against us.
General Donahue suggests that we need to distinguish among the native soldiers we train and empower those who are “true to the country.” But how? We supported Hissène Habré so long that we must have known every detail of his life. He is now on trial as war criminal. General Suharto has never been charged (nor have those Americans who gave him a “green light”) for his brutal invasion of East Timor. Both probably believed that they met General Donahue’s definition of patriotism. And in Mali, our carefully trained officers of the Special Forces answered what they thought was both patriotic and religious duty by joining the insurgency against the government we (and we thought they) supported. We have a poor record of defining other peoples’ patriotism.
And, in the interest of more urgent objectives, we have been willing to support and fund almost anyone as long as we think he might be of value. General Manuel Noriega, our man in Panama, went on to spend 22 years in an American prison after we invaded his country and fought the soldiers we had trained.
Indeed, we have a poor record of even knowing who the people we train are. After the Turkish army carried out one of its coups in the 1960s, when I was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East, I asked the appropriate branch of the Defense Department who were the new leaders. All of whom had been trained in America, often several times and during years. The answer was that no one knew. Even in army records, they were just Americanized nicknames.
And, more generally, our sensitivity to the aspirations, hopes and fears of other people is notoriously crude or totally lacking. Growing out of the Cold War, we thought of many of them as simply our proxies or our enemies. Thus, we found Chad not as a place with a certain population but just as a piece of the Libyan puzzle, and today we think of Mali in the same way. Now we are talking to training “carefully selected” Syrian insurgents to overthrow Bashir. Do we have any sense of what they will overthrow him for?
Beyond these, what might be considered “tactical” issues are “strategic,” legal and even moral considerations. I leave aside the legal and moral issues — such as what justification we have to determine the fate of other peoples — as they do not seem very persuasive among our leaders. But just focus on the long term or even middle term results of the new policy: the most obvious is that we meddle in and take some responsibility for the politics of an array of countries in which we have little direct interest. And often with the obvious danger of a deeper, more expensive and more painful result. We are close to this commitment in Syria.
Less obvious is that our activities, no matter how carefully differentiated, will be seen to add up to an overall policy of militarism, support of oppressive dictatorships and opposition to popular forces. They also meld into a policy of opposition to the religion of a billion and a half people, Islam. And they do so a great expense to our expressed desires to enable people everywhere, including at home, to live healthier, safer and decent lives.
I end with a prediction: in practically every country where Mr. Sheehan’s and General Donahue’s program is employed, it will later be seen to have led to a military coup d’etat.
William R. Polk was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia from 1961 to 1965 and then professor of history at the University of Chicago where he founded the Middle Eastern Studies Center. He was also president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. He is the author of a number of books on world affairs.

[conniption]

Shall we try to consolidate posts on U.S. (and also other non-African) interventions in Africa into a single thread henceforth?

...

Very recent threads of relevance:

Kony 2012
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34193

The Obama's Plea To "Save the Girls"
viewtopic.php?p=542818

War A Africa
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=38083

~

Zïmßåßwê - Jun 29, 2008
viewtopic.php?t=18903&p=204135

[stefano]

And what does US military involvement aim for?

General Electric Co (GE.N) on Monday pledged to invest $2 billion in Africa by 2018 to boost infrastructure, worker skills and access to energy, an announcement timed to coincide with a U.S. summit meeting of nearly 50 African leaders.
[...]
GE's investments include deals to work on increased electric grid reliability during peak power demands in Algeria and to generate uninterrupted power for the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp's state oil refinery.

The company also extended for five years a "country-to-company" agreement with Nigeria to spur the development of infrastructure projects and the transfer of skills and technology, and an investment of $1 billion in railway and power equipment in Angola.
[...]
Immelt reiterated his support for the Ex-Im Bank, which will be forced to close if Congress does not renew its charter by Sept. 30.

The bank provides loans, loan guarantees and credit insurance to help private companies export goods overseas.

Algeria, Nigeria and Angola are the continent's energy giants, along with Libya. All three are cagey about partnering with the US military, but Nigeria recently accepted some 'help' in connection with the Chibok kidnapping. The Ex-Im bank needs reauthorisation in September, which it'll probably get if (as I have it) some Republican backers of the Tea Party get restrictions on financing dirty energy (ie coal) deals scrapped. So that's what'll probably happen.

[stefano]

Wait, there's more.

President Barack Obama will announce on Tuesday that U.S. businesses have committed to investing $14 billion in construction, clean energy, banking, and information technology projects across Africa, a White House official said.
[...]
The business forum will allow dozens of African heads of state to mingle with U.S. and African executives, the official said. It will focus broadly on investment in finance, infrastructure, energy, agriculture, and consumer goods.

More than 90 U.S. companies are slated to participate including Chevron Corp <CVX.N, Citigroup Inc, Ford Motor Co, General Electric Co, Lockheed Martin Corp, Marriott International Inc, Morgan Stanley and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Several African companies were also expected to attend.

[stefano]

Pentagon set to open second drone base in Niger as it expands operations in Africa

By Craig Whitlock September 1

The Pentagon is preparing to open a drone base in one of the remotest places on Earth: an ancient caravan crossroads in the middle of the Sahara.

After months of negotiations, the government of Niger, a landlocked West African nation, has authorized the U.S. military to fly unarmed drones from the mud-walled desert city of Agadez, according to Nigerien and U.S. officials.

The previously undisclosed decision gives the Pentagon another surveillance hub — its second in Niger and third in the region — to track Islamist fighters who have destabilized parts of North and West Africa. It also advances a little-publicized U.S. strategy to tackle counterterrorism threats alongside France, the former colonial power in that part of the continent.

Although the two allies have a sporadic history of quarreling when it comes to military action, U.S. and French troops have been working hand in glove as they steadily expand their presence in impoverished West Africa. Both countries are alarmed by the presence of jihadist groups, some affiliated with al-Qaeda, that have taken root in states whose governments are unable to exert control over their own territory.

In Niamey, Niger’s capital, U.S. and French forces set up neighboring drone hangars last year to conduct reconnaissance flights over Mali, where about 1,200 French soldiers are trying to suppress a revolt that erupted in 2012.

In Chad, the U.S. Air Force has been flying drones and other aircraft from a French military base to search for hundreds of schoolgirls abducted by Islamic militants in northern Nigeria.

The White House approved $10 million in emergency aid on Aug. 11 to help airlift French troops and provide midair refueling for French aircraft deployed to West Africa. Analysts said the monetary sum was less important than what it symbolized: U.S. endorsement of a new French plan to deploy 3,000 troops across the region.

“We have this confluence of interests where both countries are working much more closely than would have been thought possible just a couple of years ago,” said J. Peter Pham, an expert on African security at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.

The cooperation is a turnabout from early 2013, when France deployed troops to northern Mali to try to prevent the country from breaking apart. The Obama administration was slow to respond to requests to provide crucial logistical support to French troops, a reflection of how the two countries have sometimes worked at cross-purposes on security policy.

France is protective of its economic and political interests in West Africa. Yet in 2008 it shrank its military presence on the continent and instead opened a base in the Persian Gulf, an area that the U.S. military sees as its sphere of influence. Around the same time, the Pentagon created an Africa Command and expanded its training partnerships with French-speaking countries on the continent, to the annoyance of some officials in Paris.

In July, however, French President François Hollande announced that his country would again bulk up its forces in West Africa. Under Operation Barkhane (a term for a crescent-shaped sand dune), France will permanently deploy 3,000 troops at bases in Mali, Chad, Niger and Burkina Faso.

French leaders consulted closely with U.S. officials before the operation. Pentagon officials said they were happy to let France take the lead on the ground, enabling the U.S. Air Force to focus on drone flights and other airborne missions that it is better equipped to handle.

“They have a similar strategy and aim about what they are doing,” said Sarah Covington, a sub-Saharan Africa analyst at IHS Country Risk, based in London. “The French have been in that region for decades now and have an extremely strong presence.”

The new base in Agadez will put U.S. drones closer to a desert corridor connecting northern Mali and southern Libya that is a key route for arms traffickers, drug smugglers and Islamist fighters migrating across the Sahara.

The city was once a magnet for ad­ven­ture tourists from Europe seeking a taste of nomad culture. But rebellions by Tuareg tribesmen in recent years and an influx of Islamists have made it a more dangerous place.

In a written response to questions, Benjamin A. Benson, a spokesman for Africa Command, called Agadez “an attractive option” for a base, “given its proximity to the threats in the region.”

In February, records show, the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency solicited bids for the delivery of more than 7 million gallons of jet and diesel fuel to Agadez later this year. In July, the Air Force posted a separate solicitation to upgrade the Agadez airport runway, a project estimated to cost between $5 million and $10 million. Documents cautioned that the project was still awaiting authorization from the government of Niger.

The next month, Mahamadou Issoufou, the president of Niger, traveled to Washington to attend the Obama administration’s U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit. On Aug. 7, the day after the summit, Issoufou gave final approval to the Agadez drone base during a meeting with Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work; Army Gen. David Rodriguez, the leader of Africa Command; and several other participants, according to Nigerien and U.S. officials.

Benson, the Africa Command spokesman, declined to say how many drones or U.S. military personnel will be deployed to Agadez, saying the operation is still in the planning stages.

The Pentagon continues to broaden its drone operations in Africa, despite growing demand for the aircraft in other conflict zones.

Since June, surveillance drones have been redeployed from bases in the Middle East to fly dozens of sorties a day over Iraq. The aircraft are also sorely needed in Afghanistan as the U.S. military draws down its forces there, as well as for counterterrorism missions in Yemen and Somalia.

The Pentagon also keeps watch over northern Libya with Predator drones that cross the Mediterranean from a U.S. base in Sicily, Italy.

The U.S. military would like to increase its reconnaissance flights over Libya, where Islamist factions and tribal militias have shattered the country. Having a drone base in Agadez will make it easier to reach the vast desert terrain in southern Libya, where many itinerant Islamist fighters have regrouped after being expelled from Mali, according to security analysts.

It is unclear whether the Pentagon will continue to operate drones from Niamey, the capital, about 500 miles southwest of Agadez, though some officials said it was unlikely. About 120 U.S. troops are deployed there at a Nigerien military base adjacent to the international airport.

French forces keep their own, small drone fleet in nearby hangars. It consists of two U.S.-built Reaper aircraft, purchased last year, and an older-model Harfang drone.

In contrast to the U.S. military, which is secretive about its drone operations, the French have been eager to show off their spy aircraft. When Hollande visited Niamey in July to tout Operation Barkhane, news photographers were permitted inside the French drone hangar.

[stefano]

All about Niger. This John Irish goes some great reporting btw.

French troops edge closer to Libya border to cut off Islamists

By John Irish

PARIS Thu Oct 2, 2014 1:46pm EDT

(Reuters) - France is setting up a base in northern Niger as part of an operation aimed at stopping al Qaeda-linked militants from crisscrossing the Sahel-Sahara region between southern Libya and Mauritania, officials said.

Paris, which has led efforts to push back Islamists in the region since intervening in its former colony Mali last year, redeployed troops across West Africa earlier this year to form a counter-terrorism force.

Under the new plan, about 3,000 French troops are now operating out of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad -- countries straddling the vast arid Sahel band -- with the aim of stamping out Islamist fighters across the region. Another 1,000 soldiers are providing logistical support in Gabon and Senegal.

"A base is being set up in northern Niger with the throbbing headache of Libya in mind," a French diplomat said.

Neither France nor Niger has said where the base will be but military sources in Niger said it was likely to be around Madama, a remote desert outpost in the northeast, where Niger already has some troops based.

French officials have repeated for several months they are concerned by events in Libya, warning that the political void in the north is creating favourable conditions for Islamist groups to regroup in the barren south of the country.

Diplomatic sources estimate about 300 fighters linked to al Qaeda's North African arm AQIM, including a splinter group formed by veteran Islamist commander Mokhtar Belmokhtar, are operating in southern Libya, a key point on smuggling and trafficking routes across the region.

French and American drones are already operating out of Niger's capital Niamey.

Echoing the French push to get assets closer to Libya, U.S. officials said last month that the United States was preparing to possibly redeploy its drones to Agadez, some 750 km (460 miles) to the northeast.

Three years after they launched air strikes to help topple Muammar Gaddafi, Western powers including France have ruled out military intervention in Libya, fearing that it could further destabilise the situation given that countries across the region are backing different political and armed groups in Libya.

However, with France particularly exposed in the Sahel-Sahara region and its forces now engaged in a support role against Islamic State militants in Iraq, Paris is stepping up efforts to squeeze militants in the area.

FRONTLINE

The murder of a French citizen last week in neighbouring Algeria by former AQIM militants who pledged allegiance to Islamic State also appears to have toughened Paris' resolve.

"The approach to (fighting terrorism) is global," Army spokesman Gilles Jaron said on Thursday. "We are on the frontline in the Sahel-Sahara region and supporting in Iraq."

The French operation, dubbed Barkhane after the name of a kind of sand dune formed by desert winds, has set up its headquarters in the Chadian capital N'Djamena, but also placed an outpost in northern Chad about 200 km from the Libyan border.

Jaron said the new Niger base was still being finalised, but would have capacity for as many as 200 soldiers with aerial support. "The aim is to bring together areas that interest us. The transit points which terrorists are likely to use," he said.

There have been some successes in recent weeks. Two diplomatic sources said Abou Aassim El-Mouhajir, a spokesman for Belmokhtar's "Those Who Sign in Blood" brigade, was captured by French troops in August.

French media said he had been taken in Niger. Niger intelligence sources said French troops had passed through Madama around the time of the operation.

Jaron said four suspected militants were also captured on Sept. 24 near Gao in northern Mali, where France has handed the bulk of security control to U.N. MINUSMA peacekeeping forces.

At the same time there has been an increase in attacks on foreign troops in Mali, including the death of 10 Chadian soldiers in September.

The U.N.'s peacekeeping chief, Herve Ladsous, said last week that with many French troops leaving the north of Mali, U.N. forces were being targeted and finding it difficult to respond due to a lack of helicopters and special forces.

"It's a problem that is being resolved. We want the MINUSMA to be up to scratch so we can focus on our number one job: getting rid of AQIM," said a French defence ministry source.

[seemslikeadream]

from counterpunch

WEEKEND EDITION OCTOBER 3-5, 2014

The Infernal Logic of the ECB
The State of Land Grabs in Africa
by ALEXANDER REID ROSS
What’s the Matter with the Global Financial System?

As torrential water cannons, stones, and tear gas canisters pounded the thousands of protestors gathered outside, the European Central Bank managers met in the sumptuous Museo di Capodimonte yesterday to discuss the future of the faltering Eurozone. Only about two miles from the Piazza Dante, the ECB remained mired in miasmatic economic purgatory, producing an even more conservative than analysts anticipated.

Paul Carrel with Reuters explained the maneuvers expected over the next two years: “The ECB plans to buy asset-backed securities (ABS)—packages of reparcelled loans—with a view to spurring the market for such credit and supporting lending to the small- and mid-sized firms that form the backbone of the euro zone economy.” As to what these ABS will comprise, much remains opaque. Some speculate that ECB will pick up high-risk loans from banks in Greece and Cyprus in attempts to buoy up the most crisis-ridden region while buttressing their ability to print more money.

It is risky business, as Germany and France have declined to guarantee the purchase of junk loans in failing economies, with Hans-Werner Sinn of the German think tank IFO stating bluntly, “the ECB will finally be turned into a bail-out authority and a European bad bank.” At the same time as the declining value of the euro seems to translate into higher export revenue, the EU will begin to rely increasingly on Eastern Europe for its energy needs, while developing entrepreneurial sectors of the domestic economy.

If the plan sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a modified version of the US-style qualitative easing (aka “credit easing”), which swept through the entire global financial system after the bloated systems of mortgage-backed securities, junk loans, and credit default swaps spilled out into the repo market. While the IMF lauds quantitative easing as the savior of the world economy after 2007, it remains a high-risk strategy with immediate implications with regards to political society. Investor confidence slips as banks refuse to lend to small businesses and homeowners, while speculation emerges at the top of a precarious market. With the incoming Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, the North Atlantic economic system could be totally reconfigured in a few short years, focusing on extraction, export, and expropriation.

Financial Risks and Land Grabs

In July 2013, a critical report surfaced stemming from a debate between Senior Economist in the Trade and Markets Division at FAO Pascal Liu and the Policy Coordinator on EU Agrofuels Policy Roman Herre and produced through the Madariaga College of Europe Foundation. The Madariaga Report declared, “Fuelled by the interaction of the financial and environmental crises and by the re-creation of global liquidity through quantitative easing, transnational transactions involving large portions of land in the Global South are on the rise, posing new threats to the financial, political, and environmental stability at the global and local levels.” Because of the increased liquidity created through quantitative easing, Liu argues, the financial allure of a concomitant expansion of land expropriations in the Global South and speculation in the futures markets creates a vacuum of investment within Europe, itself. The shadow of this vacuum etiolates the Eurozone’s domestic economy, making it increasingly dependent on the global land grab.

The European Commission has attempted to parlay anxiety over risk into rational centralization by distinguishing the financial crisis of 2007 from the current model of exchange trading. Their statement from last year claims, “exchange-trading of credit derivatives improves transparency and market stability. But the banks acted collectively to prevent this from happening. They delayed the emergence of exchange trading of these financial products because they feared that it would reduce their revenues.” The EC still believes it was the collusion of banks that destabilized the world economy rather than generalized exchange-trading of junk loans.

However, the EC also states, “Among other factors, this crisis was due to systemic risks. Risks of this type are intrinsic to over-the-counter trading: if one bank defaults, others are quickly affected.” Over-the-counter trading is currently the name of the game for the global futures market, which is the playground for big banks, equity funds, and other players who want to get rich quick off of agricultural commodity prices as land grabs become a major factor in geopolitical rivalries.

World Bank in Kenya

Herre argues that land grabs should be called “control grabs,” seeking not merely land, but “the power to control land and other associated resources such as water in order to derive benefit from such control.” It is increasingly true that without any sort of global accountability, speculation and land grabs in the Global South is becoming the insurance policy for anxiety over a pending European financial collapse. At the same time, both ecological crisis and human rights catastrophes have exposed the underbelly of the financial “great game.”

In Kenya, for example, the World Bank has funded the displacement of thousands of Indigenous Sengwer people in order to pursue a development regime that includes the environmental conservation of the Cherangany Hills, the Sengwer’s homeland, as a kind of indulgence for the sins of deforestation, industrial pollution, and other environmental problems. According to the World Bank, the conservation would build “institutional capacity to manage water and forest resources, reduce the incidence and severity of water shocks such as drought, floods, and water shortage in river catchments, and improve the livelihoods of communities participating in the co-management of water and forest resources.”

After restructuring the project in 2011, the World Bank acknowledged that they “would not be able to implement the land related commitments,” effectively shirking responsibility to the Sengwer, even in the extremely modest form of land-titling. The UN identified numerous issues with the dispossession, but according to the Forest Peoples Program, a management response from the World Bank leaked earlier this week is rife with denial, proposing a basic training for staff in Kenya rather than forwarding a rational response plan.

Europe in Trouble

Far from bringing the ECB out of purgatory, the indulgences of land grabs and carbon trading schemes have led Europe to the doors of the Inferno. By virtue of its Cerberus-like nature, the systemic risks of quantitative easement are only reified through the ECB’s latest meeting, as a cycle of low domestic investor confidence and extremely low interest rates combine to shape a future of austerity and income inequality.

In the US, the big five banks own a vast amount of property because of quantitative easing, which enables them to use increasing deposits to purchase property (houses, developments, infrastructure points, stocks of resources) from the repo market at cut-rate deals. With quantitative easing, banks can purchase numerous junk loans, which will pay for themselves if a certain percentage follow through, while maintaining the potential for larger dividends after foreclosing on those junk loans that cannot be paid off. To maintain dividends, banks work with developers to transform home ownership into a rentier economy.

If the ECB is looking to deploy these asset-backed securities in Greece, it evidences a greater trajectory towards capitalist accumulation rather than delivery from crisis. In June, Alexis Tsipras, head of Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), told ECB president Mario Draghi that Greece needs reprieve from its $327 billion debt to the EU-IMF-ECB Cerberus. In 2012, Greece’s financial crisis virtually annihilated the government’s bond market making it apparent that the ECB can either forgive Greece’s debt, or intervene in the economy by purchasing assets. Draghi and his bank seem to have chosen the latter.

The ECB, IMF, and the EU seem to believe that the collusion of the major banks created the crisis of 2007, but, to quote the EC antitrust report, “when trading occurs through an exchange, counterparty risk is managed more strictly, especially because transactions are automatically settled in a central clearing house.” As the three-headed Cerberus chases its own tail in search of an incentive to develop that doesn’t begin with raw neocolonialism, Europe strides briskly through the teargas-saturated gates of the Inferno and into the clutches of a fascist revival, an emergence of right-wing populism more powerful now than the last 40 years, which threatens to suck “Fortress Europe” further into a demonstrably more xenophobic and anti-Semitic nightmare.

[stefano]

Interesting snippet from a bit about Burkina Faso:

The military stepped in after Compaore's departure, dissolving the National Assembly and imposing a curfew. On Saturday, it appointed [Colonel Isaac] Zida, deputy commander of the presidential guard, as provisional head of state.
[...]
Zida, previously considered a close ally of the president, received counter-terrorism training in the United States in 2012 on recommendation from the U.S. Embassy in Ouagadougou. He attended a second U.S. military course in Botswana.

His was the second recent takeover by a U.S.-trained military officer in the region after Amadou Sanogo, a captain in the army of neighboring Mali, overthrew President Amadou Toumani Toure in 2012.

My reading is that the Americans stayed out of the drama last week, but Zida kept it pretty tidy at the weekend. It's probable that the civilian opposition was encouraged to go home on Saturday and Sunday in exchange for some positions in the about-to-be named civilian government, and that foreign powers facilitated these deals.

edit - I left out the punchline in that quote!

The coup [in Mali] allowed al Qaeda-linked Islamists to seize Mali's desert north and raised questions about whether the U.S. military was doing enough to instill respect for democratic governance in the foreign officers it trained.