AFRICOM Stands Up

By Dr. J. Pham

A year and a half after it was first announced by President George W. Bush, the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) becomes fully operational as the Pentagon's sixth regional combatant command yesterday. The new structure replaces an antiquated structural framework inherited from times when the continent was barely factored into America's strategic calculus and thus military responsibility for Africa was parceled out between the European, Central, and Pacific Commands in a bureaucratic version of the colonial scramble. As one who has used this column to advocate for AFRICOM, hail its creation, and continually defend the initiative, I cannot but be elated by the milestone.

AFRICOM's mission is defined according to a statement approved in May by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates:

    The United States Africa Command, in concert with other U.S. government agencies and international partners, conducts sustained security engagement through military-to-military programs, military-sponsored activities, and other military operations as directed to promote a stable and secure African environment in support of U.S. foreign policy.

What that document does not spell out are the key strategic interests which drive American foreign policy in Africa. Broadly defined, however, these are three in number:

The first is, in the context of the ongoing global war on terrorism, the necessity of preventing of Africa's poorly governed spaces being exploited to provide facilitating environments, recruits, and eventual targets for Islamist terrorists – all potential threats underscored by the recently increased terrorist attacks in Algeria of “al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” (AQIM) and the ongoing insurgency led by al-Qaeda-linked Islamists in the territory of the former Somali Democratic Republic as well as the challenge of Somali piracy and its possible linkages to the Islamists.

The second is protecting access to hydrocarbons and other strategic resources which Africa has in abundance and promoting the integration of African nations into the global economy – a task which includes assuring against the vulnerability of those natural riches as well as ensuring that no other interested third parties, including China, India, Japan, and Russia, obtains monopolies or preferential treatment.

The third is empowering Africans and other partners to cope with the myriad humanitarian challenges, both man-made and natural, which afflict the continent with seeming disproportion – not just the devastating toll which conflict, poverty, and disease, especially HIV/AIDS, exact on Africans, but the depredations of regimes like the Arab Islamist military dictatorship in Sudan and that of the aging Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

The birth of the new command has not been easy. To some Africans with memories of liberation struggles still fresh in their minds, the idea smacked of a neocolonial effort to dominate the continent anew – a notion not entirely unreasonable given the history of efforts by some erstwhile European imperial powers to continually meddle in the internal affairs of their former colonies as witnessed by France's nearly three dozen interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa (see my report two years ago on French actions in Côte d'Ivoire). Others, recalling the rather episodic history of U.S. commitments to Africa, questioned the sustainability of the new effort. Still others, noting the increased attention paid by U.S. analysts to China's role in Africa, worry about the possible polarization of the continent in some sort of new scramble between the great powers of the 21st century. Nor were all the skeptics abroad: last year I testified at a congressional hearing that was billed as “Africa Command: Opportunity for Enhanced Engagement or the Militarization of U.S.-Africa Relations?”

The concerns, while mostly legitimate, are also ironic insofar as AFRICOM's mission is premised on the acknowledgment that a go-alone, military-only approach is counterproductive and, in any case, the amount of development, relief, and other U.S. government assistance flowing to Africa dwarfs the resources available to the new command. Every senior military and civilian official at AFRICOM with whom I have spoken knows that, while traditional “hard power” operations remain a responsibility of the new combatant command, it is “soft power” instruments such as diplomatic outreach, political persuasion, and economic programs, which will deliver success to U.S. policy in Africa. As a result, AFRICOM has pursued more extensive interagency cooperation with the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other government agencies, than other regional combatant commands. In addition to a military deputy commander, AFRICOM has a civilian deputy to the commander for civil-military affairs – currently Ambassador Mary Carlin Yates, a career foreign service officer who previously served as U.S. envoy in Burundi and Ghana – who is responsible for the command's cooperation with the various agencies and directs its health, humanitarian assistance, and security sector reform programs.

As current U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown, while achieving security is a precondition for development, progress on development is integral for security. Hence, as the Pentagon has formally recognized in its 2005 Directive 3000.05 on the Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations, “stability operations” now ought to “be given priority comparable to combat operations” with the short-term goal of providing the local populace with security, essential services, and meeting its humanitarian needs and the long-term objective of helping to “develop indigenous capacity for securing essential services, a viable market economy, rule of law, democratic institutions, and a robust civil society.” The most recent Quadrennial Defense Review, that of 2006, emphasized that “by alleviating suffering and dealing with crises in their early stages, U.S. forces help prevent disorder from spiraling into wider conflict.”

With these understandings virtually embedded in its DNA, AFRICOM's overall objectives are focused on the nexus between security as a prerequisite for development and development as preventative for insecurity. This means, however, that, without prejudice to preparedness for kinetic operations, defense intelligence activities, and other functions, the command will necessarily privilege military training with partner nations, working with Africans to build their regional security and crisis response capacity. In fact, as chronicled in this space over the course of the past year, the various programs and other initiatives for which the command will assume responsibility largely consist of building up the capacity of land and maritime forces of African partners. The activities have ranged from strengthening regional cooperation against terrorism in the Maghreb and Sahel to helping train and equip peacekeepers and assisting the African Union regions in the creation of their standby brigades to enhancing the largely underdeveloped maritime domain awareness and capabilities of Africa's littoral states.

In addition to engaging other agencies in the U.S. government and African partners, AFRICOM has collaborated with and will also increasing work with America's traditional allies, many of whose militaries have historical memory, cultural awareness, and operational knowledge of the African theatre which, by and large, our personnel have not had the occasion to acquire. French, Portuguese, and other allied officers have deployed to the Gulf of Guinea with the Africa Partnership Station program overseen by the U.S. Sixth Fleet, while vessels from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Pakistan, and other countries have participated in the U.S. Fifth Fleet-led Combined Task Force 150, which helps provide maritime security in the dangerous waters off the Somali coast. In addition to personnel from the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Program's member states – Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia – allied officers from France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands have also participated in that initiative's joint exercises. At the time I visited the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) earlier this year, officers from Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Kenya, Pakistan, Romania, Seychelles, Mauritius, South Korea, Uganda, Yemen, and the United Kingdom were serving on its staff, not just as liaisons, but fully-embedded personnel.

AFRICOM represents not only a new institutional framework for U.S. engagement with Africa, but also a significant shift in the United States' strategic paradigm from military reaction to threats to a preventative approach that fosters human security through conflict prevention and, where necessary, post-conflict stabilization operations. Will it ultimately work? Can a military culture which has traditionally emphasized spearheading combat operations adapt to working in a cooperative interagency process? Is it possible to shift from longstanding U.S. preferences for bilateral partnerships to work with multilateral regional and subregional partners, many of which will have limited capacity? Is it even feasible to build a single organization that, as AFRICOM's commander, General William E. “Kip” Ward, told a congressional committee earlier this year, “will benefit the citizens of the United States and the people of Africa, and provide a model that advances interagency cooperation in conducting security assistance” all at once? Time alone will tell, but given the strategic interests at stake, both for the United States and for its African partners, it is an effort certainly worth undertaking.