Thinking about Terrorism and Other Security Challenges in Africa

In last week's column, surveying developments in the former Somalia, Sudan, the Maghreb and Sahel, Nigeria and West Africa, and the rest of the continent, I concluded that “Through the creation of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) and other initiatives, which this column has consistently advocated, Africa is no longer the 'forgotten front' in the struggle against terrorism that it had been just a few years ago. However, there is still much to be done in what is, indeed, a 'long war.'”

The stand-up of AFRICOM – which achieved initial operating capacity this past year and is mandated to achieve full status as America's tenth unified combatant command by September 30, 2008 – is the subject of an article by Sean McFate, a former officer in the 82nd Airborne Division who has served as principal architect of several U.S. peacebuilding efforts across Africa, including the Liberian Security Sector Reform Program. McFate's study, which appears in the current issue of Military Review, a refereed research journal published since 1922 by the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, home of the Army's Command and General Staff College, rightly begins with the premise that “in many ways AFRICOM is a post-Cold War experiment that radically rethinks security in the early 21st century based on peace-building lessons learned since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” (Full disclosure: I am referenced several times in the piece.) Analyzing AFRICOM's origins, timing, strategy, and composition, McFate concludes:

    Strategically, AFRICOM will narrow this gap [between security and development] by prioritizing conflict prevention and post-conflict transition over traditional “fighting and winning wars.” This represents a major shift in military strategy, and it requires a holistic interagency approach to security, hence AFRICOM's extraordinary civilian-heavy structure and unprecedented civilian deputy commander. Tactically, AFRICOM will narrow the gap through security sector reform and other programs that professionalize forces, promote good governance, and help Africans improve their own security … Will it work? Clearly it is too early to tell, with major challenges ahead … [but the AFRICOM strategy] is a promising one, suggesting that there is sufficient reason to be hopeful.

With a view toward contributing to the overall success of this initiative which this column has advocated for, welcomed, and promoted, as well as continuing the dialogue over “best practices” which, as McFate argues in his essay, is critical if AFRICOM is to pioneer a new approach to strategic engagement of Africa, I would like to propose several pointers which policymakers and analysts, both military and civilian, ought to keep in mind when approaching terrorism and other security challenges on the continent, especially in this important transition year.

1. Approach Africa and its security challenges realistically. If Africa is to get its due as a region of increasing economic, social, political, and geostrategic importance, it will not do continue viewing the continent through the rosy lenses with which some observers insist on employing. As American University scholar George B.N. Ayittey, who originally hails from Ghana, argued in his hard-hitting 1999 volume Africa in Chaos that “the attribution of Africa's crises solely to external forces is intellectually deficient.” While acknowledging that “it is true that colonialism and Western imperialism did not leave Africa in great shape,” Ayittey nonetheless assigned most of the blame for the continent's sorry state of developmental progress to the post-colonial state: “Africa's condition has been made immeasurably worst by internal factors: misguided leadership, systematic corruption, capital flight, economic mismanagement, senseless civil wars, political tyranny, flagrant violations of human rights, and military vandalism.” The same principle applies to external challenges faced by contemporary Africa, including international terrorism, especially that originating with or involving Islamist extremists. Constant repetition of mantras about the continent's relatively pacific indigenous traditions of Islam, while undoubtedly true, will neither diminish the number of soft targets across the continent nor the opportunities offered by its vast ungoverned spaces for the radicals to take shelter and/or recruit.

Conversely, nothing is achieved by alarmism or otherwise blowing the strategic challenges out of proportion. While Africa may well be the “next front” in the war on terrorism, the main theatre in the conflict will remain the Greater Middle East for the foreseeable future and such transnational threats may present themselves on African soil will likely be spillovers from other conflict zones or alignments of African extremists with existing global networks, as is the case with al-Qaeda's franchise operation on the continent, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), formerly the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC).

2. Calibrate properly the challenges and the responses. What is required is the correct assessment and prioritization of Africa's security challenges, especially those relating to transnational terrorism. The threat faced in the highly-developed urban centers of South Africa is entirely different from those confronted in the vast empty spaces of the Sahara. Consequently what resources AFRICOM might bring to bear in a given situation – assuming it is even welcome to do so, since some governments, like Pretoria's, have already signaled their inclinations to the contrary – will need to vary considerably, as will the capacities it will need to develop, both within the U.S. military and civilian partner agencies and in cooperation with allies.

Working with allies means not only forging new bonds with African countries, but also strengthening our strategic and operational ties on the continent with America's enduring partners. As I reported last month, a number of Western governments – including the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese – have already been working in cooperation with the United States to build up the military capacities of African countries. This type of coordinated, complementary effort needs to be expanded, especially given not only the limited resources which AFRICOM will have even in the best of all worlds, but also the steady reduction of their presence on the African continent by the former colonial powers of Europe.

3. Think broadly about potential partners. From the start, AFRICOM sought greater interagency coordination with the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other government agencies. A senior diplomat, Ambassador Mary Carlin Yates, who had previously served as the American envoy in Burundi and Ghana, was appointed deputy to the commander for civil-military activities (DCMA). According to a recently updated Congressional Research Service report to Congress, Africa Command: U.S. Strategic Interests and the Role of the U.S. Military in Africa, the DCMA “will direct AFRICOM's civil-military plans and programs, and will be responsible for the policy development, resource management and program assessment of AFRICOM's various security cooperation initiatives.” (The document quotes me to the effect that “the mission of AFRICOM will necessarily require a major break with conventional doctrinal mentalities both within the armed services themselves and between government agencies.”)

McFate's article argues that AFRICOM needs court partners like non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other private voluntary organizations, noting that “these organizations often know the African lay of the land better than DOD, have decades' worth of operational know-how, are development experts, and have access to places that may be denied to the U.S. military. Moreover, NGOs (both developmental and humanitarian) and DOD have complementary interests in terms of securing development and providing support for complex humanitarian crisis response.”

I have previously argued for that the new command needs to embrace contractors and other civilian personnel as force multipliers with the “Total Force.” I would now add that U.S. commercial enterprises need to also be engaged. While it is certainly not the role of the U.S. military to serve as facilitators for American businesses – who, in turn, would certainly not always benefit from close identification with the official U.S. government actions – there will be occasions when the convergence of economic and security interests in Africa might suggest synergies. Certainly countries which open to trade and other mutually beneficial relations with America will be likelier to cooperate with U.S. security interests and U.S. businesses are often the first contact that many Africans will have with Americans. Furthermore, free markets, for which security and stability are conditions sine qua non, increase prosperity which, in turn, helps alleviate the poverty and deprivation which terrorists can exploit.

4. Address Africans' perceptions of their security needs. In an article last year for the journal Comparative Strategy, I noted that “while both public and private preoccupation in the United States tends to focus on 'international terrorism,' most African governments are more concerned with the threat of 'domestic terrorism,' cases which rarely receive any press in the American media.” As I detail in the study, the difference can be attributed not only to international and domestic politics, but also legal authorities of reference. Thus I argued:

    There are very real consequences to these legal distinctions, including funding for counterterrorism and plain old attention by policymakers. Of course, the goals of international and noninternational terrorist groups differ in both objective and scope of activity. However, nothing prevents international terrorist groups from making alliances of convenience with noninternational terrorist groups, while the latter can expand their scope to include international powers that might be viewed as supporting the local authorities against whom they fight.

Hence, while, with certain exceptions, the “global war on terror” does not rank very high in the security prioritizations of many African governments, insufficient “internally-oriented” capacities in areas like law enforcement, intelligence, and basic military skills do. By privileging these African priorities, in partnership with individual African governments as well as appropriate regional organizations, the United States will ultimately achieve its own national interest by improving the local security environments.

5. Develop a comprehensive national strategy for Africa. While AFRICOM represents a momentous development in U.S. engagement with Africa, by itself a combatant command, no matter how “interagency” and “pioneering,” does not substitute for a clearly articulated national strategy. While security is, arguably, the most basic requisite both for American relations with the countries of the continent and for their own development, it is not in and of itself sufficient. If all elements of national power, “soft” as well as “hard” are to be brought to bear on this commitment to a continent, then a comprehensive strategy must be articulated. In early 2006, for example, the People's Republic of China published an official document, China's African Policy, which sought to “present to the world the objectives of China's policy towards Africa and the measures to achieve them, and its proposals for cooperation in various fields in the coming years, with a view to promoting the steady growth of China-Africa relations in the long term and bringing the mutually-beneficial cooperation to a new stage.” While clearly Beijing's white paper is to be taken for what it is – a product for public consumption prepared by a regime that is not particularly notable for its transparency – the document is nonetheless a point of both internal and external reference for which no counterpart exists in Washington.

Alongside developing a more comprehensive strategic approach to Africa, U.S. policymakers need to begin thinking about better coordination. While AFRICOM has made tremendous strides towards achieving greater interagency coordination, it will always remain a Department of Defense endeavor, institutionally at odds with the Department of State's Bureau of African Affairs, which does not even cover the same area of responsibility (the five North African states, in Foggy Bottom's organizational chart, are the province of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs). As Africa increasingly plays a strategically influential role in both global affairs and U.S. interests abroad, the time may come when Washington needs to develop some sort of coordination mechanism for all Africa-related concerns. While the model is not without its complications, some lessons might be learned from France's deft management of relations with its former African colonies, a task which for decades was entrusted to a small office in the Elysée presidential palace, the legendary “cellule Africaine” (“African cell”).

In the end, the establishment of AFRICOM is only one step in a process of continent-wide security-building that will likely be generational in length and scope. Nonetheless it is a significant advance for U.S. strategic engagement of Africa, one for which 2008 will be a decisive year.

– J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., as well as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.

Dr. Pham is the author of over two hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).

In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies. He is also a frequent contributor to National Review Online's military blog, The Tank.