Kid Kabila and Congo’s Joyless Jubilee
Last week, the United Nations Security Council rescheduled for mid-May a planned fact-finding mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Officially, the trip was cancelled because of the...
Harrisonburg
Sudan’s Elections and the Country’s Endgame
With opposition parties likely to boycott critical parts of the Sudanese elections scheduled to begin on Sunday, not only are the polls unlikely to deliver anything close to the “democratic...
Op-eds
Shi’a in Senegal: Iran’s Growing Reach into Africa
As the Iranian regime celebrated its 31st birthday last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first ordered and then boasted that the nuclear plant at Natanz had successfully enriched uranium to 19...
Op-eds
Return of the Somali Pirates
By Dr. Peter Pham After maintaining a relatively low profile since the end of the monsoon season two months ago, Somali pirates literally shot their way back into the headlines...
Op-eds
Climate Change and Security in Africa
By Dr. J. Peter Pham For much of Africa's post-independence history, "African unity" was more an aspiration than a reality. Consequently, even when, as I...
Op-eds
The New U.S. Sudan Policy: A Preliminary Review
By Dr. J. Peter Pham After a weekend marked by leaks to the Washi...
Op-eds
Eritrea: Spoiler Exacerbates Crisis in the Horn of Africa and Beyond
By Dr. J. Peter Pham One of the frustrations with which Africa's friends have had to repeatedly cope over the years has been the seemingly utter incapacity of the African l...
Op-eds
Guinea: At the Edge of the Precipice
By Dr. Walid Phares When Captain Moussa Dadis Camara seized power the day before Christmas Eve last year following the death of longtime ruler General Lansana Conté, I wa...
Op-eds
Putting Puntland’s Potential into Play
By Dr. J. Peter Pham In last week's column, I noted that the United States military and intelligence communitie...
Op-eds
Somali Instability Still Poses Threat Even After Successful Strike on Nabhan
By Dr. J. Walid Phares The United States struck an important blow against Islamist terrorism in the Horn of Africa earlier this week when, in the middle of the day on Monday, Sp...
Op-eds
Al-Qaeda Sahara Network Spurs U.S. to Train Chad, Mali Forces
Analyzing the veritable "surge" last summer in attacks launched by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), I suggested in this column space that both the rhetoric of the group and the threat it a...
Op-eds
China’s Play for Somalia’s Oil
As this column has chronicled over the past year and a half, United States policy toward the remnants of the former state of Somalia has evolved into a sort of dramatic farce played out in the fo...
Op-eds
Selling AFRICOM
In my testimony last week before the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the United States House of Representatives, I noted that the creation of the n...
Op-eds
“Total Force” for AFRICOM
Early last month, President George W. Bush named Army General William E. "Kip" Ward to be the first commander of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). If confirmed by the Senate – hea...
Op-eds
Mired in Mogadishu
Two weeks ago a "national reconciliation congress" that Somalia's ineffectual "Transitional Federal Government" (TFG), under pressure from international donors who are its only means of supp...
Op-eds
The Indian Tiger’s African Safari
While the African travels of Chinese leaders and their troubling arms sales to regimes on the continent, have caused increasing concern in Washington and other Western capitals, India's grow...
Op-eds
The Security Challenge of West Africa’s New Drug Depots
Last week, gendarmes in the Senegal seaside resort of Nianing seized fifty-one 24-kilogram sacks containing a record 1.25 metric tons of cocaine with a street value of over $100 million....
Op-eds
Cabinda: The “Forgotten Conflict” America Can’t Afford to Forget
Because of the sense of urgency repeatedly communicated by this column as well as the parallel efforts of other "Africa hands," the precarious situation of Nigeria – which I have described...
Op-eds
Hu’s Selling Guns to Africa
In recent years, United States policy makers and analysts as well as American businesses and non-governmental organizations have begun paying closer attention to the already significant – a...
Op-eds
Al Qaeda’s Franchise in Africa
More than a year ago, I inaugurated this column with an essay whose title – "The War on Terrorism's Forgotten Front" – laid out what has been one of the recurring themes of this...