FT - What the US’s Africa command does

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What the US’s Africa command does
By Christopher Thompson

Published: June 19 2010 00:52 | Last updated: June 19 2010 00:52


General William “Kip” Ward
Late one Monday morning last September, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan was driving outside Baraawe, a fishing village 150 miles south of Mogadishu, Somalia’s anarchic capital. A boyish-looking 30-year-old, Nabhan was one of Africa’s most wanted men. At just 18, according to intelligence sources, he took part in the 1998 US embassy bombings in east Africa and, four years later, played a key role in a day of attacks against Israeli tourists in Kenya. Like many other jihadis in east Africa, Nabhan, who was of Swahili Arab origin, had found his way to Islamist-controlled Somalia, where he had aligned himself with militias allied to al-Qaeda.

It was the end of Hagaa, the summer dry season, and Nabhan stopped his two-car convoy for a late breakfast. Shortly afterwards, at around 1pm, “Operation Celestial Balance” arrived. Four US military helicopters came over the horizon and, say eyewitnesses, engaged Nabhan and his fellow travellers in a fierce gunfight. Twenty minutes later, Nabhan and his companions lay dead. Commandos abseiled down from the helicopters, surveyed ­Nabhan’s Toyota Land Cruiser and carried away his remains.

The assassination was co-ordinated several hundred miles away, at Camp Lemonier, in the neighbouring east African state of Djibouti. Situated on the dusty, rain-starved outskirts of Djibouti City, next to the Indian Ocean, the base is home to the 2,000 US military personnel that comprise the ­“Combined Joint Task Force for the Horn of Africa”.

The US has agreements with at least 13 African governments for temporary use of its local military bases – dubbed “lily pads” – as and when it needs, but Camp Lemonier is its most conspicuous presence in Africa. Security is tight, the walls are heavily fortified and, in contrast to the neighbouring French base, whose legionnaires frequent the prostitute-filled bars in the town centre, its personnel tend not to leave the blast-proof perimeter. The camp was established in 2002 as a base for small groups of special forces tasked with tracking down terrorists in the Horn of Africa. But in the past eight years it has grown, in step with US foreign policy in Africa, to become a much larger and more sophisticated operation. Since 2008, Camp ­Lemonier has been a mainstay of Africom, the Pentagon’s sixth and newest military command, America’s first military structure of the post-9/11 era, and a ­controversial idea since its inception.

. . .

Just over a decade ago, a national defence review concluded that the US had “very little” strategic interest in Africa. According to Peter Pham, a neocon Africa policy expert and part-time Pentagon adviser at Virginia’s James Madison University, the continent was a “neglected stepchild” of US foreign policy. “Policy there was predominantly framed in terms of humanitarian concern – the Aids epidemic, drought and so on,” explained Pham.

That changed in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan, when the world’s “ungoverned spaces” began attracting concern. Remote areas outside traditional zones of geopolitical importance suddenly became potential havens for terrorists – and Africa’s identity changed. “Myself and a few other ­academics had been kicking around the idea of a combatant command for Africa since the late 1990s, without much success,” said Pham. “When the Bush administration suddenly saw these ungoverned spaces as a cause for concern, I thought: ‘If you’re looking for ungoverned areas, porous borders and weak states, then look no further than Africa.’ That created a buzz.”

In 2002, the US National Security Strategy acknowledged for the first time that conditions in sub-Saharan Africa threatened “both a core value of the US – preserving human dignity – and our strategic priority – combating terror”. Two years later, North Africa and its population of young, unemployed Muslim men became a key source of jihadis in Iraq (contributing about 10 per cent of foreign fighters). In 2005, Major-General Douglas Lute, then in charge of Central Command, which oversees Iraq and ­Afghanistan, publicly predicted that terrorist leaders caught up in the fighting were likely to relocate to east Africa – although there is little evidence that foreign jihadis have landed anywhere other than Somalia.

Equally pressing has been Washington’s other African concern: energy. West Africa’s large, under-explored reserves of low-sulphur crude oil are perfectly placed for shipment to America’s east coast refineries. In 2006, when the Department of Defence said that Africa “holds growing geopolitical importance” for the US, 16 per cent of its crude came from the continent. Today, Africa supplies more oil than Saudi Arabia to America.

Africa’s growing stature – as a source of both instability and opportunity – made its old home in the US military command structure increasingly uncomfortable. Responsibility for the continent had been shared between the Pentagon’s European, Middle Eastern and Pacific regional commands, and in September 2006, General Bantz Craddock, the new head of European ­Command, told Congress that Africa was his “greatest security stability challenge”. Action duly followed. Six weeks before he resigned as secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld assembled an advisory commission that would lead to the creation of the Unified Military Command for Africa, or Africom.

Africom’s first leader is General William “Kip” Ward. The US military’s only serving African-American general, Ward may be the first to keep a Ugandan walking stick by his desk, its handle carved into the shape of a ­roaring lion’s head. “It’s a sign of authority,” he said.

. . .


Action men: General Ward meets a delegation from Ghana in the Africom conference room

We were talking at Africom’s unlikely headquarters in the suburbs of Stuttgart. A distinctly European sleet was falling outside, but Ward had done his best to strike an African note indoors. In fact, his office resembled the den of a 19th-century explorer. Wood-panelled walls were hung with tribal art: sceptres, totems and sombre-looking masks. It ­contrasted somewhat with the person behind the oak desk, wearing green camouflage fatigues. Ward, who is 60, appears the consummate soldier: polished black boots, rigid posture, a chest-full of medals and a greying short back and sides. When I walked into his office, he stood upright, greeted me with both hands and patted me on my shoulder as I sat. This, as I learned later from Africom staff, was Ward’s “aura” – charming and imposing in equal measure.

As a young infantryman, Ward served at the heart of the cold war, patrolling the Iron Curtain just an hour from his current office, watching Soviet tanks. But since the early 1990s, his career has read as a textbook of “new security threats”, the sort of low-intensity, diffuse and complex military ­situations that have superseded more familiar nation-state warfare.

Just before his appointment to Africom in October 2007, Ward spent six months as George W. Bush’s security envoy to Israel and Palestine. Hamas had been elected in Gaza and the US peace roadmap was in tatters. ­Nevertheless, Ward quietly helped persuade Israel to reopen some West Bank roads and bolstered the Palestinian government’s security forces to rein in extremists. They were modest gains, but they caught the eye of Congress. When I asked him what his strategy had been, Ward replied: “We may disagree on the big issues, but there are practical steps that we can all agree on.”

He had followed a similar philosophy on his first deployment to Africa. Almost 20 years ago, Ward was in Somalia, taking part in America’s signal military mission in Africa of recent times. He led a US Mountain Division brigade in President George H.W. Bush’s “Operation Restore Hope”, an attempt to secure humanitarian relief for starving Somalis caught up in vicious clan fighting. Despite initial success, Restore Hope was overshadowed completely by the deaths of 18 US soldiers in Mogadishu on October 3 1993, a disaster burned into the memory of succeeding US presidents and, later, the American public, by the film Black Hawk Down.

Ward’s own experience, however, was formative. “It was uncontrolled – you had pockets of folk who used vehicles and guns to just demand local people to pay them. People were not being fed. Relief supplies were being held hostage to this lawlessness, this lack of security,” he told me.

Ward responded by assembling his squad leaders and meeting the elders from more than a dozen different clans. With violence all around, they sat down and lunched on roast goat-meat and tea. “That threat was something that took more than military might [to suppress],” Ward said. “It was all about dealing with the established leadership structure. You get to them by sitting down and talking. We let them know we were here to bring relief to their people – and that we would not tolerate that being interfered with.”

. . .

Combining force and negotiation is something that Ward learned growing up in working-class Baltimore. “I was a bad egg. If someone looked at me funny, I’d just knock them out,” he said. That lasted until Ward’s father, a postman who had served in a segregated military unit, intervened. “He taught me the business of being respectful of others and understanding different points of view – that you don’t resort to violence as your first course of action.”

Ward has needed a thick skin to withstand widespread scepticism in Africa about the need for a US military headquarters overseeing the continent. My first meeting with him took place in January, when the command was in the middle of a PR campaign intended to counter a storm of negative comment since Africom became an independent entity in late 2008. Over the past 18 months, Ward’s current mission has been characterised as an imperialist landgrab in editorials from Cairo to Cape Town. An article in Ghana’s Accra Mail described it as “the USA’s hidden battle for Africa”.

Not that Africom’s headquarters looks like a neo-colonial citadel. ­Bordered by a pine forest on one side and arable fields on the other, Africom is more like a suburban office development than a military facility. Somewhat unusually for a barracks, many of the employees are middle-aged, giving the base something of a Dad’s Army feel. The only visible piece of military hardware is an antique Sherman tank that sits on a lawn bordered with ash trees. It’s a bizarre place to be associated with Africa.

Africom’s leaders insist it was their decision not to base the command on the continent it oversees. “We can do the job fine from here,” Ward told me. The reasons they give are infrastructure – or rather the lack of it – in Africa, and precedent: Centcom, which covers the ­Middle East, is run from Florida. But these are not the only reasons. Of the 54 states on Africom’s radar, only civil war-wrecked Liberia publicly invited the new US military command to base itself there. An Africom spokesperson described the prospect of late-career Pentagon bureaucrats moving to ­equatorial Africa as unlikely.

Its location outside the continent also suits Africom’s intention to define itself as a hands-off military player. The nightmare in Somalia means that America still walks gingerly in Africa, and since taking office last year, Barack Obama has been keen to engender a “new moment of ­promise” across the Atlantic. With this in mind, even as US military involvement in Africa has deepened, occasional “kinetic” inter­ventions such as the Nabhan assassination have been kept to a ­minimum. Most of Africom’s work is what the Pentagon calls “military-to-­military”. Employing a mantra heard throughout Africom, Ward defined its mission thus: “We’re here to help enable our African partners to provide security for themselves.”

. . .

In December, I travelled to the bush to see what this kind of work looks like. On a deserted plateau in djibouti, a group of African soldiers kitted out with Soviet-era AK-47s and knock-off Ray-Bans waited patiently behind waist-high walls of sandbags, surrounded by goats. Behind them, military-green tents stood out against the ochre of the hills. This was Rwabatt, an elite contingent of Rwandan troops, and they were taking part in an exercise in a fictional country called “Canara”. Rwabatt is expected to form part of the 7,000-strong rapid reaction force at the heart of east Africa’s first regional army, known as “Easbrig” (East African Standby Brigade).

Easbrig was the African Union’s idea. From 2015, the force will be deployed to keep the peace across the continent. But with the US unwilling to commit large numbers of its own soldiers to Africa, it has also become a focus for Africom. Since 2004, the US has poured huge resources into initiatives such as Easbrig, using private contractors and military advisers to train almost 60,000 African soldiers such as the Rwandans I encountered. Africom has also trained Congolese special forces to operate in the country’s mineral-rich forests and reformed virtually the entire Liberian national army. Easbrig is an example of what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls “smart power” – a mixture of military might and nation-building that bears a resemblance to Rumsfeld’s concept of the “long war”.

Like his friend General David Petraeus, who overhauled the counter-insurgency in Iraq and now leads Central Command, Ward is part of the new breed of US military commanders breaking down traditional barriers between development, diplomacy and defence. The Pentagon calls this a “3D” approach and Africom stands at its most extreme, experimental edge. Unusually for a military command, Africom has civilians from the State Department and USAid, the development agency, embedded in its structure. In the field, meanwhile, Africom soldiers frequently have medics and engineers alongside them to help seek out so-called “enablers” – community ­leaders whose allegiance is crucial in the war for hearts and minds.

However, this complicated approach has not helped to soften criticism of Africom. In fact, it has made it worse. Foremost is the charge that the command is militarising humanitarian aid, an accusation borne out by its ­funding. Between 2007 and 2009, Africom’s budget has tripled, to $310m, while Africa resources at the US State Department have dwindled. Several critics have likened Africom to a Trojan horse, using the cover of ­humanitarian aid to pursue America’s real strategic interests.

“The notion of a benign US combatant command is an enigma to those who clearly understand the need for the US to secure access to Africa’s natural resources, especially oil, and to establish bases from which to destroy ­networks linked to al-Qaeda,” said Mark Malan, a South African peacekeeping expert at the US Army War College. “When the US promotes a combatant military command in terms of development and humanitarianism, Africans will inevitably suspect that the true story is being kept from them.”

Indeed, Africom’s work can take on a surreal quality, with teams vaccinating cows and digging wells alongside weapons training. I was even told of a “dental platoon” dispatched to an isolated African village to perform molar extractions. Ward insists that such flexibility is necessary to respond to ­Africa’s combination of challenges. “Our approach recognises very substantially the fact that we, as the military, are not the only instrument that is required to bring stability,” he said. “You have to have development as well.”

But other critics of Africom question whether soft power and smart development are really the answers to its most pressing priority: the business end of counter-terrorism. The scale of the task was made plain on Christmas day by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, otherwise known as the “underpants bomber” – the first sub-Saharan African to be charged with terrorism in the US after he allegedly tried to blow up a plane over Detroit.

Abdulmutallab, who is 23, grew up in Kaduna, a city in Nigeria already under the scope of “Operation Enduring Freedom – Trans Sahara”, a $100m-a-year counter-terrorism operation run by the US in 10 countries that border the Sahara. In exchange for training and hardware, the region’s governments are meant to keep internal threats from spilling over into other countries. This avoids the need for the politically complicated presence of American boots on the ground – if not the perception that Africom is also bolstering several of the continent’s “Big Men”.

. . .

For the moment, some dangers appear contained. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the group’s only official African franchise, made headlines in the summer of 2009 with a string of slayings across the Sahara. In the space of a month, militants executed a British hostage in Mali, an American aid worker in Mauritania and a senior Malian army officer in his home, raising fears that al-Qaeda was building a permanent base in the Sahelian belt, below the Sahara desert. But after battles with US-trained Algerian and Malian special forces, that hasn’t happened – at least “not yet,” as one senior Africom intelligence official put it, before quickly warning that the region’s expanding population and shrinking resources mean that the threat of unrest and religious extremism will not disappear any time soon.

In Somalia, however, America’s recurrent sore, there is not even temporary stability. Earlier this year, the country’s Islamist opposition, which calls itself “Al Shabaab” or “The Youth”, declared an alliance with Osama bin Laden. The announcement was prompted in part by a consignment of 40 tonnes of weapons delivered to Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, the country’s nominal president, in US shipping containers. Since then hundreds of people have been killed in shelling and bomb attacks in Mogadishu as the rebels have extended their control of the country. The US insists it has no intention of becoming directly involved in the Somali conflict, but there may soon be no government to prop up – even indirectly. President Ahmed currently controls little more than Mogadishu’s port, airport and a few dilapidated city blocks. America’s only official role, meanwhile, remains training battalions of UN troops from Uganda and Burundi that serve as Ahmed’s de facto army.

As the situation in Somalia deteriorated, I returned to Stuttgart for the last time. It was “African-American History Day” at the base and Ward was giving prizes in the annual soul-food cook-off. When we eventually sat down I asked him whether Somalia was turning into Africom’s first war. “[The US] has said it will support the Somali government with governance and ­security,” he said, adding that several African countries had offered to send troops and that Africom was standing behind them. “Do I see American soldiers in Somalia doing that kind of work?” he asked. “No, I do not. But I see a role for providing assistance.”

Afterwards, Ward invited me to the day’s main event – a “unity walk” round the base in which soldiers commemorated the US civil rights marches. It was a blustery afternoon. As I was waved out of the gate, past a genteel oak tree, I thought of the very different, fortified exit at Camp Lemonier. There, in the heat and the dust, one sign advises personnel to take a “battle buddy” with them into town, military argot for a companion. The second simply reads: “Be careful out there.”

Christopher Thompson is a freelance writer. His last piece for FT Weekend Magazine was about Somali pirates going on trial in Kenya. Read it at www.ft.com/pirates
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