U.S. Security Cooperation with Africa

Robert J. Griffiths

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781136291487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

As Africa's strategic importance has increased over the past decade and a half, United States security cooperation with the continent has expanded. The most visible dimension of this increased engagement was the establishment of the U.S. Military Command for Africa (AFRICOM). Some critics are skeptical of AFRICOM's purpose and see the militarization of U.S. Africa policy while others question its effectiveness. Recognizing the link between development and security, AFRICOM represents a departure from the traditional organization of military commands because of its holistic approach and the involvement of the Department of State as well as other U.S. government stakeholders. Nevertheless, AFRICOM's effort to combine security and development faces formidable conceptual and operational challenges in trying to ensure both American and African security interests. The human security perspective's emphasis on issues that go beyond traditional state-centered security to include protecting individuals from threats of hunger, disease, crime, environmental degradation, and political repression as well as focusing on social and economic justice is an important component of security policy. At the same time, the threat of violent extremism heavily influences U.S. security cooperation with Africa.

In this examination of the context of U.S.-African security relations, Robert J. Griffiths outlines the nature of the African state, traces the contours of African conflict, surveys the post-independence history of U.S. involvement on the continent, and discusses policy organization and implementation and the impact of U.S. experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan on the U.S.-Africa security relationship. Africa's continuing geostrategic significance, the influence of China and other emerging markets in the region, and America's other global engagements, especially in light of U.S. fiscal realities, demonstrate the complexity of U.S.-African security cooperation.

1
The State, Politics, and the African Security Landscape

Africa’s economic and demographic growth and its growing strategic importance have focused attention on the continent’s security landscape. As the U.S., along with the rest of the world, recognizes Africa’s economic, political, and security importance, the implications of the nature of the African state, the sources of conflict and insecurity, and the global dimensions of Africa’s security challenges have become more salient.

There is little question that security is a critical state and regional challenge throughout a significant portion of Africa. While fighting ended in several of Africa’s long-running wars in the early 2000s, large swaths of the continent continue to face conflict and instability. Africa’s recent history has highlighted the challenges of formulating and implementing effective defense and security policy where conflict and instability, uneven economic growth, deep and persistent poverty, and varying levels of state capacity are widespread. Nevertheless, American recognition of Africa’s growing strategic importance has led to deeper U.S. involvement on the continent and initiatives to create a partnership between the U.S. and Africa to protect American interests and enhance Africa’s security capabilities.

The effort to create a U.S.-African security partnership takes place against a complicated backdrop of regional and global trends. These include political patterns and the nature of the African state, debate over the nature and implications of so-called new wars and fourth-generation warfare, the role of state and nonstate actors in security, the threat of Islamic radicalism, regional approaches to security, the history of U.S. involvement with Africa, economic and political constraints on American policy, and shifting global strategic calculations. Creating an effective security partnership between the U.S. and Africa poses some formidable challenges in defining security in the African context, enhancing the limited capabilities of African armed forces, and formulating policy appropriate to the continent’s complex security environment.

The source of valuable raw materials and commodities and a growing market fueled by an expanding middle class, an increasingly important theater in the battle against Islamic extremism, and the site of persistent conflicts and humanitarian crises, Africa has seen its security become a matter of growing concern to the U.S. The former European colonial powers, along with China and emerging markets like India and Brazil, are also increasingly engaged on the continent and provide an additional dimension to any analysis of the continent’s security environment.

In the past several years, Africa’s natural resources have helped to fuel economic growth on the continent. Although the 2008 global financial crisis caused a dip in Africa’s economic growth rates, prospects for increased growth are good. The continent’s economy was expected to grow by 4.7% in 2014 and by 5% in 2015. Growth rates in several African countries will be among the strongest in the world. Growth rates vary between regions, with West Africa continuing to have the strongest growth rates and East Africa also performing well. Southern Africa’s growth lags a little behind but is also expected to improve, while North Africa is projected to have the weakest growth. Although much of this growth is attributable to demand for African commodities, Africa’s resource wealth is a mixed blessing. While it contributes to economic growth, primary production leaves African exporters vulnerable to demand and price fluctuations and has not necessarily boosted job growth.¹

While the revenue from resource exploitation is essential to growth, it is all too often inequitably distributed. The “resource curse” raises issues of equity, weakens state links with the public, helps privatize the state’s economic transactions to the benefit of elites, creates a gap between the state and its citizens, and crowds out investment. Given these drawbacks, it is fortunate that Africa’s growth has also been powered by increasing investment from abroad as well as urbanization and domestic consumption.²

Africa’s role as both producer of raw materials and a growing market for imported goods has drawn the attention of investors from around the world. Africa has now become too strategically and economically important to ignore, not only for its abundance of raw materials and growing internal market but also because of persistent conflict and instability, the threats of Islamic extremism and transnational crime, and geopolitical implications. As the U.S. has become more deeply engaged in Africa, the challenges of security cooperation have become more apparent.

A Brief Overview of the Security Landscape

Peace agreements in Sierra Leone in 2002 and Liberia in 2003 brought an end to brutal conflicts that had raged since the early 1990s. Southern Africa has been largely peaceful since the independence of Namibia in 1990, the end of Mozambique’s civil war in the early 1990s, South Africa’s 1994 elections that brought an end to apartheid, and the end of the civil war in Angola in 2002. Nevertheless, the ebb and flow of conflict and instability has been a recurrent theme in postindependence Africa, and conflict and instability has stretched across Africa in the postindependence era, from the Mano River region in the west, extending across the Sahel and Sudan and on into the Horn, then bending southwest into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR). Africa’s conflict zones have produced some of the world’s most brutal wars and worst humanitarian crises in the post–World War II era. From the liberation struggles, to Cold War proxy warfare, to Africa’s post–Cold War ethnic and communal struggles, there has been a terrible toll on African societies.

Adding to the list of factors that contribute to Africa’s fragile security is the fact that parts of the continent have become a key theater in the battle against Islamic extremism. Although Africa had experienced terrorist incidents in the past, the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania signaled the broader threat that international Islamic extremism now poses to African security and U.S. interests. The University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database lists 3,901 terrorist incidents in Africa between 1998 and 2012, most involving armed attacks or bombings. Most attacks were directed against citizens, but government institutions, especially the police and the military, were also heavily targeted. The majority of those attacks were small scale, with 0–10 fatalities. Of the 3,901 attacks, 364 involved between 11 and 101 fatalities. While there was a decline in the number of incidents to fewer than 400 in 2008–2009, since 2010 there has been a dramatic increase. In 2012, almost 1,200 attacks were recorded.³ Although there is a danger in conflating violence that stems from local conditions and international terrorism,⁴ extremist groups such as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and al Shabaab in Somalia have allied themselves with al Qaeda, while Boko Haram announced its allegiance to the Islamic State in March 2015.

Boko Haram and al Shabaab have both stepped up their activities, with increasingly deadly results. Boko Haram has attacked schools and churches in northeastern Nigeria as well as a police station and UN headquarters in the capital, Abuja. These attacks killed hundreds and forced the Nigerian government to declare a state of emergency in May 2013 in three northeastern states, Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa. Between the declaration and the end of 2013, an additional 1,200 people were killed in Boko Haram attacks.⁵ In April 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 school girls in Chibok, Bornu state, threatening to sell them off to the group’s fighters. The incident sparked national and international outrage and was followed by further attacks and kidnappings. By 2015, some seventeen thousand people had been killed in the Boko Haram insurgency since the beginning of the attacks in 2009. The Nigerian armed forces were criticized as either incompetent or unwilling to confront the militants or both. In some cases where the military did respond, it faced later charges of widespread human rights abuses in its response to attacks. A 2015 report by Amnesty International asserted that some 7,000 young men and boys had died in custody and that there were an additional 1,200 extrajudicial deaths at the hands of the Nigerian armed forces.⁶ Friction developed between Nigeria and the U.S. because of human rights abuses by the armed forces. The Nigerian ambassador to the U.S. criticized the American prohibition of arms sales to Nigeria, and in late 2014 the Nigerian government suspended U.S. training of a battalion of Nigerian armed forces that were to be deployed against Boko Haram.⁷

Nigeria’s battle against Boko Haram is part of a wider pattern of Islamic radicalism in the region. The roots of this threat go back at least to the Algerian civil war of the early 1990s. The Algerian armed forces annulled the 1992 elections which the Islamic Salvation Front, an Islamist party, was poised to win. The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) emerged from the civil war and declared itself al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in 2007. In the Sahel, the kidnapping of tourists by groups allied with al Qaeda and the attack on a gas plant in eastern Algeria in January 2013 in which forty workers and thirty-nine attackers were killed highlighted the threat of extremism in the region and demonstrated the complexity of the security threat in the Sahel. The gas plant attack was the work of al Murabitun or the “Signed in Blood Brigade,” a splinter group of AQIM led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an Islamic radical, veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Algeria, and cigarette smuggler known as “Mr. Marlboro.” His jihadist activities were underwritten by smuggling of not only cigarettes but also drugs, weapons, and illegal immigrants.⁸ Belmokhtar was also behind coordinated suicide attacks against a military base and a French nuclear plant in Niger four months after the gas plant attack and threatened further attacks against the French and African countries taking part in the operations against insurgents in Mali.⁹ These networks illustrate the intersection of ideology, extremism, and criminal activity, the region’s porous borders, and the shifting status of extremist groups.

Concern over the threat of the jihadist movement in the Sahel only grew after extremists seized control in northern Mali after a coup in March 2012 plunged the country into a crisis. Some four thousand French troops, along with troops from Chad, were deployed to oust the jihadists from the towns and cities under their control. Some evidence pointed to cooperation between Boko Haram in Nigeria and the extremists behind the seizure of northern Mali, expanding what many see as an increasingly regional and coordinated radical Islamist threat in the Sahel. In March 2013, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Carter Ham, then Commander of AFRICOM, stated that while al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Boko Haram, and al Shabaab in Somalia all represented individual threats, the growing collaboration among these groups heightened the extremist threat across the region.¹⁰

In the Horn, the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) was established in 2007 with the approval of the UN. Troops from the fledgling Somali government and regional African Union member states succeeded in forcing al Shabaab out of Mogadishu and other strongholds in southern Somalia. The United States has supported these efforts and provided training for AMISOM troops. Ethiopia intervened in Somalia between 2006 and 2009 and then joined AMISOM in early 2014. After initially intervening in Somalia in 2011 after several kidnappings attributed to al Shabaab, Kenya affiliated with AMISOM in 2012. Although it has steadily lost control of territory in the face of AMISOM’s success, al Shabaab has demonstrated a willingness and ability to strike regionally. An attack on a bar in Kampala during the World Cup in 2010 killed seventy-four people, and the spectacular Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi in September 2013 killed more than sixty. These attacks underscored not only the group’s deadly capabilities but also its regional reach. Al Shabaab has continued to launch attacks especially against Kenya, including the April 2015 assault on Kenya’s Garissa University College that killed 147 and injured another 79. Al Shabaab has also continued to carry out deadly bombings in Mogadishu.

The genocide in Rwanda was the catalyst for Africa’s deadliest war. The massive flow of refugees from the 1994 genocide touched off violence in eastern Congo that fueled the rebellion that ousted Mobutu Sese Seko, prompted regional wars that drew in several neighboring countries, gave rise to a volatile and shifting mix of militias and client armies, and resulted in an estimated 5 million war and war-related deaths. The lucrative exploitation of the DRC’s rich mineral deposits and land disputes among the region’s ethnic groups continue to fuel sporadic violence despite the presence of a large UN force with a peace enforcement mandate. Regional politics continue to influence security and stability across the eastern DRC.

In Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), began its campaign against the government of President Yoweri Museveni in 1986. The LRA was known particularly for its brutality and had a reputation for kidnapping children to serve in its ranks. It was able to sustain itself for more than two decades in part through support from Sudan, which backed the LRA in response to Uganda’s support for rebels in South Sudan. With the independence of South Sudan and after a sustained effort by the Ugandan armed forces, the LRA was routed from its northern Ug...