US Security Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

Africa has been a forgotten continent for the US foreign policy until very recently. During the Cold War period, the US presence in African soil was as a player of a greater chessboard moving pawns here and there in order to contain USSR growing influence. In other words, the US’ African policy at that time had nothing to do with Africa.

Things changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a new liberal world order rose, the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations were willing to engage sub-Saharan Africa in this liberal cosmos. Former colonies were taught by their ex-metropolis how to put themselves in the path of liberalization. France, Great Britain, and the US were assisting these countries under the condition of democratization (Letitia, 2007). The pinnacle of this idealistic plethora was the humanitarian intervention of Somalia in 1992–1993, which turned out to be a misadventure. And after that, the Rwandan genocide broke into the scene. Africa appeared to be too complicated for the kind of solution and the U.S started to withdraw from Africa. From that moment on, their approach to any African issue would be towards the motto “African solutions to African problems” meaning that their approach would be through non-direct intervention: financial aid, economic development programs and so on. Regarding the military dimension, they fostered the creation of the African Crisis Response Force (ACRF) built up by 5000 African soldiers, trained and equipped by Western countries for rapid deployment as peacekeeping forces under the mandate of the UN (Letitia, 2007). But the whole picture changed dramatically in the aftermath of 9/11.

A new era: Global War on Terror

9/11 was a massive shift in the US understanding of a threat to their security. As the National Security Strategy (NSS) stated in 2002 “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones” (Rono, 2016) this is the core element that is driving U.S security policy in sub-Saharan Africa. Most of these African states share some characteristics that rang all the alarms in Washington as the new doctrine imposed by the Bush administration of Global War on Terror (GWOT) understood that Muslim countries where the state appears to be week were potential sanctuaries for international terrorism, and therefore the US has the need to intervene (Rono, 2016). Africa, all of a sudden, turned to be a main concern for American foreign policy, and far from any humanitarian aid, the goal was to hardener the US security policy throughout the region by the military presence.

In December 2002 two initiatives took place: the deployment of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) and the Pan-Sahel Initiative/tans-Sahel Counter-Terrorism Initiative (PSI). CJTF-HOA counted some 1500 troops with the sole objective of preventing terrorists from Afghanistan to find save-heavens in the “vast ungoverned spaces” of the Horn of Africa. (Rono, 2016) Time has proved this assumption quite wrong as it is assessed later on. Inefficiency and the lack of resources changed their nature to a more conflict-preventive and humanitarian aid-provider form. As for the PSI, their primary mission was to reinforce the border defence of countries in the west of the Horn: Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania (Letitia, 2007). By 2008, following and intensifying the same grand strategy for Africa, although with a slightly different approach, the US Department of Defense (DOD) decided to designate a unified United States Command for Africa (AFRICOM) (McFate, 2008). A significant proof of the importance that sub-Saharan Africa was gaining importance as a strategic region for the US.

According to US DOD planners, AFRICOM sought for a secondary role of watching and helping local leaders to secure their countries. Hence, helping these countries to undertake securitization policies, but also tackling human and economic development issues. In other words, AFRICOM is a military command without combat orientation, rather conflict prevention operations (McFate, 2008). Actually, with a high number of civilian staff, AFRICOM turns to be an experiment of the XXIst century security policy looking to bridge the gap between security and development. The command intention is to help African countries to reinforce their own security and stability (Ward & Galving, 2008) and provide tools to prevent future conflicts. As AFRICOM primary intention is to secure those countries from international terrorism, they realized that development is a crucial area to tackle. Hence, AFRICOM is not only addressing conflict prevention operations, but it is also addressing underdevelopment and poverty as well as fostering medical missions (Okumu 2008).

AFRICOM’s interests

AFRICOM responds to Africa’s new geostrategic importance to the US. Although counterterrorism remains as the main interest of the US in the region, securing natural resources in big oil producers like Nigeria or Angola is also a key area of action. To balance China’s growing influence is a third factor that makes the US elevate Africa as a critical region in the geopolitical scenario (McFate, 2008).

GWOT is, without doubt, the primary concern of the US in the region and although their approach seems to be a more passive one, by training and helping when it comes to the mixture of the military with humanitarian aid, things get blurred. For it, it has a two-way lecture: is AFRICOM a humanitarian aid reinforcement or are they just militarizing it? At the end of the day, we need to bear in mind that AFRICOM has taken over the humanitarian work which was previously coordinated by the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). In other words, US humanitarian aid has moved from USAID to DOD, which is pretty self-telling (McFate, 2008).

Africa has turned in the US’ eyes the new GWOT front: week states, extreme poverty, and large Muslim population could be seen as a hotspot for transnational terrorism, nevertheless this is a vast generalization. AFRICOM operates in 52 states that represent nearly 3000 cultural groups, over 2000 languages and a wide spectrum of religious groups that span from monotheist to animist (Berschinski, 2007) while 1/3 of the African population are Muslims the majority of them practice moderate branches such as Maliki and Shafi’i. Even in hotspots like the Horn of Africa, the vast majority of people practice a highly plural Islam that integrates traditional African cultural and religious practices (Berschinski, 2007). As the National Strategy Combating Terrorism (NSCT) reported “terrorism is not the inevitable by-product of poverty”. In fact, GWOT is not even remotely a priority for those countries, and therefore there is a critical mismatch between US security priorities for Africa and the African states ones. This together with the fact that the US has deployed boots in the ground has alarmed several African countries. Actually, AFRICOM has not received a warm welcome in Africa, to say the least. “Stop AFRICOM”; “Why U.S.’s AFRICOM Will Hurt Africa;”; “AFRICOM — the Invasion of Africa?” (McFate, 2008): these are some headlines of African newspapers that joined several official voices in the region that refused to give permission to the US to establish AFRICOM bases within their borders. Countries as important as Nigeria and South Africa have done so and have asked their neighbours to do the same. However, some have welcomed AFRICOM, like Liberia, who has even offered to host their headquarters. John Campbell, a retired ambassador of the US in Nigeria stated that “my African friends seem to be correct. The U.S. military is playing a larger role than ever before, and much — if not most — of what it is doing comes back to counterterrorism. And I agree with them that this is not necessarily a good thing” (Campbell, 2013). He also argues that all this military training comes with a huge risk to democratic development, as they are providing the military with even more tools and strength to overthrown civilian governments. Therefore the training assistance could be just making better coup-makers rather than better democracies (Campbell, 2013). Rebecca Zimmerman, a national security and policy researcher warned how risky is that kind of policy. In fact, by 2012 a US-trained army captain, Amadou Sanogo, overthrew Mali’s elected government and in 2014 Lt.Col. Isaac Zida, also a US-trained high tank official made a coup in Burkina Faso (Turse, 2017).

In 2006 only 1% of all US commandos were deployed in Africa, by 2016 this had jumped to 17% (Turse, 2017) and, what is more, AFRICOM currently has 46 bases and outpost spread all over the continent while the official speech is that the U.S only has one permanent base in Djibouti (Turse, 2017). Any other base is just temporally and all these “expeditionary” and “transitory” stations are conducting several kinds of operations: in 2008 AFRICOM made some 172 missions, activities, programs, exercise and training. By 2013 this number jumped to 546. Moreover, these missions are quite unclear, according to AFRICOM in May 2017 a Navy SEAL was killed while “assisting partner forces” in Somalia and in October 2017 four special forces soldier were also killed while “providing advice and assistance” in Nigeria (Turse, 2017).

Securing Natural resources

Several authors claim that one of the goals, or even the main aim of AFRICOM securitization of Africa, is to safeguard oil production for the US (Lemelle, 2008; Klare & Volman, 2006). And actually, this is a reasonably valid argument for the first decade of the XXIth century. In fact, the Bush administration was willing to get access to African oil in order to diversify their dependency on Middle East providers. By 2007 sub-Saharan Africa provided 16% of the oil world imports to the US, predictions that year claimed that by 2015 it would be over 25%, surpassing the Middle East (Phalm, 2007). This did not happened. Thanks to new techniques of oil extraction, oil dependency of the US has dropped rapidly. Nigeria and Angola, the two most important oil exporters to the US, altogether had a 66% drop of African oil imports to the US. Nigeria went from 280 million barrels in 2011 to 75 in 2016 and in the case of Angola from 122 million barrels to 58 (XXX).

Balancing Chinese influence

China Grand strategy is to become a great global power, and as such, it seeks to exercise influence over Africa (Chau, 2007). It uses a softer approach by trading and providing financial development without any political demands in exchange. “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” policy turns to be pretty effective. Some scholars are describing this competition between the US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a proxy economic war. In 1995 two-way trade between Africa and China was less than US$ 1 billion and by 2006 it surpassed US$ 50 billion. PRC interests in the region are not only for resources but also to help African states to develop and thus creating new future markets. Security and development are, therefore two common goals for the US and the PRC, which makes them compete though is who will gain the allegiance of these countries. That said, while China is just making trade partnerships, the US is militarizing the continent. Hence, they are playing in different spheres. However, the hard-power approach of the US is a risk-taker strategy, as a Libyan Ambassador stated in the offspring of AFRICOM: “How can the U.S. divide the world up into its own military commands? Wasn’t that for the United Nations to do? What would happen if China also decided to create its Africa command? Would this not lead to conflict on the continent?” (Ndlovu-gatsheni &Ojakorotu, 2010)

Preventing terrorism through the militarization Africa

Overall US security policy pursues mainly one objective: prevent safe haven locations to international terrorist groups in African countries where a vacuum of power and territorial control could attract such groups. Natural resource extraction was also a critical point in the early 2000s for US presence in Africa due to the need for diversification, but this trend changed. Despite the fact that US oil imports from Africa have dropped dramatically thanks to more self-sufficient oil policy, AFRICOM financial support and operation in the ground have not decreased for a single moment, all the contrary, those operations have grown in number and weight. And regarding the Chinese counterbalance, it seems that the US is using more a secondary and defensive strategy. Occupying spaces just to make sure that the Chinese do not. Thus, leaving a potential escalation move to the Chinese, who this far, are neither willing nor needing to do.