Foreign Policy In Focus Special Report: U.S. and Africa: Starting Point for a New Policy Framework

Special Report
United States and Africa:
Starting Points for a New Policy Framework

The Security Gap

From the 1960s to 1990, superpower competition dominated U.S. security interests in Africa, from interventions in the Congo and Angola to shifting alliances in the Horn of Africa. The anti-apartheid struggle succeeded in imposing an additional dynamic, with international sanctions against South Africa in the last years of apartheid contributing to the successful transition to majority rule.

It is also too simplistic to interpret U.S. policies of support for particular clients as a coherent U.S. strategy for competing with Europe (particularly with France) or with South Africa either in the security field or in regional geopolitical arenas.

Some think they see a replacement framework emerging by defining the new goal as protecting the U.S. from African-derived threats such as “weapons proliferation, state-sponsored terrorism, narcotics flows, the growing influence of rogue states, international crime, environmental degradation, and disease.”²² In fact, such formulations of threats give policymakers little specific guidance (good or bad) for determining either friends and enemies or appropriate policies for dealing with conflict.

It is also too simplistic to interpret U.S. policies of support for particular clients—such as Uganda, Rwanda, or Ethiopia—as a coherent U.S. strategy for competing with Europe (particularly with France) or with South Africa either in the security field or in regional geopolitical arenas. The different policies advocated and pursued in response to particular crises reveal widely divergent and shifting views within the U.S. government, the State Department, the White House, the Pentagon, and among ambassadors or special representatives in the field. To craft consistent policies in response to rapidly changing crises requires far greater attention from high-level officials than has so far been the case.

Media coverage of humanitarian crises compels such attention only momentarily, and Africa-focused officials within the U.S. government have little clout to persuade their superiors to expend political capital to issues regarded as marginal and remote. Crafting a consistent response to a complex crisis is difficult enough when it is high-profile; it can be even more difficult when attention from the top is intermittent or when existing policy guidelines are quickly outpaced by events.

Thus the record shows a lurching from one approach to another: intervention (as in Somalia), indifference to looming genocide in Rwanda, a desire to “leave it to Mandela,” and mixed signals in response to successive crises in Congo (Kinshasa) in 1997 and 1998. The global antiterrorism theme has ensured a focus on Sudan, but the decision to bomb the commercial factory in Khartoum without a terrorist link was based on bad intelligence and was formulated without input from officials knowledgeable about Africa.²³

Figure 10
Civil Conflicts and Hotspots

African Countries in Conflict
Interstate conflicts Eritrea and Ethiopia Civil Conflicts Algeria Angola Burundi Chad Comoro Islands Djibouti Egypt Sierra Leon Somalia Sudan Uganda	Civil conflicts that entail military intervention by other African Countries Congo-Brazzaville Democratic Republic of Congo Guinea-Bissau Rwanda Senegal Western Sahara Countries where civil conflicts could easily start up again Central African Republic Liberia Mali Nigeria Niger
Source: Adapted from Marina Ottaway, "Africa: Think Again," Foreign Policy, Spring 1999 (updated Sept. 1999).

In terms of military assistance, the U.S. has provided some $10 million to the Organization of African Unity to support its conflict resolution capability, essentially to establish a management center and to supply equipment to enable the OAU to send military observers on short notice to crisis areas. Washington has also played key roles in supporting the UN peacekeeping mission in Angola and in encouraging regional conciliation efforts in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Yet the centerpiece of recent administration policy has been the Africa Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), providing for training of battalions from selected African countries for participation in peacekeeping missions. The most concrete result of the initiative has been a series of short-term training exercises, each lasting about 60 days and costing about $3 million. The U.S. has also provided financial support for a similar exercise in April 1999, sponsored by the Southern African Development Community, which brought 3,000 troops from 12 nations to South Africa.²⁴

ACRI was slow to get started and is a scaled-down version of Washington’s 1996 proposal for an African Crisis Response Force (ACRF), which would have involved a permanent force capable of intervention. Given the serious concerns raised by African and European governments as well as U.S. legislators about the ACRF proposal, the ACRI has focused only on training. Yet doubts remain about its impact and the use to which the training might be put. Two of the countries receiving training (Senegal and Uganda) are themselves involved in conflict. The scale of the program, in comparison either to the potential African needs for peacekeeping or to Washington’s unpaid dues for UN peacekeeping operations, is not great.

Another obscure but substantial initiative is the Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, for which Congress has appropriated $42 million. According to Pentagon planners, the center is not modeled after the notorious School of the Americas (which has trained many Latin American dictators and human rights abusers) but is rather one of a string of “Regional Centers for Security Studies,” the first of which—the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch, Germany—was founded in 1993. Its curriculum, designed for executive-level military officers and civilian counterparts, stresses democratic civil-military relations, national security decision-making, and management tools. The center’s mission statement says it will “encourage an appreciation of appropriate civil-military relationships and an understanding of effective defense resource management across African governments.”²⁵

Whatever the content of the curriculum, an important effect of these and other training programs will be to build closer ties between the U.S. military establishment and African military and civilian defense officials. The assumptions that these ties are purely technical and will automatically contribute to accountability and respect for human rights are highly dubious. It is a step forward that African as well as U.S. civilians have been invited to participate in early curriculum planning for the center, but this falls far short of the public scrutiny necessary for accountability.

Nevertheless, there is general agreement between official U.S. positions and African public opinion regarding peace and security goals, just as there is on issues related to democracy and civil rights. Though many Africans deplore the unilateral U.S. response to terrorist bombings, there is little popular support for terrorist strategies even in countries where these armed groups are active in internal conflict, such as Algeria and Egypt. Despite the persistence of conflict in a score of countries, the overwhelming demand of civil society groups, when they are free to speak, is for peace. Women’s groups, church groups, human rights organizations and conflict resolution groups advocate negotiation, understanding, and compromise. Disgust with leaders who find ideological or ethnic excuses for continuing or reigniting conflicts is a powerful sentiment in almost all African countries.

The end of the cold war generated significant progress in negotiating the end to a series of African conflicts. The thirty-year regional war associated with the apartheid regime’s struggle to survive ended with the emergence of a democratic South Africa and the end of conflicts in Mozambique, Namibia, and, at least temporarily, Angola. The overthrow of the Mengistu dictatorship in Ethiopia in 1991 led to the successful conclusion of Eritrea’s struggle for independence.

Yet the 1990s have also seen a bewildering profusion of old and new internal conflicts, most notably in Angola, Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Algeria, Rwanda, Congo (Brazzaville), and Congo (Kinshasa), including not only the genocide of more than a half million people in the space of a few months in Rwanda but also massive abuses against civilians in each country mentioned. In 1998, the specter of more conventional interstate conflict emerged as well, with the border dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea as well as the danger that the Congo (Kinshasa) maelstrom would continue to suck its neighbors into deeper confrontation with each other.

This is one arena in which modesty is particularly appropriate for critics of administration policies, given the intractable, complex, and diverse causes of ongoing conflicts and the disagreement among international agencies, civil society groups, and progressive analysts about what is to be done in particular cases. Anyone who does not admit to being uncertain about analysis and prescription applying to the range of conflicts mentioned above is either dishonest or uninformed.