A stimulus for African security

The most recent iteration of the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, released in March 2006, declared:

Africa holds growing geo-strategic importance and is a high priority … It is a place of promise and opportunity, linked to the United States by history, culture, commerce, and strategic significance. Our goal is an African continent that knows liberty, peace, stability, and increasing prosperity … The United States recognizes that our security depends upon partnering with Africans to strengthen fragile and failing states and bring ungoverned areas under the control of effective democracies … We are committed to working with African nations to strengthen their domestic capabilities and the regional capacity of the AU to support post-conflict transformations, consolidate democratic transitions, and improve peacekeeping and disaster responses.

The mission statement approved by the Secretary of Defense in May 2008 for the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) states that:

The United States Africa Command, in concert with other U.S. government agencies and international partners, conducts sustained security engagement through military-to-military programs, military-sponsored activities, and other military operations as directed to promote a stable and secure African environment in support of U.S. foreign policy.

Last week, Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin), chairman of the Subcommittee on African Affairs, in the course of remarks on U.S. policy in Africa inserted into the Congressional Record, noted:

I was reminded … of the very important and strategic roles that AFRICOM, if advanced properly, can play. These roles include helping to develop effective, well-disciplined militaries that adhere to civilian rule, strengthening regional peacekeeping missions, and supporting postconflict demobilization and disarmament processes. If carried out properly, AFRICOM’s work can complement that of the State Department, USAID, and other U.S. Government agencies working on the continent and help contribute to lasting peace and stability across Africa.

Taken together, these three statements underscore the fact that the advancement of American national interests in Africa requires a recommitment to strengthening and expanding of U.S. security cooperation with the nations of the continent.

Security cooperation, that is, military engagement outside wartime, is hardly a new concept. During the Cold War, these activities were focused on building the relations that were not only successful in containing the spread of the Soviet empire, but ultimately in bringing about its fall. In the wake of the collapse of the Iron Curtain, military engagement activities played a significant role in integrating the newly freed states of Central and Eastern Europe into the North Atlantic community. Nowadays, security cooperation is codified in the joint doctrine of the U.S. armed forces and defined by Joint Publication 5-0: Joint Operation Planning (2006) as "the means by which Department of Defense (DoD) encourages and enables countries and organizations to work with us to achieve strategic objectives" and by the most recent version of Joint Publication 3-0: Joint Operations (2008) as "all DoD interactions with foreign defense establishments to build defense relationshipsthat promote specific U.S. security interests, develop allied and friendly military capabilities for self-defense and multinational operations, and provide U.S. forces with peacetime and contingency access to a host nation." The latter document also affirmed that "security cooperation is a key element of global and theater shaping operations," which, in Pentagon-speak, would make security cooperation a large part of "Phase 0" of any U.S. campaign, a stage that as General Charles Wald, then deputy commander of the European Command (EUCOM), noted in one Joint Force Quarterly article, includes "everything that can be done to prevent conflicts from developing in the first place," the goal being to "promote stability and peace by building capacity in partner nations that enables them to be cooperative, trained, and prepared to help prevent or limit conflicts."

While some of the security cooperation efforts undertaken with allies and potential partners are carried out directly by active duty U.S. armed forces personnel, reserve and National Guard components also play an important role. For example, beginning in 1993 in the wake of the liberation of the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, the State Partnership Program (SPP) helped shape the strategic environment after the departure of the Red Army by partnering Army National Guard units with militaries in participating countries in a variety of activities in support of broad bilateral goals, including military-to-military subject matter expert exchange, disaster planning and response, environmental protection, and provincial- and city-level contacts. Currently, more than fifty countries are linked to forty-six states, two territories (Puerto Rico and Guam, and the District of Columbia. In Africa, Ghana is paired with North Dakota, Morocco with Utah, South Africa with New York, and Tunisia with Wyoming.

Moreover, it goes without saying that, given the stresses of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as fidelity to the Quadrennial Defense Review (2006) directive to integrate them into the "Total Force," civilian government personnel and contractors also make significant contributions, especially in training and equipment, but also in humanitarian responses, post-conflict reconstruction, and new infrastructure building – the latter all roles which the market-driven private sector may be better positioned to do well than government bureaucracies. (See my previous discussion on "Total Force" in the AFRICOM context.)

Generally speaking the six geographical combatant commands (COCOMs) are required by two still-classified Security Cooperation Guidance directives from the Secretary of Defense to develop and submit for approval annual security cooperation plans for their respective theaters which would link bilateral and multilateral defense activities to U.S. security interests identified by theme and objective (AFRICOM is, in fact, holding its annual capstone Theater Security Cooperation Working Group conference this week in Garmisch, Germany, an event that brings together hundreds of officials representing about a dozen U.S. government and international agencies to develop a plan of projects and programs which are synchronized with the strategic plans which U.S. embassies develop for each partner state). In Africa, for example, it would not be hard to imagine that the broader approach to security cooperation includes two programs which have shown themselves to be not only meet strategic objectives of a more immediate nature like countering terrorist activity and "showing the flag," but also building relations over the longer term, are the Operation Enduring Freedom-Trans Sahara (OES-TS) military support for the State Department-administered Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Program (TSCTP) and the Africa Partnership Station (see, respectively, my reports last year on U.S. security engagements in the Maghreb and maritime security efforts) as well as the ongoing activities of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), based at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti.

Despite the success of initiatives like OEF-TS, Africa Partnership Station (APS), and CJTF-HOA – kicking off the 2009 APS deployment, the Austin-class amphibious transport dock USS Nashville arrived Tuesday in Dakar, Senegal, beginning a mission that will also include port calls in Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Gabon for training, professional military exchanges, and humanitarian and civic outreach – security cooperation within AFRICOM’s area of responsibility (AOR) still faces a number of challenges, some of which are common to the other five regional commands, while others are unique to the African context.

Despite being mandated to plan and carry out security cooperation in their respective AORs, the COCOM commanders both lack sufficient dedicated resources to implement their security cooperation strategies in a coherent manner and, when attempting to manage as they can, often find themselves confronted with a bewildering array of legislative, policy, and bureaucratic hurdles. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee three years ago in his then-capacity as the head of EUCOM and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Marine Corps General James L. Jones, currently President Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor, lamented:

There are as many as thirty sources of funding which emanate primarily from the Department of Defense and the Department of State – and which are regulated by various, often times competing, authorities and guidelines. Although the Unified Command Plan establishes the authority of the Geographic Combatant Commander (GCC) to plan and conduct security cooperation activities within an assigned area of responsibility, there are a number of programs or activities over which the GCC has no influence.

The general might have added that even within single government agencies, security cooperation programs face significant hurdles. Sales of defense equipment and technology to allies, for example, are acknowledged as extraordinarily good policy. In addition to reinforcing existing partnerships and improving interoperability between the U.S. military and its professional counterparts, the economies of scale created by these transactions help the American economy in general and our defense industries in particular, while simultaneously indirectly subsidizing the research and development efforts critical to maintaining our technological edge in the years to come: simply put, the more units of something that are sold, the lower the marginal costs. Yet, as retired U.S. Navy Captain Sam Tangredi, author of Futures of War and other strategy texts, noted in a recent Defense News article:

Even within DoD itself, Foreign Military Sales programs are subject to approval by up to five technology-transfer committees, each of which operates on its own schedule. After DoD, the State Department must approve and Congress must be briefed. For a major weapon system sale to a critical non-NATO ally (and sometimes to a NATO ally) to be fully approved within two years is almost a miracle.

Efforts to build security partnerships with African nations bring additional challenges. The starting point of many African countries insofar as security capabilities are concerned, is relatively low. Moreover, with the exception of the continent’s handful of natural resource-rich, low population-density countries like Angola (see my September 9, 2008 column advocating an intensified strategic engagement with the geopolitically significant Southern African country), most of America’s would-be partners are constrained by lack of the financial wherewithal to upgrade their capabilities to meet even short-term priorities. It is a vicious cycle in which many are trapped: security is a prerequisite for development and development is a preventative for insecurity, yet these states lack the basic means to pay for the security that would facilitate the stability and economic growth that would, in turn, generate the revenues for the governments. Furthermore, lest anyone simplistically respond that Africans just emerging from conflicts need peacebuilding, not the accoutrements of armed security, it is worth recalling that acclaimed development economist Paul Collier and his colleague Anke Hoeffler found in their study on Military Expenditure in Post-Conflict Society that in the first five years after a peace agreement a given country’s estimated risk of renewed conflict is about 44 percent. Interpreted bluntly, this means that governments need to consolidate Max Weber’s "state monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force" (Gewaltmonopol des Staates). In addition, the current global economic crisis is not without its effect on African security, as non-African states pull out of peacekeeping missions on the continent in an effort to cut costs: for example, just last Saturday Poland became the latest such country when Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that in the next few months he would pull the 400-strong Polish contingent, the second-largest in Chad, from the European Union Force helping protect civilians and humanitarian workers in that country and the Central African Republic (EUFOR Tchad/CAR).

Of course, a variety of programs exist to "jump start" America’s potential partners when they lack resources on their own, including Foreign Military Financing (FMF), administered by the Office of Policy Plans and Analysis within State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, provides grants for the acquisition of U.S. defense equipment, services and training, with an emphasis on promoting U.S. national security by contributing to regional and global stability, strengthening military support for democratically-elected governments, and containing transnational threats including terrorism and trafficking in narcotics, weapons, and persons; Section 1206 funds (named for the apposite section in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006), which allow the Secretary of Defense to train and equip foreign military and maritime security forces to carry out counterterrorism actions and to support military and stability operations in which U.S. armed forces might participate; and the Section 1207 authority for the Pentagon to transfer to the State Department up to $100 million per fiscal year in dense articles, services, and other support for reconstruction, stabilization, and security activities coordinated by the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS). Nonetheless, despite the fact that the Section 1206 money has allowed COCOMs to move quicker in building up partner capacity and the Section 1207 authority has, according to a U.S. Institute of Peace special report last year by Robert Perito, helped to "jump start the S/CRS by providing authorization and funding for projects that would involve interagency coordina tion," neither is supported by specifically appropriated funds, thus implementation of approved initiatives remain subject to whether or not money is ultimately determined to be actually available within the overall Defense Department budget to be shifted toward the programs. Moreover, authority for Section 1206 is set to expire in FY 2011 while that for Section 1207 was extended last year for one fiscal year and will expire September 30 of this year (in testimony last April before the House Armed Services Committee, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had noted that the Departments of State and Defense were in agreement that Section 1207 authority should be increased to $200 million per year and extended for at least five fiscal years); both provisions need to be made permanent.

Taking a look at Africa, however, it is hard to say that budgetary provision for security cooperation aside from obligatory contributions to the United Nations for peacekeeping operations has kept pace with the continent’s growing strategic importance to the United States. Aside from Egypt (which comes within the mandate of CENTCOM), the fifty-two other African countries in received just $17.435 million out of the $4.45 billion available for FMF in FY 2008 – barely three-tenths of one percent of the total. In FY 2009, assuming Congress fully funds the $4.812 billion requested in the FY 2009 international affairs budget, just nine countries in AFRICOM’s AOR – the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Djibouti, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Nigeria, and Nigeria – are slated to benefit from FMF funds, sharing a pool of just over $16.5 million. As for Section 1606 funds, $67.9 million was obligated to African programming in FY 2008 (out of a total of just under the statutory limit of $300 million), most of which went either to enhancing counterterrorism capabilities in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Tunisia or to maritime security efforts in Gulf of Guinea. As for Section 1207 transfers, of the $100 million to fund seven programs in FY 2008, just one, a $9.1 million initiative to reinforce the authority of the central government in the DRC (see my report last week on developments in that sorry land and its benighted regime), went to Africa.

Where there has been money available, it has been used to good effect. The Horn of Africa republic of Djibouti, for example, received modest FMF funding of $3.8 million and $1.9 million in FY 2007 and FY 2008, respectively. In the former year, it also received about $8 million in Section 1206 funding for maritime domain awareness (MDA) projects, in addition to much more modest assistance it received under multilateral and bilateral programming like the State Department-administered East Africa Counterterrorism Initiative (EACTI) and International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, respectively. Given that, in addition to hosting America’s only permanent military installation in Africa, CJTF-HOA’s Camp Lemonier, Djibouti sits astride the vital Bab-el-Mandab straits – 2-mile-wide Bab Iskender and 16-mile-wide Dact-el-Mayun, connecting the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden – through which nearly 10 percent of the world’s petroleum production passes each day and that Somali pirates are still active nearby notwithstanding the increased presence of naval vessels from a number of countries (the election last month of Abdirahman Mohamed Farole, a wealthy businessman who is believed by a number of intelligence services to enjoy a close relationship with the pirate crews operating out of Eyl, as the president of the semi-autonomous Puntland region is hardly an auspicious start to the year), the assistance enabled the Djiboutians to effectively multiply their maritime capacity several times over by acquiring four 44-foot patrol boats equipped with global positioning system (GPS) and other modern naval systems. With these new capabilities, Djibouti, whose port is also fast becoming a regional hub for containerization of cargo traffic between Europe, Africa, and Asia, can contribute its part to both regional security and U.S. interests, as underscored by the affirmation of the National Strategy for Maritime Security (2005) that "Assisting regional partners to maintain the maritime sovereignty of their territorial seas and internal waters is a longstanding objective of the United States and contributes directly to the partners’ economic development as well as their ability to combat unlawful or hostile exploitation by a variety of threats."

As the United States undertakes a major strategic shift towards Africa and as America’s first president of African descent settles into his third week in the White House amid a severe economic crisis, there may indeed be an opportunity to be discerned in the confluence of developments. As I noted in this column two weeks ago on the morrow of President Obama’s inauguration, "the wave of enthusiasm for the new president and, consequently, for America in general which has swept across the continent gives the forty-fourth president an unprecedented opportunity to not only secure key U.S. interests in Africa." By more generously allocating political and financial resources to security cooperation programs in general and those under the aegis of AFRICOM in particular (recall that the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense has slashed the new regional command’s requested FY 2009 budget by nearly one-third), President Obama now has a chance to simultaneously help America’s African friends begin achieving their own security objectives, enhance the U.S. military’s professional relationships and potential interoperability with these new partner states, and frustrate the efforts by other powers like China and Russia to reduce our influence through the indiscriminate sale of their arms cross the continent – all the while strengthening the domestic security industrial sector, reducing the cost of future defense acquisitions, and securing business for U.S. firms and creating jobs for American workers. Now that is the type of strategic stimulus we can all get behind.

— J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., as well as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.

Dr. Pham is the author of over two hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).

In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies. He is also a frequent contributor to National Review Online’s military blog, The Tank.

© 2009 J. Peter Pham