The rust-flecked Toyota Land Cruiser skidded to an abrupt halt, and half a dozen armed men spilled out of the truck bed. The soldiers, wearing a motley assortment of khaki and forest-green camouflage, fanned out in the dirt, Kalashnikovs at the ready. A small group of boys who had been rolling old bicycle tires around the mud-walled courtyard stopped to watch the soldiers as they inched forward in the dirt, ready to return fire.
Captain Lassine Keita, a reed-thin officer in pressed desert fatigues, urged the soldiers on, and his men leapfrogged toward the ambush point to launch their counterattack. Then Keita, his spectacles pushed back on his forehead like a professor, stepped forward and waved his arms to stop the drill. The troopers clambered back in the pickup and prepared to make another circuit around the yard.
Keita was commander of the 512th Compagnie d’Infanterie Motorisée, a Malian infantry unit that in 2007 was patrolling the country’s Fifth Military Region, a vast territory that stretched across the northern deserts of Mali, reaching all the way to the borders of Algeria and Mauritania. The 512th was stationed at what some would consider the end of the world. Their training base was in Timbuktu, the fabled trading center at the very southern edge of the Sahara. At the intersection of ancient caravan routes, Timbuktu was once a center of Islamic scholarship, and over the centuries its leading families had preserved the city’s priceless manuscripts in private libraries. Now it was an exotic tourist destination. Though the city had fallen on hard times, the phantasmagoric mud mosques and street markets still attracted adventurous, well-heeled travelers. It even hosted two world music festivals, Sahara Nights and the Festival in the Desert.
This part of Mali did not have a peaceful history. In the early twentieth century, it was a center of resistance against French colonial rule. In the early 1990s, portions of northern Mali and neighboring Niger were rocked by uprisings of the Touareg, nomadic Berbers who traditionally inhabited the Sahara and the Sahel. A “flame of peace” monument on the outskirts of Timbuktu marked the end of the most recent large-scale rebellion, in 1995, and the rusting barrels of weapons that were symbolically burned to mark the end of the conflict were embedded in the concrete. Fighting occasionally flared up. Just a few weeks earlier, government forces in northern Mali had engaged in a few gunfights with Touareg rebels led by Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, who had led two previous revolts against the government in the capital city of Bamako.
The training overseen by Keita reflected a newer threat faced by Mali’s army. The expanses of the Sahara had become a staging ground for Islamic extremists because they could move easily between the porous, badly policed borders intersecting West Africa and North Africa. Four or five pickup trucks might rendezvous in a remote wadi, spend a week training with rifles or explosives, then disappear across the horizon. Extremist groups were also tied to narcotics and weapons trafficking rings, which often relied on old caravan routes that stretched across Libya, Chad, Mauritania, Mali, and Niger. Occasionally the militants were bold enough to confront local militaries. A year earlier, members of one faction of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, a militant group known as GPSC (for Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat), attacked a Mauritanian military outpost near the border with Mali. The Mauritanians responded with force, chasing the insurgents across the border into Mali.
Keita’s drill, called a “reaction to contact,” was supposed to train the lightly armed Malian soldiers to respond to an ambush if they encountered insurgents on a long-range desert patrol. For Keita and his trainees, this was no run-of-the-mill training day. At the edge of the dusty parade ground, a few foreign visitors stood out, broad-shouldered men in digital-pattern Army combat uniforms. Their uniforms were “sterile”—they bore no name tapes or rank insignia, just U.S. ARMY on the left over the chest pocket and American flag patches on the right shoulder. All of the men wore wraparound shades. This was a training team from First Battalion, Third Special Forces Group—Green Berets—out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, assigned to Special Operations Command Europe. The U.S. government was providing the trainers, the fuel for the trucks, and the extra ammunition for marksmanship practice.
Since 2003, the U.S. military had been quietly increasing its military-to-military ties with Mali. As part of the assistance, around two or three times a year a Special Forces team would deploy to this outpost near Timbuktu for three or six weeks of intensive instruction with the Malian military. The training began under the rubric of the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a post-9/11 border security and counterterrorism program started in 2003 by the State Department. The aims of the Pan-Sahel Initiative were straightforward: African soldiers would get schooling from some of the best infantry instructors in the world, and the Green Berets would get the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the cultures, terrain, and languages of four West African countries—Mali, Chad, Niger, and Mauritania. In 2005, the Pan-Sahel Initiative was renamed the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership, or TSCTP, and now had a much more ambitious scope. With a budget of around $100 million per year, TSCTP would offer military aid to Nigeria and Senegal and also encourage the countries in the region to expand their security ties with Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.
The idea of the project was to make the region inhospitable to groups such as the GPSC, which formally aligned itself with al-Qaeda in 2006 and renamed itself Al Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM.1 This local insurgency fighting the Algerian government had become a regional franchise of a global terror organization, and the U.S. assistance to West Africa was supposed to help keep the region from becoming a base for extremists.
This Special Forces training mission coincided with a larger, three-week military exercise, called Flintlock 2007. Flintlock, held that year in Bamako, was a “command post exercise.” It was built around a fictional (but quite plausible) scenario, the simultaneous staging of several cross-border incursions by a terror group, along with coordinated terror attacks in several cities. The goal of the exercise was to encourage representatives of regional militaries to share information with each other as the crisis unfolded. Military representatives from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia would all take part (Libya was invited, but declined to participate).
For African militaries, this kind of desktop exercise could have tangible professional benefits. It gave them a chance to work inside a modern, computerized command post. More important, participants from different countries could exchange cell-phone numbers with their counterparts. The next time there was a regional crisis or a violent border incident, a military officer or a border patrolman might be able to call his opposite number to coordinate a response. That kind of collaboration could have application for peacekeeping, disaster relief, and other kinds of emergencies.
Flintlock 2007 and the training exercise in Timbuktu were also part of a deepening U.S. military interest in the region. Part of the idea was to counter cross-border problems: terrorism, human trafficking, narcotics smuggling. But it was also what U.S. government officials liked to call “capacity building,” helping vulnerable, impoverished governments in Africa build competent militaries and capable government institutions. That was a more sweeping state-building project, in which the U.S. military was taking the lead.
Colonel Mark Rosengard, a gruff Green Beret officer with a flat Boston accent, a thick black mustache, and a hockey player’s build, was one of the officers observing from the sidelines in Timbuktu. As we watched the Malian troopers go through their paces on the training ground, he told me that the drill was a first step toward building a professional military for Mali. The country needed armed forces and border guards that were equipped to train and work in this austere, forbidding place, and capable of distinguishing between legitimate cross-border trade and more nefarious activity. “The important elements of security in this part of the world are pretty simple,” he said. “[The Special Forces team] are here to help them establish procedure, how to shoot, move, and communicate more effectively.”
Rosengard had long experience in the Balkans and Afghanistan, and he was observing this training mission as a representative of U.S. Special Operations Command Europe. The training in Timbuktu was in many respects a classic Special Forces “foreign internal defense” mission, an assignment known as Joint Combined Exchange Training, or JCET. Green Berets routinely performed these JCET missions around the globe.
But the mission to Timbuktu was taking place as the U.S. military was preparing to activate a brand-new military command for Africa, U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM. The new headquarters was slated to reach “initial operating capability” the following month, October 2007. This rollout was a sort of beta version of the organization, based out of U.S. European Command in Stuttgart. The command became a fully activated unitary command one year later, on October 1, 2008.
In some respects AFRICOM represented a simple streamlining and reorganization of U.S. military activity in Africa. Before AFRICOM, three different commands divided responsibility for watching Africa. U.S. European Command oversaw most of sub-Saharan Africa; it tended to view Africa as an extension of former European colonial territories. U.S. Central Command, focused primarily on the Middle East, was responsible for the countries bordering on the Red Sea. The island of Madagascar was under U.S. Pacific Command, a seeming afterthought. The creation of the new command signaled a major foreign policy shift. Instead of dealing with Africa through dozens of embassies, the U.S. government could approach the continent through a powerful, unified military command. The reasoning was the main problems in Africa were transnational. Migration, resource wars, ethnic conflict, HIV/AIDS—all cut across borders, and AFRICOM would offer a more coherent approach to dealing with them than the embassies could. That mission required a new kind of organization. Unlike a traditional military command, AFRICOM focused heavily on humanitarian and development issues. Its staff would include a large contingent of civilians, and one of the top officials, the deputy to the commander for civil-military affairs, would be a senior Foreign Service officer. After the failures of nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan, AFRICOM offered a clean slate, a hybrid civil-military organization optimized to respond to crises in the region before they required full-blown military intervention. Africa was the new laboratory for “getting it right.”
AFRICOM’s planners in the Pentagon envisioned its main goal as “preventive” security: Instead of stationing U.S. troops on the continent, the United States through AFRICOM would boost the ability of local governments to police their own borders, participate in peacekeeping operations, and, when necessary, organize the response to the next Somalia or Rwanda. It would also mean a new infusion of U.S. dollars on the continent, where the U.S. Agency for International Development had once been the primary vehicle for development assistance to Africa. Now, the new command would help direct millions more in “security assistance” funds to African governments, as well as oversee development projects. U.S. aid to the continent would take on a much more military flavor.
The training exercise in Mali was just one modest example. The U.S. teams were able to make the training in Timbuktu much more “event-intensive” by supplying ammunition for live-fire exercises and providing extra fuel for the trucks. The course of instruction was very basic: The Malian soldiers received classroom instruction on land navigation and the laws of armed conflict, practiced rifle marksmanship and communication, and took part in field exercises. But this modest investment could make a major difference for cash-strapped African militaries.
Still, the Malian military had a long way to go before they became self-sufficient. The U.S. trainers concluded the morning’s exercise with a weapons inspection. While the Malian soldiers stood in formation, the Green Berets inspected their rifles, an assortment of corroded-looking SKS rifles and AK-47s. Across the courtyard, in a bare classroom, a medic gave a lecture on battlefield first aid. The Malians had no overhead projector or practice tools for the students. And it seemed difficult to maintain an atmosphere of military discipline as barefoot children wandered around the training grounds. While his colleagues examined the weapons, racking back the slides to inspect the breeches, the Green Beret team leader offhandedly muttered a joke: “They’re probably surprised to see a truck with fuel.”
The U.S. military had been an intermittent presence in Africa, but U.S. involvement in Africa ramped up dramatically after September 11, 2001. In late 2002, U.S. Marines established a task force at Camp Lemonier, a former French army outpost in Djibouti. The Djibouti task force, called Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa, occupied a critical piece of geography near the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, along transit routes that might be used by al-Qaeda as they fled Central Asia or the Middle East. The task force was also heavily involved in Civil Affairs missions and military-to-military training, overseeing medical and veterinary clinics, digging wells, and providing security training for countries in the region. Still, momentum for this new Africa command did not really build within the Pentagon until after the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan pushed military planners to embrace the tools of nation building and development, and laid bare the lack of civilian capability for repairing failed states. Like Iraq, Africa presented problems that defied simple military solutions, and the continent seemed to cry out for the “whole of government” treatment promoted by the counterinsurgents.
The idea of dividing up the globe into unified U.S. military commands dated back to the immediate postwar era, when the U.S. military began to confront its wartime ally, the Soviet Union. The original “Outline Command Plan” of 1946 established seven unified commands (Far East Command, Pacific Command, Alaskan Command, Northeast Command, Atlantic Fleet, Caribbean Command, and European Command). That scheme overlooked Africa entirely. It was not until 1952 that part of Africa was assigned to a unified geographic command, when European Command assumed responsibility for contingencies in France’s départments in Algeria, along with the French colonies of Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya.2
That did not mean that the United States had no military involvement on the continent. During the Suez Crisis in 1956, a Marine battalion evacuated U.S. nationals from Alexandria, Egypt; in 1964, Belgian paratroopers parachuted out of U.S. transport planes during a hostage crisis in Stanleyville, Congo; and in 1986, President Ronald Reagan sent U.S. warships to confront Libya. U.S. involvement during the Cold War was not limited to brief military interventions: As part of its proxy war with the Soviet Union the United States provided long-term support to anti-Communist guerrillas such as Angola’s UNITA, and for several decades the Army maintained a large listening post at Kagnew Station, near Asmara, Ethiopia (now part of Eritrea).
In the 1990s, U.S. military involvement in Africa saw a steady uptick. In response to widespread disorder in Zaïre in 1991, U.S. aircraft transported Belgian troops and equipment to Kinshasa; in 1992, U.S. forces evacuated Americans from Sierra Leone after the government was overthrown; U.S. aircraft evacuated noncombatants and diplomats during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. More emergency airlifts followed during crises in Liberia (1996), Congo and Gabon (1997), and Sierra Leone (1997 and 2000).3 The proliferation of cheap small arms—particularly the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle, a rugged, simple weapon that any stoned teenager could operate—made local conflicts much more lethal, and the United Nations was often powerless to stop the violence. Peacekeeping missions such as the 25,000-strong UN force in the Democratic Republic of Congo or the African Union mission in Somalia were often short of resources and had limited mandates. Terrorism was also a rising threat. A U.S. joint task force deployed to Kenya and Tanzania following the al-Qaeda–orchestrated bombings of U.S. embassies in 1998. The biggest involvement was in Somalia, where President George H. W. Bush first deployed armed forces in response to a humanitarian crisis in 1992. After the 1993 “Black Hawk down” debacle, in which nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed in a firefight in Mogadishu, President Bill Clinton ordered the U.S. task force home, but American forces returned briefly to Somalia again in March 1995 to assist in the withdrawal of UN forces. In the 1990s U.S. armed forces deployed to the continent at least eighteen times.4
The idea for a unified command for Africa gained momentum during the latter half of the 1990s, as the U.S. military witnessed a cascading series of crises in Africa. Civil wars in Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo cost millions of lives, and displaced millions more. The Rwanda genocide had forced something of a rethink in international relations theory, spurring arguments in favor of military intervention to halt mass atrocities. Military involvement in Africa could potentially be benign. A relatively small early intervention could stop a local conflict from turning into a mass outbreak of violence. Scott Feil, a retired Army officer, argued in a 1998 study that a five thousand–strong task force from a modern, Western military would have been enough to stop the killing in Rwanda.5 Better yet, a longer-term presence in conflict-prone regions, coupled with swifter, more empowered international peacekeeping missions could keep such violence from starting in the first place.
In early 2001, Commander Richard Catoire, a naval aviator, wrote an article for Parameters, the journal of the Army War College, reflecting the Pentagon’s new thinking on Africa:
Because of the increased US engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, and because the current regional unified commands are principally focused elsewhere, the time has come to rethink the Unified Command Plan as it regards Africa. The current plan cannot effectively protect America’s security interests on that continent. It is unlikely to realize the articulated policy objectives of the United States in the region, and it should be revised to better secure those objectives.6
Catoire’s article included a map of a proposed new command that would monitor all of the continent except five north African countries, which would remain under U.S. European Command. As Catoire outlined it, the United States would be stepping in to fill the shoes of France, which had provided much of the security assistance and training on the continent, especially to francophone countries, of which Mali was one. The piece also took note of new factors, particularly the rising dependence of the United States on African oil exports:
The region has tremendous mineral wealth, huge hydro-electrical power reserves, and significant underdeveloped ocean resources. The better part of the world’s diamonds, gold, and chromium are produced in countries at the southern end of the continent. Some 20 percent of America’s oil now is imported from Africa. Copper, bauxite, phosphate, uranium, tin, iron ore, cobalt, and titanium are also mined in significant quantities. The waters off both coasts of the continent support huge fisheries. The continent’s potential as a market and as a source of important commodities is great.7
In mid-2006, John Hillen, assistant secretary of state for political military affairs, was invited to working group meetings on AFRICOM at the Pentagon. From his post in the State Department, Hillen saw the push for AFRICOM as a reform initiative similar to the new Army and the Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual, an opportunity to bridge the “pol-mil divide” by forcing the military and civilian bureaucracies to work more closely together to integrate their efforts. “I always saw AFRICOM as a new kind of command, an interagency command that would be a better vehicle for delivering programs to Africa that were bent on nonkinetic goals than EUCOM had been,” he said. “So to me it was very pragmatic. And I got Condi [Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] on board; she said, ‘Great, we’ll play.’ ”
Hillen found an ally in the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Jendayi Frazer, who was a strong supporter of the concept. Frazer had even included the idea of an Africa Command in Governor George W. Bush’s debate points during the 2000 election campaign. But Hillen and Frazer ran into resistance from the rank-and-file within the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, where the new initiative was seen as another bureaucratic “land grab” by the Defense Department.
It was a legitimate concern. At the end of the day, AFRICOM was a powerful, well-resourced combatant command, and it exerted a serious gravitational pull. U.S. diplomats in the Middle East had long been aware that the military head of U.S. Central Command eclipsed them in power and resources. The new AFRICOM commander would have the same kind of resources at his or her disposal. Mindful of the power of the combatant commanders, planners rebalanced the design of AFRICOM by giving the State Department a seat at the table. The commander was assigned two deputies, one for military operations and one for political and economic affairs. The political and economic affairs slot would be taken by a career diplomat.
On February 6, 2007, President Bush made public his decision to create a new unified command for Africa, and directed the secretary of defense to have AFRICOM up and running by the end of fiscal year 2008. Bush cast the rationale for the new command in “soft power” terms, presenting it as a vehicle for humanitarian assistance and cooperation with African states. “This new command will strengthen our security cooperation with Africa and create new opportunities to bolster the capabilities of our partners in Africa,” he said. “Africa Command will enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health, education, democracy, and economic growth.”8
Bush also promised to consult with African leaders on how the command should be structured. Over the next several months, military and diplomatic officials fanned out across the continent to sell the concept to African leaders. Despite efforts to sell AFRICOM as a primarily humanitarian and development-focused organization, African governments and their citizens were extremely wary of the Pentagon’s intentions. To some, AFRICOM looked like a poorly disguised neocolonial scheme, and African governments were reluctant to host a large U.S. military headquarters.* In the late spring of 2007, U.S. officials, including representatives of the State Department and the military, paid visits to Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa to pitch the AFRICOM concept. Another delegation toured Africa that summer, but the diplomatic outreach did little to assuage concerns.
U.S. planners seemed to have willfully ignored the continent’s history. “It was a complete and total disaster,” Frazer later told me. The briefers kept changing the briefing slides on each stop of the tour, making it clear to African leaders that U.S. government agencies still had not reached internal agreement as to what, exactly, the mission of AFRICOM was, and how it was going to be organized. “The [lead briefer] was changing slides as he went along—as if the leaders don’t talk to each other.”
Part of the problem, Frazer said, was that the military was trying to design a command on Africa based on lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. “If you don’t know the African environment, you’re prepared to impose any old structure on it, thinking, this’ll work,” Frazer said. “From my point of view, this sexy new design was Peace Corps on steroids. And we didn’t need Peace Corps on steroids, what we needed was professional military doing the professional military engagement we had had, but more of it. Not something new and sexy and different. Give us something Africans already know.”
The military tried to reach out to another key constituency, the foreign aid community. In May 2007, Rear Admiral Robert Moeller, director of the AFRICOM transition team, attended USAID’s Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid; he was there to present the concept to nongovernmental organizations and humanitarian relief groups. Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Ryan Henry, who also attended the meeting, tried to reassure members of the USAID committee that AFRICOM would not be a typical military command, noting that it would draw as much as one quarter of its staff from civilian agencies of the U.S. government. Henry and Moeller also floated the idea of a “distributed” AFRICOM headquarters. Instead of a single AFRICOM headquarters on the continent, the new command would have several smaller regional hubs.
Lawmakers were skeptical. In an August 2007 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Dick Lugar (R) of Indiana worried that the creation of AFRICOM would place a “disproportionately military emphasis” on Africa. AFRICOM also sent mixed messages about U.S. aims. In theory, U.S. military assistance to foreign nations was supposed to help reinforce principles such as civilian control of the military, but when men and women in uniform were the ones delivering humanitarian assistance and overseeing development projects, it sent a signal that the U.S. military, not its civilian agencies, called the shots in U.S. foreign policy. In fact, one southern African officer complained to Jane’s Defence Weekly, the professional military journal, “We are told to leave our military legacies behind us to become true democracies, yet the world’s biggest democracy is able to come into our sovereign territory with all of its military might; it is hypocritical and dangerous and not at all in Africa’s best interests.”9
In September 2007, South African officials announced they would not host AFRICOM; the Southern African Development Community, an organization representing fifteen southern African nations, also made it clear that they did not want a permanent U.S. command headquarters on their territories.10 In fact, U.S.-led discussions about possible basing arrangements spurred speculation that the United States might have plans to overthrow unfriendly regimes or initiate regime change in dictatorships such as Zimbabwe.11 From a public-relations standpoint, the rollout of the new command was botched. Despite efforts to reach out to the humanitarian aid and development community with reassurances that AFRICOM would focus on “nonkinetic” missions such as disaster relief, humanitarian aid, or professionalizing African armed forces, suspicions lingered that a more interventionist military agenda was at work. It didn’t help that briefing papers circulated by the Defense Department said the command would “conduct limited operations” such as counterterrorism missions when necessary.
Many observers wondered whether the real reason U.S. policymakers had cooked up AFRICOM was to serve as a counterweight to China, which had been quietly but steadily increasing its presence on the continent through ambitious state-backed development assistance and investment schemes. China’s expansion in Africa was remarkable. The Chinese invested in major infrastructure projects, building roads, bridges, and power plants in return for oil, mining, and other natural-resource concessions. Its activity in Africa was free of the poisonous legacy of colonialism that still lingered in relations between African states and former European colonizers. But human rights were not high on China’s list, and Beijing was also willing to turn a blind eye to authoritarian regimes in Sudan, Zimbabwe, and other countries.
Marine Corps General James Jones helped pioneer the AFRICOM concept while he was a four-star combatant commander of U.S. European Command. Shortly after retiring, Jones gave a speech in Washington in which he outlined some of the thinking behind the new dual-mission command:
There are competitors out there … that are out-cycling us at a fairly rapid rate because they can make their decisions on a far more rapid basis [than we can]. One example of that … is the influence of China in Africa, which is very, very impressive from a standpoint of a sovereign nation able to take decisions quite rapidly … the process they go through is probably a lot shorter than ours. But if you’re a unified commander and you’re trying to render assistance somewhere or start a program … just about anywhere in my neck of the woods the past four years, it’s a very frustrating and time-consuming proposition to get anything done, and to get anything done quickly.
Jones suggested that the new civil-military command of AFRICOM could help streamline the cumbersome processes of U.S. government, which he said have a “paralyzing effect” on foreign policy. “As we get more competitors on the playing field that out there—and believe me, they are out there as the world changes—we have to look at our systems, we have to look at our laws, our policies, our manipulations, the inner workings of the interagency to try to free up the giant that is the United States, that too often is captured, is restricted from moving in ways that this giant could.”
To reach Timbuktu in October 2007, I hitched a ride from Bamako with representatives of U.S. Special Operations Command Europe. Our plane was a CASA 212, a boxy, utilitarian twin turboprop that was ideally suited for operating from primitive airstrips. The plane would take us from the lush, green plains of the Niger River valley to the thick brush and scrub of the southern edge of the Sahara.
The aircraft’s tail number, I noticed, ended in BW—it was a Blackwater plane, part of the fleet of the company’s Presidential Aviation airline. Blackwater provided contract aviation services to U.S. Special Operations Command, offering everything from airlift services in Africa to parachute training in the United States. The creation of AFRICOM and the military’s new focus on nation building in Africa was sure to create another lucrative market for defense contractors who were looking for new business opportunities beyond Iraq and Afghanistan.
AFRICOM’s unique structure and its emphasis on peacekeeping, development, and stability operations created demand for everything from logistics support and security to training and intelligence. John Wrenn, Blackwater’s director of Global Stability Initiative and Corporate Communications, told me shortly before the full activation of AFRICOM in October 2008 that his company saw tremendous opportunities for a “strong partnership” between the new command and the private sector. Companies like Blackwater could provide everything from running medical clinics to overseeing civil engineering projects, military and law-enforcement training, and rule-of-law education. AFRICOM, said Wrenn, was “a lean organization, with a smaller command structure [than other military commands] to oversee the large area of operations. Since AFRICOM is a smaller organization, it will require a strong partnership with the private sector to effectively and efficiently direct and oversee U.S. engagement programs in Africa.”
Erik Prince, Blackwater’s founder, even envisioned a more ambitious new role on the continent for the private sector: as peacekeepers. Speaking in February 2005 in Washington, he floated the idea of Blackwater as peacekeepers-for-hire to replace U.N. blue helmets in Africa:
One of the areas we see ourselves covering up more is contract peacekeeping in areas where the UN is, or where there’s a lot of instability, sending a big, large-footprint conventional force is politically unpalatable. It’s expensive, diplomatically difficult as well. We can put together a multinational professional force, supply it, manage it, lead it, put it under UN or NATO or U.S. control, however best we can, we can help stabilize a situation. I encourage people to go see … Hotel Rwanda … It’s a great story—it’s a sad story, it’s pathetic. The UN let many people get slaughtered in a country the size of Vermont over a four-month period. Mostly by machetes. And it wouldn’t have taken more than a couple hundred guys to stop it.
In the unfolding crisis in Darfur, Prince suggested that Blackwater operatives could provide an armed “quick reaction force,” or QRF, to protect nongovernmental organizations, aid groups, and refugees from Sudan’s feared janjaweed militia. If there was an atrocity in progress and the janjaweed needed to be stopped, Blackwater could move in and stop them. It was a cheaper proposition than funding UN peacekeepers. “I just challenge you: Are you getting your money’s worth [from traditional UN peacekeeping]?” Prince said. “I think you can get a lot more done with a lot less.”
In fact, Blackwater executives presented a plan for private-sector peacekeeping to the State and Defense departments and the National Security Council. The scheme, named the African Union Support program, was to create a ring of “persistent surveillance” around the camps for displaced Darfurians, using armed local or “third-country national” contractors and to provide Western supervisors and private logistics support. It was a swaggering, muscled-up vision of humanitarian aid—relief work as delivered by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Chris Taylor, the vice president of business development at Blackwater, presented the plan and spoke in broad terms about the proposal in industry forums. In an after-dinner speech at the 2006 annual meeting of the International Peace Operations Association, the main U.S. trade association for private security firms, Taylor argued for a private military role in humanitarian intervention. Once again Rwanda was the poster child: “Would the eight hundred thousand people killed in the Rwanda genocide have cared if their rescuers were from the private sector?” he said. But when Cofer Black, vice chairman of Blackwater, in 2006 raised the subject at an international military conference in Amman, Jordan, it created a wave of negative publicity. “We’re low-cost and fast,” Black was quoted as saying. “Who’s going to let us play on their team?” The concept seemed to cross the line into creating a mercenary army with an overt combat role.12
Blackwater’s swaggering talk of humanitarian soldiers-for-hire showed a remarkable lack of insight into Africa’s recent history. In the 1960s and 1970s, white mercenaries such as “Mad” Mike Hoare and “Colonel” Bob Denard played a notorious role in postcolonial intrigues and coups. The market for armed force in Africa got another boost in the 1990s, when a controversial South African firm with the Bond-villain name of Executive Outcomes operated a private army for hire. It trained and later fought on behalf of the Angolan government against UNITA rebels and also helped rescue the government of Sierra Leone from a nihilistic militia known as the Revolutionary United Front. Executive Outcomes garnered some praise for its professionalism from Erik Prince, who noted admiringly that Executive Outcomes “had a good track record the first time they went into Sierra Leone.” The company drew key personnel from veterans of apartheid era military and police units of South Africa and South-West Africa and the predominately Angolan 32 Battalion of the South African Army. Antimercenary legislation passed by the South African government in 1999 called the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act effectively drove the company out of business.
Quasi-mercenary schemes forwarded by Blackwater’s management may have seemed far-fetched, but U.S. private security firms in fact already had a significant foothold in Africa, largely through the African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) program, a State Department–funded effort to help cash-strapped African militaries build militaries capable of contributing to UN peacekeeping missions. ACOTA was part of a larger U.S. program called the Global Peace Operations Initiative, which had a goal of training seventy-five thousand new peacekeepers worldwide by the end of 2010, a force to be drawn largely from the developing world. The bulk of this work was outsourced to the private sector. As the Government Accountability Office reported in June 2008, contractors provided the “majority” of ACOTA training in Africa. From the program’s inception in 2004 to mid-2008, State Department–funded ACOTA contractors trained thousands of African peacekeepers, at a cost of around $98 million.13 Northrop Grumman Information Technology designed training materials and conducted computer-simulated peacekeeping exercises for participating countries; DynCorp raised security forces; MPRI operated simulation centers. Once again, a core function of the government, training foreign militaries, was being outsourced to the private sector. This sent an ambiguous message to the recipients of aid about American motives and priorities.
Contractors also provided logistics support to the U.S. government in Africa through a State Department contract vehicle called AFRICAP (Africa Peacekeeping Program). Much like the Defense Department’s LOGCAP (Logistics Civil Augmentation Program), which provided base operation and logistics support to military units in the Middle East and Central Asia, AFRICAP was a quick, relatively low-profile way to support military intervention in Africa. For example, in the summer of 2003, during a small-scale U.S. intervention in Liberia to protect the U.S. embassy in Monrovia, contractors provided support on the ground while a U.S. amphibious task force sailed from the East Coast to West Africa.
In a November 2003 after-dinner speech to the International Peace Operations Association, Theresa Whalen, deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, told an audience of private security contractors that employing contractors in African contingencies “means that the U.S. can be supportive in trying to ameliorate regional crises without necessarily having to put U.S. troops on the ground, which is often times a very difficult political decision.” Whalen said that in Liberia, contractors had helped speed up the U.S. response:
If you look at the time between when the decision was made and when things got started on the ground in country, it was pretty darn short, a matter of weeks actually. And if you look at the time between when the Africans made the decision that they were going to send forces to Liberia at the end of July and then look at when we were actually getting the Africans on the ground, which was about the middle, or early August, again, very short. And in comparison if you look at the UN current deployment schedule, which is weeks behind, we were actually lightning fast. So there is a big advantage in being able to put the contractors on the ground and get things going fast.14
DynCorp and Pacific Architects and Engineers (a construction firm that was acquired by Lockheed Martin in 2006 and renamed PAE Government Services) won the original AFRICAP contract in 2003. In early 2008 the State Department announced it would tender the contract again, which would be worth approximately one billion dollars over five years. The contract was divided among four firms: PAE Government Services, AECOM, DynCorp, and Protection Strategies Incorporated.15 But the U.S. government’s dependence on private contractors in Africa once again raised serious questions about oversight. Contractors seemed to be performing many essential U.S. government tasks in Africa: training and advising foreign militaries, providing military mentors, and demobilizing former combatants. In some cases, they even performed oversight of other contractors. In fact, the State Department’s ACOTA office was mostly staffed by contractors. According to the Government Accountability Office, the ACOTA staff comprised nine contractor employees and one federal employee. The GAO also raised serious questions about whether contractors were meeting targets for training peacekeepers, whether the State Department was properly able to assess the quality and effectiveness of the training, and whether trainees in U.S.-funded programs were being adequately screened for human rights abuses.16
Once again, responsibility for doing the government’s job had been outsourced. Private profit, not smart foreign policy, seemed to be the guiding principle. And that did little to diminish suspicions in Africa as to American intentions.
About a week after the exercise in Timbuktu, a Malian army unit became pinned down in a protracted engagement with Touareg rebels led by Ibrahim Ag Bahanga. As fighting raged near the northern border post of Tinzaouatene, on the border with Algeria, the Malian government put in an emergency request to the U.S. military to resupply its troops with food rations. The U.S. government agreed, and dispatched a C-130 cargo plane that happened to be in Mali for an airborne exercise associated with Flintlock. It was a fairly straightforward task: The Malians supplied the rations, and the U.S Air Force provided the cargo pallets and the parachutes. During the second of two air-drop missions, the aircraft came under fire; the aircraft returned safely but was struck by rifle rounds, an unhappy reminder that nonlethal military assistance under the rubric of “building partnership capacity” came with some risks.
The rationale for U.S. support of the Malian military was counterterrorism: The mission was supposed to make Mali less vulnerable to transnational terrorist groups. It was not supposed to encourage the government in Bamako to resolve internal conflicts by force. In many respects the fighting in northern Mali was a domestic dispute between the Touareg minority and Mali’s Bambara-speaking majority. The U.S. military had become, briefly, directly involved in a low-level civil war.
Adama Sacko, a former deputy in Mali’s legislature, told me the clashes in northern Mali were a domestic problem, not a terrorist threat. “The problem in the north is very simple,” he said. “It’s a problem of poverty and development; it’s not a problem of terrorism.” Yet the Malian government seemed eager to cast its opponents as “terrorists” or extremists” in order to secure more U.S. support.
At the conclusion of the Flintlock exercise, I attended a press conference in Bamako hosted by the U.S. embassy and the Malian ministry of defense. It seemed a typically dull, stodgy event, as the U.S. ambassador, Terrence McCulley, issued a few platitudes about Mali’s hospitality and the importance of partnership between nations. Then Mamadou Clazie Cissouma, the Malian minister of defense, veered a bit off-script. After thanking the participants in the Flintlock exercise, he launched into an angry denunciation of the “armed bandits” who had attacked military convoys and sown mines in the north. The politically correct facade of the Flintlock exercise had slipped.
Although U.S. officials were careful to emphasize the “preventative” and “nonkinetic” nature of AFRICOM, it did open the door to more direct military involvement. General William Ward, previously the deputy head of U.S. European Command, was AFRICOM’s first four-star commander. Ward had served as a brigade commander during the Somalia intervention and had made clear his views about the military’s role in Africa: It was to be driven by a sort of enlightened armed humanitarianism. In a 2007 article written for Joint Forces Quarterly, Ward described the searing experience of peacekeeping in the Horn of Africa: “Seeing the victims of the famine gave me stark reminders of why we were deployed there: to provide security to allow the international relief efforts to happen.”17
The efforts to stabilize Somalia had ended in failure. In his article Ward suggested that in the future, the U.S. military would “have to be prepared to intervene early, with clear goals, authorities, and responsibilities understood by the parties to the conflict and among the international and interagency partners involved.”18 The conviction that the judicious application of military science and a willingness to intervene could somehow inoculate Africa from full-blown conflict seemed to be AFRICOM’s guiding belief. This powerful new command could deliver aid to the continent in a way that no civilian relief agency could. It could draw upon the extraordinary logistics capabilities of the U.S. military to fly troops to a crisis in a hurry; it had a planning staff that could draw up sophisticated plans in an emergency; and it would have a sophisticated intelligence apparatus to anticipate conflict before it broke out. This vision of “smart power also pointed the way to future U.S. military intervention on the continent.
In May 2008, a few months before the full activation of AFRICOM, the Army hosted a war game at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, called Unified Quest 2008. There were around two hundred players: active-duty and retired military officers, Coast Guard personnel, NATO representatives, and a smattering of diplomats, intelligence officials, and other civilians. Unified Quest is an annual event whose purpose is to test the U.S. government’s response to potential crises in the not-so-distant future. The focus of the 2008 game was conflict prevention. Participants tested scenarios that policymakers could face in an era of “persistent conflict” arising from the combined forces of globalization, competition for energy resources, population growth, and failing states.
Two of the scenarios took place in Africa. In one, Army Colonel Mark Forman played the role of the AFRICOM commander, responding to a hypothetical crisis in Nigeria sometime between 2013 and 2015. The Nigerian government is near collapse, and various factions are competing for power. In this scenario, AFRICOM operates as an “economy of force” headquarters; it has limited manpower and is only a small presence of the continent.
The second scenario was supposed to test how a fully configured AFRICOM could respond to a crisis in the Horn of Africa. James Embrey, a retired army colonel with the Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, played the head of a multinational task force that deploys to Somalia in 2025 to prop up an embattled government and fight off insurgents. The scenario was premised on the assumption that AFRICOM would command the full range of diplomatic, military, and conflict prevention tools by that time. “The supposition that we are making here is that the whole-of-government interagency planning and framework has been cured, there have been the proper structures built in terms of a special coordinator for reconstruction and stability,” Embry explained. “And … the requisite civilian expertise in terms of Civilian Response Corps—additional subject matter experts that are almost like an interagency reserve force—have come online.”
Embrey was describing the military’s vision of the future: The U.S. government will have created a functioning civilian nation-building reserve on standby. The State Department has a deployable reserve, the military is skilled at reconstruction and stability operations, and hybrid “civil-military” commands such as AFRICOM are capable of coordinating the whole effort. Despite the lip service being paid to the “interagency” and “civil-military integration,” it is clear that in this vision, the military is in charge. Brigadier General Barbara Fast, deputy director and chief of staff for the Army Capabilities Integration Center and deputy chief of staff for Army Training and Doctrine Command, told reporters quite explicitly that the Army wanted to communicate to civilian government agencies and foreign militaries to make the kind of investments and capabilities they will need in the future. “This is really a self-examination for us as an Army, and it’s an introspective look that we hope to be able to offer the insights beyond the Army, both within the department and in the international arena writ large,” she said.
Unified Quest was a forum for evangelizing another principle: humanitarian intervention. One prominent player in Unified Quest 2008 was Sarah Sewall, the Harvard professor and human rights advocate who had been instrumental in shaping the military’s emerging counterinsurgency doctrine. A few months after Unified Quest 2008, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government unveiled a new initiative led by Sewall: the Mass Atrocity Response Operations, or MARO, Project. Cosponsored by the Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, the MARO Project was supposed to be a step-by-step guide for a military response to genocide or mass killings. According to Chris Taylor, a former private security executive who helped Sewall craft the document, it was written specifically as a blueprint for action for combatant commands such as AFRICOM to use the military as a “genocide prevention tool.”
The MARO Project was inspired by “responsibility to protect,” an emerging school of thought in international relations that calls for intervention by external actors if a state is unwilling, or unable, to stop genocide or mass killings. The guide even featured a hypothetical scenario on the African continent in Country X, a landlocked state in sub-Saharan Africa. Country X resembled Rwanda before the genocide. It was run by one ethnic group, Clan A, which was distributing weapons and broadcasting propaganda for a campaign of ethnic cleansing against another group, Clan B. The international community has limited time to act—weeks, perhaps days—before the mass killings begin. The MARO Project guide is supposed to spell out the options for intervening to halt the atrocities. Using this tool, the command could weigh the implications of sending in a rapid intervention force, understand the main operational tasks, and identify the desired end-state.
More important, the guide encourages civilian government agencies as well as allied nations to reorganize and become more closely involved in planning for such contingencies. The scenarios crafted by the MARO Project are hypothetical, but it is easy enough to spot real-world applications, especially after the creation of AFRICOM. In January 2009, the U.S. military became directly involved in planning and helping pay for a military offensive against the Lord’s Resistance Army, a notorious rebel group in Uganda. It looked like a textbook case of “responsibility to protect”: The LRA’s messianic leader, Joseph Kony, was under indictment by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity; his cultlike army employed child soldiers and used rape as a weapon of war; and the LRA’s reign of terror extended beyond Uganda’s borders: north to Sudan, and east to the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.
Much as in Mali, the United States had quietly been providing counterterrorism training to Ugandan troops. In addition, as the New York Times later revealed, a team of seventeen advisers and analysts from AFRICOM worked closely with Ugandan officers to plan the offensive. They also provided intelligence, satellite phones, and $1 million in fuel. Despite the U.S. assistance, the operation was botched: Ugandan troops failed to block off the LRA’s escape routes, and as the rebel fighters scattered, they embarked on a killing spree in nearby villages. An estimated nine hundred civilians were killed in a wave of massacres and reprisals.19 The quiet, behind-the-scenes intervention in Uganda was a failure.
What was missing from the planning, and the scenarios, was some notion of balance between military and humanitarian capacity. U.S. foreign policy in Africa was quietly being militarized, but there was no parallel effort to beef up traditional aid and development efforts. There seemed to be no discussion within higher-echelon policy circles of trade, direct investment, or encouraging stronger bilateral ties within Africa. The new Africa command created its own internal logic. When the continent was viewed through the lens of preventive security, security became the sole goal.
* A notable exception was Liberia. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf offered to host AFRICOM headquarters, but as of fall 2010 the command was still based in Stuttgart.