Terrorism, Security, and the State
The actual threat posed by terrorism in Africa can be overstated, but it is difficult to exaggerate the impact that post-9/11 security concerns have had on the way analysts and practitioners understand and engage with Africa. While the new preoccupation with security threats in Africa manifests itself most explicitly as the counter-terrorism agenda, it encompasses a much wider range of international security concerns, some pre-dating the global ‘war on terror’. Analytically, this has meant that a growing portion of research and analysis on Africa interprets the continent through a security lens. In the policy world, the trend has been toward the ‘securitization’ of humanitarian relief, development aid, state-building and democratization programmes, and peace-building and post-conflict initiatives (Curtis, this volume), as security priorities have subordinated and redefined those agendas. The reshuffling of priorities has produced stormy debates and power struggles inside donor governments and the United Nations (UN) system. At the same time, it has also brought external security actors – especially the US Department of Defense – into a much more robust role on the continent than was the case in the 1990s, when Africa was generally seen to have marginal importance to US and global security.
The securitization of external relations with Africa has also reshaped the behaviour and calculations of African political actors. In a reprise of political manoeuvring during the Cold War, some African governments and armed groups have sought to harness Western counter-terrorism concerns to advance more parochial interests – to demonize or eliminate local rivals, secure military aid, or deflect criticism of authoritarianism or human rights abuses. In other cases, African actors have energetically resisted external and local attempts to reframe Africa as a global security threat. In short, almost every topic examined in this Handbook has been affected, and in some cases transformed, by the rise of global security agendas since 2001. Getting both security analysis and security policies right in Africa is thus a matter of high importance. Unfortunately, that has not always been the case.
Contested Concepts
All three of the concepts under consideration here – terrorism, security, and the state – are deeply contested. This has tended to result in analysts and observers talking past, rather than with, one another. Defining terrorism in the abstract is not especially contentious, but applying the label to specific groups certainly is. A number of African parties and governments – including, most notably, the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa – were once armed resistance movements labelled as ‘terrorists’ by the West. More recently, the designation has tended to be applied to armed groups that attack Western targets, while other armed groups that have engaged in terrorist tactics against local populations or governments have not been so designated. Not surprisingly, many African observers are sceptical about what they see as the selective application of the terrorist label. Some of the worst instances of terrorism in Africa in recent decades have been conducted or sponsored by African governments themselves, sometimes with external support. The extensive governmental use of unaccountable paramilitaries – the most infamous of which was the Sudanese government’s reliance on and support to the ‘janjaweed’ in the ethnic-cleansing campaign in Darfur – has produced horrific acts of terrorism against targeted civilians. For most African communities, the threat posed by state-sponsored terrorism is a more immediate danger than the remote machinations of al-Qaeda. By contrast, for most Western governments, terrorism in Africa is assumed to be about al-Qaeda, its affiliates, and other extremist Islamic movements on the continent.
Security is also a disputed concept. The debates surrounding this term boil down to two questions: ‘whose security?’ and ‘security from what?’ Conventional security studies focuses exclusively on security of the state against a physical attack. This national security perspective emphasizes either the security of African governments, or the states outside the continent – in this case Western states. However, the notion of human security – the physical protection of local communities from the threat of violence – has widened the definition of security in recent years. Security studies has broadened its focus to encompass a much wider range of threats, including disease, criminal violence, malnutrition, environmental degradation, and displacement. In Africa, where much of the continent has endured and emerged from horrific civil wars in the past 20 years, there is a particular emphasis on post-conflict security problems. Shockingly high levels of post-conflict violence in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have highlighted the chronic levels of insecurity in conditions of ‘not war not peace’ and underscore the ubiquity of criminal and political violence in areas beset by unresolved local disputes, small arms proliferation, and weak governance (Muggah 2009).
Finally, the concept of the state in Africa has been contested since independence. In some instances, what passes for a sovereign state is in fact a shell of a government controlled by a narrow band of political elites and/or ethnic interests with little legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. In such a context, the very notion of state security becomes problematic and easily conflated with regime survival. In cases where African regimes are predatory and constitute a major threat to the security of portions of their own population, attempts to improve the state’s security sector by outside actors can actually heighten the insecurity of the citizenry (Le Sage 2010: 74; Call 2008). In addition, most African states suffer from serious capacity deficits; in the worst cases, African states are unable to exercise even the most minimal powers expected of a sovereign authority. No fewer than 14 of the 20 states ranked at the top of the 2011 ‘Failed States Index’ are located in sub-Saharan Africa (Foreign Policy 2011), hence most of the literature on the causes and problems of state failure are, with a few notable exceptions, virtually synonymous with assessment of the problem of weak governance in Africa. The failure and fragility of most African states – manifested in corruption, an ineffective rule of law, and poorly paid and controlled security-sector forces – is widely understood to be a major security threat to both the international community and to local citizens.
‘Ungoverned Space’ and Security Threats
The most consequential theory linking terrorism, security, and the state in Africa involves making a threat assessment around the concept of ‘ungoverned space’. In the months following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and America’s subsequent military operation to oust al-Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan, US counter-terrorism strategy anticipated that al-Qaeda would disperse and decentralize in new locations. The areas of greatest concern were what came to be called ungoverned space – territory beyond the effective control of state law enforcement, where al-Qaeda could presumably operate with impunity. This theory, and the national security strategy that emerged from it, was based on a plausible assumption that al-Qaeda needed two things: a physical base from which to operate; and one with as little government capacity as possible. The seminal 2002 US National Security Strategy encoded this reasoning, famously observing that the United States was ‘now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones’ (White House 2002: 1). The precise link between failed states and terrorist safe havens subsequently became the focus of intense US government analysis, with more refined assessments eventually emerging from the Department of Defense’s ‘Ungoverned Areas Project’ (Lamb 2007). Even so, the basic premise of the 2002 National Security Strategy has endured, as evidenced by the 2009 remarks of Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, the State Department Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism: ‘Weakly-governed or entirely ungoverned areas are a major safe haven for al Qaida and its allies … The problem of un- and under-governed spaces is one of the toughest ones this and future administrations will face’ (Benjamin 2009).
The post-9/11 focus on denying al-Qaeda access to safe haven in weak states had several immediate consequences for Africa. First, portions of sub-Saharan Africa came under close scrutiny as likely sanctuaries for al-Qaeda cells. States that were institutionally weak, featured large, poor, and/or aggrieved Muslim populations, and possessed a pre-existing Salafist or Islamic jihadist movement made the top of the shortlist. Somalia met all those criteria, as did a number of other areas now seen as hotspots, including coastal Kenya and Tanzania, eastern Ethiopia, northern Nigeria, and the Sahel states. More generally, Islamic Africa – long treated as marginal in both academic and diplomatic circles – suddenly gained much greater attention from the West, and the United States in particular.
This new attention to Islamic Africa and to the ‘hotspot’ areas noted above prompted a major shift of Western government defence and intelligence assets to these countries of concern. This stood in stark contrast to the 1990s, when Western government analysis of and intelligence on Africa was slashed. The new attention to Islamic Africa also triggered a flood of commissioned studies of existing Islamist movements, al-Qaeda’s presence in Africa, radicalization of African Muslims, African security sectors, and other related fields. Long a neglected field, African security studies mushroomed in importance, with new journals, workshops, and projects devoted to it. Academic area specialists with expertise in an African ‘country of concern’ suddenly found themselves awash with requests for studies for think tanks, contractors, and governments. They were joined by a flood of newcomers who quickly retooled to meet demand (Toolis 2004). In a sense, the academic enterprise in Africa became partially ‘securitized’, as research funding and consultancies became increasingly driven by counter-terrorism agendas. Africa’s hotspots also became the target of much more frequent – though sometimes superficial – coverage by a host of defence monitoring and analysis publications.
In addition, the US military devoted much greater resources to the continent: the creation of a new Combatant Command devoted exclusively to Africa (AFRICOM), based in Stuttgart Germany; the establishment of a military base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, which hosts several thousand US force personnel comprising the Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA); the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership (successor to the Pan-Sahel Initiative of 2004); and a robust increase in both Department of Defense (DOD) military attachés in US embassies, and training and support programmes to African militaries (Le Sage 2007). This major expansion of the presence and role of the US military sparked sharply negative reactions from many African observers and leaders, who feared it represented the militarization of US diplomacy. The creation of AFRICOM – seemingly an innocuous improvement of the Combatant Command structure, at least in the eyes of DOD officials – proved especially contentious, provoking a storm of criticism and debate in Africa. Most of the US military engagement on the continent has been in the form of military training and support, and some civil affairs work, but in a number of cases the US military and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have engaged in ‘kinetic’ operations against terrorist targets, especially in Somalia. The CIA also operates an interrogation facility in the Mogadishu airport in Somalia that has recently come under media scrutiny (Scahill 2011). In addition, parts of Africa have seen an increase in the number of private security firms operating on contract with foreign governments, international companies, or the host government. This trend has been especially pronounced in Somalia.
At the same time, some African governments have redirected their energies toward counter-terrorism, sometimes with substantial support from Western governments. One of the most dramatic instances of this has been the deployment of an African Union peacekeeping force to Somalia (AMISOM). The peacekeeping force’s mandate includes protecting the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and supporting its stabilization efforts. In reality, the 17,000-strong force, composed mainly of Ugandan, Burundian, and Kenyan troops, has (with support from private security firms) mainly been engaged in a prolonged war against the jihadist group al-Shabaab, which is committed to driving both the TFG and AMISOM out of Mogadishu. Some observers accuse Uganda and Burundi of serving as surrogates for Western militaries in Somalia and of being motivated by parochial economic interests. AMISOM’s supporters dispute this, arguing that they are acting to promote stability in the troubled Horn of Africa.
Some African counter-terrorism operations have been unilateral. Prior to AMISOM’s deployment to Somalia, the government of Ethiopia launched a major military offensive in stateless Somalia in December 2006 to oust what it believed to be a dangerous Islamist movement known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). The ensuing two-year Ethiopian military occupation and counter-insurgency against al-Shabaab plunged Somalia into a horrific crisis from which it has yet to recover, and ultimately fuelled the ascent of al-Shabaab from a small militia into the most radical and dangerous al-Qaeda affiliate on the continent. The ill-fated Ethiopian occupation of Somalia serves as a reminder that counter-terrorism operations are susceptible to the law of unintended consequences. Despite the problems encountered by Ethiopia in 2007 and 2008, both Kenya and Ethiopia sent their armed forces into southern Somalia in 2011 and 2012 in pursuit of al-Shabaab, relying heavily on local proxies. These more recent, unilateral counter-terrorism operations have encountered difficulties but did not trigger broad public mobilization by Somalis in support of al-Shabaab.
Securitization of State-Building
Western counter-terrorism policies to deny al-Qaeda a base in Africa have sparked a security-driven focus on state-building, with the aim of strengthening local capacity to monitor, disrupt, and prevent terrorist activities. In the past, weak and failed African states had been seen as primarily a humanitarian problem or a constraint on development; after a brief and highly unsuccessful foray into state-building in Somalia in 1993–94, the United States and the West had shown little appetite for ‘fixing failed states’ in Africa. In the aftermath of 9/11, that changed. The Bush Administration’s disdain for nation-building was replaced by urgent prioritization of state-building programmes in weak states. Selected African governments became major beneficiaries of this policy reversal. A significant portion of Western development budgets in Africa was devoted to state capacity building. Most of the work of AFRICOM consisted of military-to-military assistance in the form of training and equipment. Donor states and UN specialized agencies took on projects in security-sector reform that had them involved in equipping and training police and engaging with security forces to a degree that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. The entire enterprise to strengthen the capacity of African states’ police, military, and judiciary in order to build up local partners in the global war on terror represented the securitization of state-building in Africa.
The approach has enjoyed successes, but has also brewed controversies and seen its share of setbacks. First, it quickly encountered criticism when some of the security-sector capacity it had developed was misused by partner governments against their own populations. The heavy-handed Ethiopian crackdown in 2005 against protesters following a disputed election was the most dramatic of these incidents, but hardly the only one. This raised concerns that capacity-building projects had failed to consider the question ‘capacity to do what?’ In some cases the answer was to use the capacity against domestic rivals, not terrorists. Observers worried that securitized state-building would set back hard-earned democratic gains on the continent, as regimes exploited their new role as partners in the global war on terror to consolidate power, eliminate rivals, and curtail civil liberties. Others pointed out that state-building in the name of counter-terrorism presumed that the recipient government shared a common agenda with Western donors, when in fact they were often much more concerned with their own political survival and local threats, not with al-Qaeda. Put another way, the United States and some of its African allies were actually fighting somewhat different wars, so that counter-terrorism assistance was likely to be put to different uses than what the donor intended. Disputes between the government of Ethiopia and the United States over American contact with the Ogaden National Liberation Front – a movement the United States sees as a potential bulwark against al-Shabaab in the eastern Horn, but which Ethiopia views as a domestic terrorist group and a more immediate threat to its own security – is but one example.
Questions were also raised about the political will of some recipient governments to commit to state-building (Le Sage 2010: 73). The securitized state-building agenda assumed that the problem of Africa’s weak states was a matter of capacity, not will. For many policymakers and analysts in the West, the idea that a government would not seek to maximize its power seemed counter-intuitive. Yet developments in a number of state-building settings, both in and beyond Africa, demonstrated that African government leaders often had powerful reasons not to extend the reach of their government. In some cases, leaders presided over lucrative criminal economies and so had little interest in promoting the rule of law; in others, leaders correctly surmised that efforts to extend state authority to remote, thinly populated, ‘ungoverned’ hinterlands was simply not economical; in still others, leaders were keen to embrace state-building in the name of counter-terrorism, but only as an ongoing income-generating project, not as an outcome (Reno 2000; Herbst 2000). In such cases – of which the Somali TFG is probably the best example – securitized state-building led to a perplexing case of moral hazard, in which local actors shared with the United States a powerful interest in addressing terrorism, but little interest at all in defeating it, as that would have the unwanted effect of reducing their strategic importance to the United States and would dry up military and state-building assistance (Menkhaus 2010c). Finally, some African heads of state resisted military aid aimed at strengthening their security sector out of concern that elite counter-terrorism units could create a rule of law unto themselves, accountable more to the external donor than to their own government. Recent research suggests that African heads of state tend to make decisions about the composition and capacity of their security sectors based on calculations on regime survival, even if that produces a greater likelihood of ethnic grievances, insurgencies, and civil war (Roessler 2011).
Time and again, Western donor agencies and militaries were perplexed and frustrated with the failure of some African governments to respond as they expected as partners in counter-terrorism and in state-building. These Western expectations reflected an inadequate understanding of the political economy of the state across much of the continent and a lack of appreciation for the ways in which local leaders sometimes view the state, the rule of law, and terrorist threats through a very different lens than do Western donors.
The privileging of state-building as a security issue also had major and unwanted implications for development agencies as they came under donor pressure to channel their aid through state agencies. This raised a difficult policy question: when should external actors work with African states in pursuit of their objectives, and when is it appropriate or necessary to work around the state? Many observers trace almost all of Africa’s most pressing crises – food insecurity, humanitarian emergencies, underdevelopment, civil war, criminality, and terrorist threats – to the weakness of African states. For this school of thought the answer is clear: all external assistance and interventions must be designed to strengthen the capacity and legitimacy of the state. However, working with weak and sometimes venal state authorities comes at a cost: reduced effectiveness, reduced efficiency, and loss of neutrality, especially in cases where the state is party to an ongoing armed conflict. Not surprisingly, development and humanitarian agencies have been among the most vocal critics of efforts by donor governments to harness their aid in pursuit of state-building objectives. Claiming that the push to strengthen African states has been mainly driven by counter-terrorism concerns, these actors argue that pressure to channel humanitarian aid through states essentially ‘securitizes’ development and humanitarian aid as well, a policy that jeopardizes their neutrality in conflict situations (Muggah et al. 2010).
Importantly, though, schools of thought on the question of working with or around Africa’s weak states do not fall neatly into counter-terrorism, development, democratization, or humanitarian camps. Counter-terrorism initiatives simultaneously work with and around the state, sometimes working at cross-purposes, and while some development agencies resist linkage of their operations to state-centric stabilization agendas, other development actors have eagerly embraced the securitization of their work as a means of attracting more funding.
Re-Thinking Ungoverned Space
Meanwhile, the flurry of state capacity building that ensued following the 9/11 attacks rushed past the fundamental question of whether the threat assessment on which policy was based was in fact empirically correct. Were zones of ungoverned space in Africa in fact attractive safe havens for a dispersed al-Qaeda?
Counter-intuitively, the eventual answer was no, or at least not exactly. As evidence of al-Qaeda’s operations and presence on the African continent was collected and assessed, it became increasingly clear that zones of complete state collapse proved to be just as ‘non-permissive’ an environment for terrorists as they were for international aid agencies. Close examination of al-Qaeda’s experience in north-east Africa in 1991–96, a period when the organization was based in Sudan, revealed that the group’s attempts to penetrate Somalia – which by 1991 was the scene of complete state collapse, massive displacement, civil war, and famine – met only setbacks, acrimony, and frustration (Watts et al. 2007). Al-Qaeda operatives were stymied by clannism, local distrust, corruption, logistical headaches, and disease, eventually prompting one operative to ask his superiors if efforts to build a training camp could be relocated back to Sudan, which was both safer and cheaper. Somalia’s ‘ungoverned space’ was anything but conducive for al-Qaeda’s nascent East Africa cell, which by 1995 withdrew from Somalia to Kenya (Menkhaus and Shapiro 2010). Instead, it was in neighbouring Kenya where the East Africa al-Qaeda (EAAQ) cell thrived. There it established residencies, set up businesses and charity fronts, rented light aircraft, intermarried, and planned and executed several major terrorist attacks – including the bombings of the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998. Kenya in the 1990s had a weak state and a highly corrupt police force. It teemed with foreign missionaries, aid workers, businesspeople, and tourists, so foreign terrorists could easily go unnoticed; and Kenya was replete with soft Western targets. By contrast, Somalia featured almost no Western targets and had almost no foreign visitors, making it much harder for non-Somali operatives to go unnoticed. It seems al-Qaeda prefers a weak, penetrable government to no government at all. ‘Not all weak and failing states are afflicted by terrorism’, notes Stewart Patrick, ‘nor are all weak and failing states equally attractive to transnational terrorists. In fact, terrorists are likely to find weak but functioning states like Kenya or Pakistan more congenial long term bases of operation’ (Patrick 2011: 10). Instead, political commitment on the part of a weak government appears to be a more decisive factor in determining its vulnerability to terrorist infiltration (ibid.: 11).
In addition, the concept of ungoverned space came under scrutiny from those who challenged the premise that zones of state failure were ‘ungoverned’. The dominant image of Africa’s zones of state failure were as regions of lawless, violent anarchy. In reality, researchers and relief agencies pointed out that local African communities are not passive victims of state collapse, but quickly construct informal systems of ‘governance without government’ in an effort to provide some level of security and order (Menkhaus 2006–07, 2010b). Areas beyond the effective reach of the state in Africa usually feature a patchwork of hybrid governance arrangements. Some of these are impressive grassroots efforts enjoying strong legitimacy in the community; others are little more than warlord fiefdoms (Andersen et al. 2007). In either case, they are not Hobbesian anarchy.
The ubiquity of what Crawford and Miscik (2010) call ‘mezzanine rulers’ in weak states poses a range of interesting policy challenges. For African governments, the choice is whether to view these often powerful non-state actors as impediments to the expansion of the state’s authority or as potential partners in negotiated governance arrangements. For Western governments pursuing counter-terrorism agendas, the choice is whether to partner with government security forces with limited capacity, or to circumvent the state and work directly with armed non-state partners in pursuit of terrorist groups. In the long term, all agree that an effective state security sector is key to preventing and monitoring terrorism and international criminal activities, but the building up of state capacity is a lengthy process. In the interim, more expedient logic often applies, enticing Western governments to work around rather than with weak African governments. As was learned in Afghanistan, this can inadvertently work against state-building, by strengthening forces opposing the expansion of state authority and incentivizing them to remain autonomous from the state. This has been particularly notable in the case of Somalia, where US and AMISOM counter-terrorism efforts have often relied on non-state armed groups as a more effective partner than the TFG.
Thus, despite mounting evidence from the field, conventional thinking on state-building, state failure, and security still presumes a compatibility between state-building and counter-terrorism objectives, and still clings to the questionable assumption that ungoverned space is a more attractive lair for transnational criminal and terrorist groups than are weak states. Deeply embedded Western belief systems about the nature of states, interests, and armed conflict fare poorly when they collide with the messy realities of ‘post-modern’ political violence in Africa and elsewhere (Keen 2012).
‘Hearts and Minds’– The Securitization of Development and Humanitarian Aid
Another piece of conventional wisdom in security studies – especially in counter-terrorism doctrine – is the importance of winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of local communities. This ‘civ-mil’ (civilian-military) work typically involves harnessing development and humanitarian projects with the specific intent of addressing local needs (especially youth unemployment), reducing local grievances, and combating perceptions of marginalization that insurgents can exploit. By demonstrating to recipient communities that their loyalty, support, and cooperation pay dividends, and by generating jobs that reduce the number of easy recruits into armed groups, the aim of ‘hearts and minds’ campaigns is to inoculate local communities for radicalization and render them non-permissive environments for terrorists or insurgents. This latter objective is based on the very important observation that the single most effective deterrent to terrorism is community policing.
The ‘hearts and minds’ strategy explicitly melds counter-terrorism operations with development and humanitarian projects, whether executed by civil affairs teams in the military or in partnership with development firms. In the US government this is referred to as the ‘whole of government’ approach, an effort to ensure that the ‘3 Ds’– defence, diplomacy, and development – are all working toward a common goal within a common strategy. Not surprisingly, this securitization of development assistance in Africa has met with resistance and alarm from many development and humanitarian actors. They insist that this approach in fact subordinates development aid to defence objectives. They argue further that the direct linkage between development projects and security operations creates enormous security risks for aid workers. They also question the effectiveness and appropriateness of aid projects driven by short-term, military objectives.
Beyond the debate over the securitization of development and humanitarian aid for counter-terrorism purposes, an equally pressing question has received less attention: winning ‘hearts and minds’ for whom? Is the aim of these projects to combat anti-American or anti-Western sentiment? Or to win local communities over to their own governments, against which they may have profound grievances? The tendency among US civil affairs programmes has been to privilege the former goal. Yet evidence suggests that programmes aimed at making aggrieved populations feel that they are stakeholders in their own country is a far more effective approach to countering radicalization.
In Africa, the effort to harness development and humanitarian aid to win over potentially hostile communities has been almost exclusively focused on Muslim populations. Numerous inquiries into the ‘roots of radicalization’ of African Islamic communities have been commissioned, which have in turn informed new programming designed to address – and presumably prevent – the radicalization of African Muslims. While the quality of the programming varies from project to project, the premises underpinning this ‘hearts and minds’ approach in African Islamic communities are questionable and have come under attack. First, the very notion of what constitutes ‘radicalized’ viewpoints among African Muslims is a matter of debate – to return to the question above, is it measured in levels of anti-Americanism or anti-Westernism? Affiliation with a Salafi movement? Support for al-Qaeda or its affiliates? Desire for an Islamic state rather than democracy? Is there any discernible link between extremist views and actual security threats? On the one hand, available evidence suggests that radical views do seem prevalent among at least some African Muslim communities. For instance, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that Nigerian Muslims registered opinions on some questions that were more radical than Muslim counterparts from other continents. In polls conducted only with Muslim populations, Pew found that Nigeria was the only country surveyed which showed an increase in the percentage of respondents who expressed confidence in Osama bin Laden between 2003 and 2008 (from 44 per cent to 58 per cent), and revealed that support for bin Laden was by far higher in Nigeria than in any other Muslim country in the survey (Pew Research Center 2008). A higher percentage of Nigerian Muslims also agreed with the statement that suicide bombing is justified, though that number declined from 47 per cent to 32 per cent from 2003 to 2008. Nigerian Muslims also registered the highest level of favourable attitudes towards al-Qaeda – 49 per cent – of any of the countries surveyed in a follow-up 2010 poll (Pew Research Center 2011). Qualitative studies in other African countries with large Muslim population, such as Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, document the dramatic increase in Salafi mosques and schools, and growing manifestations of Islamic radicalization manifested in verbal support of al-Qaeda and acceptance of al-Qaeda’s master narrative (Carson 2005; Abbink 2011; ICG 2005; Møller 2006).
These reports raise concern, but also constitute a puzzle. If African Muslim populations are increasingly susceptible to radicalization, why has so little of that translated into action in the form of direct involvement in jihadi and terrorist organization? On paper, many African Muslim communities should be ripe for recruitment by al-Qaeda and its affiliates. In reality, sub-Saharan Africa has proven to be infertile ground for recruitment, with only a very small percentage of al-Qaeda’s fighters coming from there. There are a variety of potential explanations, but the simplest appears to be that African Muslim grievances and agendas have been mainly local, not global, in nature; hence, their political mobilization has been directed at national-level concerns (Menkhaus 2009). These affiliations can shift quickly, of course, as the case of Somalia’s jihadist group al-Shabaab demonstrates. Al-Shabaab’s rapid ascent was fuelled mainly by Somali anger over a local calamity: the Ethiopian military invasion and occupation of southern Somalia. However, al-Shabaab leaders subsequently pushed the movement into affiliation with al-Qaeda for their own more parochial reasons.
That radicalization of parts of the African Muslim population has not (yet) translated into high levels of recruitment into al-Qaeda or its affiliates is reassuring, but is only one element of counter-terrorism policy. Of perhaps greater concern is the passive rather than active support that a large, partially radicalized, disaffected Muslim community in Africa could provide to a terrorist group (Le Sage 2010). That is, terrorists will be in a strong position to exploit operating environments in which aggrieved local communities do not have a sense of being stakeholders in the welfare of the state. This analysis is important because it points to a different type of development intervention – one which prioritizes reforms and service delivery by the local government to win over its own citizens, as opposed to trying to win over local communities to the United States or the West. If local populations have a sense of being stakeholders in their country, they are much more likely to engage in the kind of community policing that is central to prevention of terrorist and other armed insurgency attacks.
The harnessing of development work in pursuit of ‘hearts and minds’ campaigns also raises questions about the actual roots of radicalization. Why are some of Africa’s Muslim populations apparently more prone to radicalism than others? The answer of course depends in part on the context of each state, but studies tend to focus on a general syndrome of radicalization ‘drivers’, including political marginalization, economic frustration, clashes over land, the more general politicization of identity politics across Africa’s multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian states, the impact of the influx of Salafi mosques and clerics funded by groups in the Gulf, and greater exposure to global media and websites carrying radical messages and narratives. While this assessment is plausible, the prescription that has typically followed is not. Development projects put to use as tools of de-radicalization have shown no signs of effectiveness. Local communities that voice support for an al-Qaeda affiliate such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) or al-Shabaab are not going to change their views simply because Western aid agencies or military civil affairs teams build them a new schoolhouse. A recent assessment of US civil affairs outreach in Kenya reached the sobering conclusion that the assumption that small-scale aid projects like repairing toilets, can win the ‘hearts and minds’ of people, help to stabilize a region, prevent the radicalization of populations and work to counter terrorism, suggests at best a simplistic – if not patronizing – view of the assisted communities (Bradbury and Kleinman 2010).
Most donor agencies and AFRICOM civil affairs teams are aware that their limited aid interventions are very unlikely to change public attitudes toward the state, the foreign donor, or the al-Qaeda master narrative. They nonetheless find such ‘hearts and minds’ work useful as a means of gauging local attitudes and gathering information. This, however, has sparked powerful disagreements with development and humanitarian agencies, which fear that such overt use of development work for what amounts to intelligence gathering will render all aid organizations vulnerable to charges that they are spies for the US military, an accusation that puts aid workers in grave danger. This is a major concern in parts of Islamic Africa, where humanitarian access has dramatically shrunk due to insecurity.
Finally, counter-terrorism operations in one African state, Somalia, have collided with the humanitarian imperative of access. One of the more effective counter-terrorism policies against al-Qaeda and its affiliates has been tight restrictions on financial transactions. The Patriot Act of 2001, which gave the US government greater freedom to investigate individuals suspected of terrorist activities, also prohibits material support to groups designated as terrorist. The law has subsequently been strictly interpreted by the US Supreme Court, in the Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project Case of 2010; other Western states have passed similar laws. In effect, strict legal interpretation of these laws has virtually criminalized all humanitarian aid into zones controlled by terrorist groups, as these groups will almost certainly derive some material benefit from the aid. In response to this legal concern, in late 2009 the US Agency for International Development (USAID) announced the suspension of all food aid into southern Somalia, prompting an acrimonious debate with some relief agencies over the move, especially at a time of worsening humanitarian crisis in southern Somalia (Menkhaus 2010a: 337). The collision of counter-terrorism legislation with the humanitarian imperative of full access to those in need remained unresolved right through the Somali famine of 2011, and constituted one of a number of critical bottlenecks to effective delivery of emergency relief (Menkhaus 2012).
Evolving Terrorist Threats
What, in the end, is the actual terrorist threat in Africa, and who is most threatened? Two categories of threat are of particular concern.
The Rise of Al-Qaeda ‘Affiliates’
Al-Qaeda’s affiliates are now considered to be a greater global and regional security threat than al-Qaeda itself. Many of these affiliates – al-Shabaab, AQIM, Boko Haram, Ansar al-Dine – are based in Africa. Nearly all of these groups have emerged relatively recently; this has placed the counter-terrorist spotlight squarely on Africa since 2008.
The actual threat posed by African jihadi movements has varied over time and by group. One of the oldest African jihadi groups, AQIM, has in recent years split and one wing has degenerated into a criminal syndicate, engaged in drug smuggling and kidnapping for ransom (Le Sage 2010: 60). Neither wing commands many fighters, and by 2011 experts perceived AQIM to be in ‘survival mode’. Turmoil in parts of the Sahel since 2011 may, however, be providing the group with new opportunities, leading to warnings about AQIM from the US African Command (Marshall 2012). A second jihadi group, Boko Haram, has grown considerably as a threat to both Nigerians and the international community. It launched a major terrorist attack against the UN compound in Abuja in August 2011 that killed 23 people. Most of its political violence is directed at Nigerian Christians living in northern Nigeria: churches are one of the group’s preferred targets. It is responsible for over 1,000 deaths since 2010, and is now a major security threat inside Nigeria. Boko Haram claims links to al-Qaeda but is not considered an affiliate. Its agenda and grievances have to date been local not global; it claims to want to bring strict sharia (Islamic) law to the country and rid it of all Western influences. A third West African jihadi group, Ansar al-Dine, emerged suddenly from the spill-over of armed groups from Libya and the ensuing disorder in northern Mali in 2012. It has links to AQIM, draws on the Tuareg people for support, and seeks to impose sharia law and an Islamic state over all of Mali. To date, most of its armed attacks have targeted sufi shrines and tombs, which, as a strict Salafi group, it views as a corrupted practice of Islam.
The African jihadi group that has generated by far the most concern as a security threat to its own people, neighbouring states, and global interests is Somalia’s al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab’s influence and power actually peaked in 2008; since then, it has been beset by internal disputes, has lost legitimacy among most Somalis, and has lost territory in the face of military pressure from AMISOM forces and the militaries of neighbouring Ethiopia and Kenya (ICG 2010). Nonetheless, the group remains a real danger at home and abroad (Marchal 2009). Inside Somalia, it retains the capacity to launch daily attacks on AMISOM troops and the Somali transitional government. Under pressure in southern Somalia it has expanded operations in the north of the country, against the once stable regions of Puntland and Somaliland. It poses the greatest threat in Kenya and East Africa, where a large cell of non-Somali East Africans operate under the al-Shabaab franchise and have launched a series of terrorist attacks, most notably the World Cup bombings in 2010 in Kampala that killed 74 people.
Radicalization of African Diasporas
One of the quiet – but seismic – transformations of parts of Africa is the rise of a large diaspora in the West and the Middle East. For many African states, remittances from the diaspora constitute the top source of hard currency and are critical to the economy. African diasporas are also a major source of leadership in African political, commercial, and civic life. The diasporization of some African countries has implications for violent extremism. When African Muslims migrate abroad to the Gulf states, Europe, or North America, they are often exposed to more strident forms of Salafi Islam and other forms of socialization which lead a small percentage to embrace radical interpretations of Islam (Menkhaus 2009). This concern is most pronounced in the case of the very large and poorly assimilated Somali refugee and immigrant communities abroad, many of which expressed sympathy and provided support to al-Shabaab during its battle with Ethiopian occupying troops in 2007–08. Indeed, much of the top leadership of al-Shabaab consists of Somali returnees from the diaspora.
Though the allure of both al-Shabaab in particular and al-Qaeda in general has faded in recent years, there remains a genuine concern over the possibilities of self-radicalization by Somali or other African Muslim youth in the West and ensuing ‘home-grown’ terrorist plots. This has securitized Western government policies towards African Muslim diaspora populations. Their remittances have come under much closer regulation out of fear they are financing terrorist groups, and their movements abroad, internet chat rooms, mosques, and political activism have all come under closer law enforcement scrutiny.
Conclusion
The threat of terrorism in Africa has reshaped international perceptions of and policies toward Africa. The result has been the partial ‘securitization’ of state-building, development aid, and humanitarian assistance as security agendas have come to dominate the new international relations with the continent. The impact of this shift has been felt unevenly across Africa, with Nigeria, Sahel countries, East Africa, and the Horn most affected. African governments that have succeeded in positioning themselves as allies in counter-terrorism, and programmes designed to combat violent extremism have fared well, securing such governments significant aid in the name of capacity building and earning them a greater degree of immunity from criticism over human rights abuses or democratic deficits.
Close examination of the theories and strategies underpinning counter-terrorism initiatives in Africa since 9/11 clearly suggests that some elements of Western – and African – counter-terrorism policies have been based on partially inaccurate assumptions. Zones of state failure are not in fact ‘ungoverned space’ but are populated by a complex array of informal security and governance arrangements. Zones of complete state collapse and civil war are not ideal operating environments for international terrorist or criminal networks; al-Qaeda’s experience in East Africa suggests instead that it prefers to exploit weak, corrupt states. Al-Qaeda’s exploitation of Africa’s weak states does not require a strong network of true believers as much as it requires corrupt police and pragmatic businesspeople. African governments in some instances view counter-terrorism as an opportunity to be exploited, not a problem to be solved, and use this Western agenda to accrue aid and capacity that helps them solidify their position of power and suppress local rivals. State-building assistance provided in the name of counter-terrorism and stabilization cannot always presume that the recipient government shares an interest in improving the capacity of the state. In some cases, regimes have a stronger interest in perpetuating institutional weakness to facilitate patronage politics and allow criminal activities to go undetected (see also Brown, this volume). Civil affairs projects and ‘securitized’ development aid from the West are not in fact an effective means of winning ‘hearts and minds’ among aggrieved or marginalized African Muslims, whose demands are usually for political rights and reform in their own country rather than a new well or pit latrine. African jihadist groups have sought and secured affiliations with al-Qaeda and embraced their globalist rhetoric, but their agendas, like those of most African Muslims expressing ‘radical’ views, are primarily local, not global. Some of the most worrisome terrorist threats are increasingly coming not from radicalized African Muslims on the continent, but from a small number of African Muslims in the diaspora who have been radicalized while living in Europe or North America. Similarly, the main religious battle in Islamic Africa today does not in fact pit Muslims against Christians, but is instead a struggle between sufi and Salafi interpretations of Islam.
Finally, direct external military interventions to defeat a rising terrorist movement can inadvertently inflame local sentiment, earning the radical group more support from the population and allowing it to conflate its extremist ideology with ethnic or nationalist solidarity (Lyman 2009). Fortunately, many organizations involved in counter-terrorism and security matters have learned from these reconsiderations, giving reason for cautious optimism that ‘second-generation’ counter-terrorism policies in Africa will be better informed and less likely to produce unintended consequences. ‘Without such an understanding’, concludes Andre Le Sage, ‘U.S. and other security assistance providers will not only be frustrated in achieving their goals, but their investments in Africa may actually reward those who allow violence, predation, and plundering to continue’ (Le Sage 2010: 74).
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