Africa to get its own US military command

For the first time in its history, Africa is poised to get its very own US military command. The advent of "AFRICOM," which will be heralded next week when President Bush submits his 2008 budget request to Congress, marks an official acknowledgment that a variety of ostensible threats in Africa require more sustained high-level attention by the Pentagon than it has been able to give until now. Of particular concern are Africa's role in the "global war on terror," or, in Pentagon parlance, "the long war," the growing importance of the region's natural resources, especially oil and gas, to the world economy and increased competition with China, among other countries, for those resources. West Africa currently provides nearly 20 percent of the US supply of hydrocarbons, up from 15 percent just five years ago and well on the way to a 25 percent share forecast for 2015. Africa has been parceled out between three US regional commands. The European Command (EUCOM), which covers all of Russia, the Caucasus and Turkey, as well as the rest of Europe, also includes North Africa west of Egypt and all of West, central and continental southern Africa. The Central Command (CENTCOM), which covers Central Asia and the Middle East, also includes Egypt, Sudan and the Horn of Africa. Finally, the Pacific Command covers the African islands of the Indian Ocean, including Madagascar, as well as all of Asia and the Pacific. Creation of AFRICOM, which will be based, initially at least, at EUCOM headquarters in Germany, has strong support from both parties in Congress. "An Africa Command would help the US military focus on a continent that is essential to our national security," according to Democrat Russell Feingold, one of the most liberal members of the Senate who also chairs its subcommittee on Africa. "Our national security strategy needs to evolve, and so does our capability to meet new and emerging threats," he said. "An Africa Command is vital to strengthening our relations with African nations and preventing them from becoming staging grounds for attacks against the US or our allies." It is not as if the Pentagon has ignored Africa, although, since the 1993 "Blackhawk Down" incident, in which 18 US soldiers were killed in Somalia, Washington has generally resisted African and international pressure to put "boots on the ground" in Africa, particularly in peacekeeping missions for which until now it has provided only logistical and financial support. Nonetheless, Washington's military presence in the region–especially in the Horn, in the Sahelian region, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in oil- and gas-rich West Africa–has grown steadily since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon which launched the Bush administration's "global war on terror." Since 2002, the greatest concentration of US military power on the continent has been based at Camp Lemonier in the former French colony of Djibouti, where between 1,500 and 1,900 CENTCOM troops have been poised for swift intervention against alleged terrorist targets elsewhere in the Horn and East Africa (where al-Qaida blew up the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998) or across the Red Sea in Yemen. Some of those troops, as well as US naval units patrolling Somalia's coast, were reportedly involved in tracking and twice attacking alleged leaders of the Union of Islamic Courts after their retreat from Mogadishu in the face of last month's Ethiopian-led offensive that ousted the group from power. Next to Egypt, which will remain under CENTCOM's jurisdiction after the creation of the new Command, Ethiopia has been by far the largest recipient of US military aid and training in Africa, and its US-backed intervention in Somalia has been hailed by hawks here as a model for future counter-terror strategy. Meanwhile, EUCOM has dispatched dozens of training units, as well as millions of dollars in weapons and other equipment, to friendly governments in the Sahelian region as part of its Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative. The program, for which Congress has budgeted some $500 million over the next six years, has focused on Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Nigeria and Morocco–all countries whose national governments have charged, with varying degrees of credibility, that al-Qaida or associated groups or individuals have been active. Meanwhile, CENTCOM has become more active in West Africa, whose importance to future US energy supplies is growing by leaps and bounds, and where poverty, corruption, and ethnic tensions, in Washington's eyes, foster the kind of instability that could result in failed states, not unlike Afghanistan or Somalia.