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September 11, 2012 | 12:27 PM | By  | 

Is Africa the new ‘playground’ for Al Qaeda? | 

Analysis

That’s the gist of a new report by Global Post, which says the links between local rebel movements in Mali, Nigeria and Somalia and the Islamist terror group Al Qaeda are growing stronger. The report coincides with today’s anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9-11.

It’s a good series, but I can’t help but worry that this angle will translate into a simplistic pitch for a military response to the continent’s troubles with various separatist movements. Are these conflicts really about Al Qaeda? I’m not so sure.

Here’s an artsy map accompanying the GP’s series on this thesis:

Al Qaeda in Africa

Some of these alleged linkages to Al Qaeda are not new, of course, and most are often preceded by squishy lingo such as “believed to be” linked with or “has ties to” the terror group.

It’s often not clear just how strong such ties are, or even if they mean much more than sharing a similar ideology or antipathy. Nigeria’s Boko Haram, for example, is perhaps best thought of as an Islamist separatist movement that has only recently sought to ally itself with Al Qaeda. Does that translate into anything on a material basis, or is it just a boast aimed at boosting the group’s terrorizing image?

Somalia’s Al Shabaab clearly considers itself part of Al Qaeda. But militant movements in parts of Africa and hostility to the U.S. goes way back (remember Blackhawk Down?) and it would be simplistic to think this is all due to Al Qaeda’s influence.

In any case, the possibility of a growing Al Qaeda movement in Africa should be taken seriously. Bin Laden had his base in Sudan for many years in the early 1990s. The question is how best to respond to this trend. Will we take the standard route and support a policy of responding to terror simply with military or police actions? Or will we also battle for hearts and minds?

Gen. Carter F. Ham, head of the U.S. Africa Command, aka AfriCom, had this to say today:

To successfully defeat terrorism requires not only the collective efforts of many nations, but it requires the combined effects of military, diplomatic, development, economic, good governance, education, food security – it requires all of those to work in concert to address the underlying causes that establish the conditions in which young people, primarily young men, find themselves attracted to these terrorist organizations.

Sounds good, but AfriCom (which was launched by Donald Rumsfeld during the Bush Administration) has yet to actually find a home anywhere in Africa. It was supposed to be headquartered somewhere on the continent in 2008 but has so far remained in Stuttgart, Germany.

Africans, and others, appear reluctant to allow the U.S. military to establish a large presence there. And a new survey indicates many Americans are also not that interested in expanding our military footprint overseas.

If Al Qaeda is indeed gaining turf in parts of Africa, the first step is make sure we understand why. Are these separatist groups joining forces with Al Qaeda for ideological or practical reasons? Was Ho Chi Minh primarily a communist or a Vietnam nationalist? Many would say the failure to answer this question accurately prompted what was, until Afghanistan, our longest war.

Al Qaeda is probably best thought of as a fungus rather than as a military force. It tends to only really flourish in places of rot – places of poverty, injustice and dysfunction.

Sure, it’s a lot more fun and entertaining to use a flame-thrower to fight a fungus. But the more reasonable approach is to just stop the rot.

FILED UNDER: Politics, Africa, Al Qaeda, development, military, terrorism
November 22, 2011 | 8:00 AM | By  | 

The case for divorcing foreign aid from military support | 

AidWatch

Bill Easterly

Development expert and economist Bill Easterly, writing in The Guardian, argues that A firewall should be built between U.S. foreign aid and national security. Says Easterly:

US foreign aid programs should be for poverty relief and should not be taken over by national security interests, abetted by delusions of nation-building.

Easterly said the foreign aid budget was significantly increased under President George W. Bush and enjoyed wide bipartisan support in Congress until recently. So what happened to turn foreign aid into Congress’ favorite punching bag in the budget battle these days?

The answer is that the US aid program was taken over by national security interests, abetted by delusions of nation-building. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) wound up in the most self-destructive position – the unsuccessful cover-up…. The resultant failures overshadowed notable successes in more traditional aid programmes like health. These disasters and the neglect of more feasible poverty relief failed to sustain the compassionate constituency evident earlier in the decade.

I’ve written about this issue several times before, when the Arab Spring came to Egypt and many of us learned how much of our “aid” to Egypt had been actually going for military equipment in support of the Mubarak dictatorship. Here was a story the next day in The Guardian noting the risk of mixing up defense and aid.

For comparison purposes, here’s a chart from GOOD comparing how much we spend on aid vs. the military.

Easterly says it’s clear most Americans want to help the poor overseas. He contends the only way we can rescue foreign aid is to disentangle it from our national security interests:

Compassionate American taxpayers continue to make private donations at a rate higher than any other nationality in the world. The bipartisan coalition that came together to increase aid in 2002 may be nearly extinct, but it could be resurrected by redirecting aid to where it has a decent chance of working. Aid will not get too many more chances.

FILED UNDER: Politics, Bill Easterly, foreign aid, foreign policy, military
August 29, 2011 | 8:30 AM | By  | 

Libya: Making the case for humanitarian warfare? | 

Flickr, Runs with Scissors

Gandhi and Che, two kinds of freedom fighters

On CNN’s Global Public Square blog, Stewart Patrick writes that the U.S. military’s support of the popular revolution in Libya and its defeat of Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi vindicates the Obama Administration’s decision to engage in warfare on humanitarian grounds.

Patrick, who is a senior fellow at Foreign Affairs and director of the Program on International Institutions and Global Governance for the Council on Foreign Relations, notes that this was the “first unambiguous military enforcement of the Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. Writes Patrick:

The fall of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is a significant foreign policy triumph for U.S. President Barack Obama. By setting overall strategy while allowing others to shoulder the burden of implementing it, the Obama administration achieved its short-term objective of stopping Gadhafi’s atrocities and its long-term one of removing him from power. This was all done at a modest financial cost, with no U.S. troops on the ground, and zero U.S. casualties. Meanwhile, as the first unambiguous military enforcement of the Responsibility to Protect norm, Gadhafi’s utter defeat seemingly put new wind in the sails of humanitarian intervention.

I’ve raised this issue a few times on Humanosphere, including this post in mid-March immediately after the Obama Administration decided to intervene. I also noted an argument for intervention by Robert Pape in The Atlantic and later posted on the ongoing and, to me, somewhat confusing debate about what kind of humanitarian crisis justifies military intervention.

Patrick regards the decision to intervene in Libya as a justified but unique exercise of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine — aka, the humanitarian case for warfare. Many will disagree with both characterizations.

As Patrick notes, many will see Libya as a dangerous precedent encouraging “interventionism run amok.” Others, looking at the Syrian government’s ongoing killing of democracy protesters, will see any argument against intervening there as a dangerous ambivalence.

FILED UNDER: Politics, humanitarian, Libya, military, Obama, Obama Administration, Stewart Patrick
April 4, 2011 | 9:12 AM | By  | 

New humanitarian standard for warfare? | 

Flickr, Jayel Aheram

Except for euphemistically calling warfare “intervention,” I think this article in The Atlantic about our current military efforts in Libya “The New Standard for Humanitarian Intervention” is a good read. Says the author Robert Pape:

We may be witnessing an historic shift in international norms.

Flickr, Runs with Scissors

Gandhi and Che, two kinds of freedom fighters

Pape’s article answers a question I raised a few weeks ago in my post asking “What determines the humanitarian military response?”

I will refer Pape’s article to my brother who, over the weekend, was challenging me on this — about Obama deciding to wage “intervention” against Libya without congressional approval, about the geopolitical wisdom of using warfare as a means to stop or resolve conflict and so on.

And it’s not just me and my brother. The chattering class (of which I am a card-carrying member) has been all over this issue as well, with some pundits who had been criticizing President Obama for not taking action in the Middle East now criticizing for him taking this action.

I recently looked at the reasons why I believe it is in our national interest to take aggressive “humanitarian military action” in Libya, as did Nick Kristof, who argues it is the better of several bad choices. For more than a month now, I’ve been citing stories about Ivory Coast that raise the question of why there has been so little international response to that crisis so similar in nature to Libya.

Pape goes beyond these specific cases and issues to look at what the rapid military intervention in Libya may mean for the future of foreign policy, and if it signals a more “humanitarian” approach by the international community — a lower threshold of intolerance for brutality. Says Pape:

Crises short of genocide, such as the Libyan conflict, justify a military response when it can save thousands of lives with reasonable prospects of virtually no or only very low casualties to international allies.

FILED UNDER: Justice, Politics, Arab revolt, Barack Obama, Congress, foreign policy, Libya, military, Nick Kristof
March 19, 2011 | 12:38 PM | By  | 

What determines the humanitarian military response? | 

Flickr, Runs with Scissors

Gandhi and Che, two kinds of freedom fighters

Most of us prefer to avoid using the military and killing people to solve problems.

At least, that’s what we say — that we prefer non-violence. Hollywood and the entertainment industry, however, seem to think shooting at people is, in fact, our favorite problem-solving strategy.

The reality is that a military response is sometimes the only course of action that will work.

Take what’s happening in Libya.

Is there a credible argument out there that challenges the need for the current international military response to Muammar Gaddafi’s murderous retaliation against those Libyans who are — as part of the broader Arab revolt — seeking an to end his dictatorship?

I’ve seen a few articles questioning the political validity of this move, or the specific tactics. Here’s a thoughtful post by Yale development expert Chris Blattman noting that military interventions imply broader failures in foreign policy.

But I can’t find anyone (other than Gaddafi and his few supporters) arguing that the military response aimed at stopping the pro-Gaddafi forces is fundamentally wrong. Rather, this action has become a humanitarian obligation. Yet: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, foreign policy, Ivory Coast, Libya, military
February 16, 2011 | 10:54 AM | By  | 

America’s foreign policy skills crumbling, says leading diplomat | 

“Diplomats without language skills are like soldiers without bullets.”

Ronald E. Neumann

So says Ronald E. Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy and a man with a long career in foreign service, describing just one symptom of the sorry state of affairs that has resulted from the U.S. government’s long neglect of the country’s diplomatic corps and foreign policy apparatus.

Neumann speaks tonight in Seattle at the University of Washington’s Kane Hall, an event sponsored by the World Affairs Council. His main message, he told me, will be that the U.S. has let its diplomatic talent base and clout crumble for many years and that further cuts will only endanger us — and probably cost us much more in the long run.

In a study done a few years ago by his organization, Neumann and his colleagues found that nearly a third of all diplomats the U.S. had posted overseas lacked the language skills needed to converse in that country.

Imagine a diplomat in Egypt who doesn’t speak Arabic. Hmmm … maybe that explains why the Arab revolt in Egypt and throughout the Middle East blindsided even our political top brass? Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, diplomacy, foreign aid, military, national security, Obama Administration, Wikileaks