Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Rafforzamento della presenza militare USA in Africa.

La prima osservazione che si può fare riguardo a questa nuova attività
statunitense è che l'approccio neocon al confronto con i competitori
(Cina) rimane di tipo militarista.
La seconda è che ormai il controllo delle fonti di materie prime,
petrolio in testa, è di vitale importanza per garantire la continuità
di funzionamento di un sistema economico, produttivo, finanziario,
fondato sulla continua crescita del tasso di profitto del capitale.
Un sistema che è virtualmente irriformabile.
La terza osservazione riguarda l'estrema utilità della cosiddetta
"guerra al terrore" per giustificare imprese che altrimenti
apparirebbero crudamente per ciò che sono: espansionismo economico
drogato, in quanto sostenuto dalla potenza militare.
Da questo punto di vista salta agli occhi il differente approccio tra
Cina e USA nel gareggiare per le risorse: la prima tenta di penetrare
scambiando tecnologia con materie prime; i secondi usando la presenza
militare, ovviamente alla caccia di terroristi.
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Getting AFRICOM Right
Last week President George W. Bush created a new military command for
Africa:
    "I am pleased to announce my decision to create a Department of
Defense Unified Combatant Command for Africa. I have directed the
Secretary of Defense to stand up U.S. Africa Command by the end of
fiscal year 2008. This new command will strengthen our security
cooperation with Africa and create new opportunities to bolster the
capabilities of our partners in Africa. 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 in Africa."
This development is welcome news, being long overdue, as I have
repeatedly argued (including in this column last year), given the
continent's strategic importance to key U.S. interests. While Sub-
Saharan Africa currently supplies the U.S. with nearly 20 percent of
its petroleum needs - a figure that the National Intelligence Council
expects to jump to more than 25 percent within the decade - that
resource is also particularly vulnerable to both transnational
terrorist threats like al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist group which
have set their sights on the region and local groups whose fights,
with outside support, can and have impacted production, as I have
documented extensively in this space. Beyond the security and resource
concerns, Africa is also an arena for intense diplomatic competition
with other states with global ambitions, like China, as I noted just
last week.
Also to consider, as General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, noted in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services
Committee on the same day the president made his announcement, is the
fact that "political and humanitarian challenges in Africa are
myriad." The specific challenges the Marine officer singled out
included growing instability, genocide, and civil war, and de facto
safe havens for criminal elements.
Given all of this, it made no sense to parcel out responsibility for
Africa to three different regional commands - the European Command
(EUCOM), the Central Command (CENTCOM), and the Pacific Command
(PACOM) - each of which is already overtaxed with its own strategic
command priorities, thus oftentimes leaving African concerns
insufficiently address if not entirely ignored until long-summering
challenges turn into full-blown crises.
However, reorganizations, like other transformations in the military,
are not ends onto themselves; their sole value lies in the strategic
effect they advance. In the case of the new AFRICOM, the strategic
effect was announced by Defense Secretary Robert Gates as he explained
the administration's proposed Pentagon budget for 2008 on Capitol
Hill: "This command will enable us to have a more effective and
integrated approach...to oversee security cooperation, building
partnership capability, defense support to non-military missions, and,
if directed, military operations on the African continent."
In rising to the challenge of this mission objective, AFRICOM must
first overcome four hurdles:
First, there is the question of perception, especially but not
exclusively in Africa. New Jersey Representative Donald Payne,
chairman of the House Subcommittee on Africa is put it succinctly when
he told a Voice of America interviewer: "I think there'll be a lot of
skepticism, because there has been so little attention given to Africa...
All of a sudden to have a special military command, I think the
typical person would wonder why now and really what is the end game?"
The answer to the congressman (and others) is found in the much-
maligned 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of
America which declared that "weak states...can pose a great danger to
our national interests as strong states. Poverty does not make poor
people into terrorists and murderers. Yet poverty, weak institutions,
and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks
and drug cartels within their borders." In Africa, the document went
on to assert: "Promise and opportunity sit side by side with disease,
war, and desperate poverty. This threatens both a core value of the
United States - preserving human dignity - and our strategic priority
- combating terror. American interests and American principles,
therefore, lead in the same direction: we will work with others for an
African continent that lives in liberty, peace, and growing
prosperity."
Furthermore, while the heyday of the type of pan-Africanism dreamed by
African independence leaders like Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah has come and
gone, a continental perspective nonetheless does resonate with African
states which do tend to see themselves, at least in interactions with
non-African powers, as African. Consequently, it behooves U.S. foreign
policy to engage those same countries on the basis of that collective
identity. The case needs to be consistently made by both the political
leaders and military personnel that a unified command focused on the
entire continent will be better positioned to coherently address
uniquely African challenges and support local efforts to bolster the
operational capacities of African states, including those of the
African Union and subregional organizations like the Economic
Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
Second, if the Africa Command get down to doing its job of advancing
U.S. interests abroad it must get the support to do so from home. It
is one thing to create a skeletal structure - a 60-member transition
planning team is already being assembled at Kelley Barracks, a EUCOM
installation outside Stuttgart, Germany - and quite another to give it
flesh between now and the full stand-up of the command, mandated to
occur before September 30, 2008.
In a period when the many within the Congressional majority are not
exactly defense hawks, the Bush administration needs to concertedly
reach out to the rather eclectic group of Africa advocates on the
Hill, some of whom - to put it mildly - are usually not counted as
members of the president's fan club. For example, in an interview with
an African news service last week, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, a
fierce critic of the war in Iraq, declared his support for AFRICOM,
characterizing it as "vital to strengthening our relationships with
African nations." Thus ironically in the same week when the U.S.
Senate was introducing conflicting resolutions on the president's
troop surge in Iraq, AFRICOM presents a unique opportunity for
executive-legislative cooperation in the great American tradition of
partisan divisions stopping at the water's edge.
Third, securing Congressional appropriations is not the only domestic
hurdle that AFRICOM will need to clear. Rear Admiral Robert Moeller,
executive director of the new command's implementation planning team,
and his colleagues will have to do battle within the Pentagon for
scarce resources, personnel as well as material. Aside from the 60
planners who will report to Admiral Moeller, the only other manpower
that the command has are the approximately 1,700 troops in the
Djibouti-based Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA),
which since late 2002, has been carrying out training, humanitarian
assistance, and counterterrorism missions in that region, most
recently launching air strikes aimed at the three al-Qaeda leaders in
Somalia who were responsible for the 1998 bombings of the U.S.
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as well as coordinated 2002 attacks on
Israeli tourists in Kenya. Even if cooperative endeavors with partners
in its 52-nation area of responsibility (AOR) - for sound geopolitical
and strategic reasons, Egypt will continue to fall within CENTCOM's
AOR - are done in a rotational basis, AFRICOM will certainly need a
larger standing force as well as headquarters staff. The question, of
course, is where that manpower will come from, considering that it is
now admitted by all that the U.S. military is indeed short of its
ideal personnel strength.
In addition, the new command requires considerable start-up physical
resources, beginning with bases and other capital infrastructure.
While it was announced last month that CJTF-HOA's 97-acre base, Camp
Lemonier, will be expanded to some 500 acres, the relatively isolated,
sweltering abandoned French Foreign Legion outpost is hardly ideal as
the headquarters for an Africa-wide command. Moroccan officials have
been quick to step forward to offer AFRICOM a possible home, but it is
likely that one or more sites will have to be acquired and constructed
in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Fourth, the mission of the Africa Command will necessarily require a
major break with conventional doctrinal mentalities both within the
armed services themselves and between government agencies. The
challenges that the new command will confront will be quite different
from those its homologues face in other theatres. Briefing reporters,
Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Ryan Henry
correctly emphasized the comprehensive nature of the mandate which
circumstances in Africa will require AFRICOM to assume: "This command,
then, will focus on some efforts to reduce conflict, to improve the
security environment, to defeat or preclude the development of
terrorist networks, and then support in crisis response, whether they
be humanitarian or disaster response. We want to help develop a stable
environment in which civil society can be built and that the quality
of life for the citizenry can be improved."
Fulfilling such a broad mandate would, however, necessitate that the
command's theatre-wide engagement be a spectrum array which embraces,
in addition to "hard power" options, diplomatic, developmental
assistance, humanitarian relief, and other proactive "soft power"
missions which some in the military have been hesitate to engage in
and which others in the policy community - I can think of certain high
officials and career officers at the State Department and the U.S.
Agency for International Development (USAID) as well as a the anti-
military "usual suspects" - will be none too eager to see the
uniformed services undertake. Likewise, closer in-theatre coordination
will be needed between the members of intelligence community whose
work is more directly coordinated by the Director of National
Intelligence (DNI), their counterparts in the Defense Department's
intelligence bodies, and AFRICOM's commanders - and effect that last
week's Senate confirmation of a career military intelligence officer,
retired Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, as DNI will hopefully facilitate.
In any event, the reality is that in today's geostrategic environment,
perhaps no one else can leverage the focus and resources that the
Pentagon can, as long as it recognizes the limits of its own
capabilities. To this end, building on the precedent of some military
commands having political advisors as well as the wide behind-the-
scenes consultations they have already held, the architects of AFRICOM
would do well to incorporate qualified non-military Africa experts
into the eventual command, many of whom - especially those not in
career bureaucratic positions with other federal agencies - have the
"outside-the-box" perspectives that the new mission will require.
The announcement of AFRICOM is an important step towards achieving
more active U.S. engagement in an important strategic space that can
neither continue to be relegated to tertiary status in the strategic
calculations of our national security, political, and economic
interests nor be parceled out to several combatant commands in a
dysfunctional arrangement which Dr. Gates himself characterized as
"outdated." However, we have to do more than just create the new
command; we now have a narrow window - barely eighteen months - to get
its stand-up right.
- J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International
and Public Affairs and a Research Fellow of the Institute for
Infrastructure and Information Assurance at James Madison University
in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is also an adjunct fellow at the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C. In
addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his
research interests lie at the intersection of international relations,
international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular
concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy
and African states as well as religion and global politics.
Dr. Pham is the author of over one hundred essays and reviews on a
wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both
sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a
dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a
Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed
by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign
Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child
Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean
Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).
In addition to serving on the boards of several international and
national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the
U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both
Congressional and Executive agencies.
© 2007 J. Peter Pham
http://worlddefensereview.com/pham021507.shtml

 challenges turn into full-blown crises.
Quoto.
Tutte cose che non c'entrano un ca**o con un fantasioso "militarismo" ma
semplicemente con il fatto che l'Africa e' stata per troppo tempo
abbandonata a se stessa, con il controllo diviso tra troppe strutture
responsabili gia' di altro.
-Stefano