16 April 2004
U.S. National Security Interests in Africa Outlined
State Dept. official lists key programs that tie Africa to America
By Susan Ellis
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- The United States has real national security interests in Africa and ignores them "at its peril," a State Department official cautioned a conference on U.S. national security interests in Africa, held at a Washington think tank April 13.
Speaking to a gathering of businessmen, academics, and diplomats at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, Charles Snyder, acting assistant secretary of state for African affairs, noted that from President Bush to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Africa "remains a priority, which we've demonstrated both with resources and diplomatic engagement."
"In partnership with African governments, we've made significant achievements in our four focus areas: encouraging trade and investment; promoting democracy and human rights; encouraging development; and protecting the environment."
However, he continued, "you can't do any of that, despite our passion, unless you address the cross-cutting issues," such as fighting HIV/AIDS, countering terrorism, and ending regional conflict.
Snyder described the challenges to be faced in Africa, as in the rest of the world, as "new, thorny, and constantly evolving. And we must view these challenges with fresh eyes and search for novel, creative approaches in solving them."
For example, infectious diseases know no borders, he said, and whether it's polio, tuberculosis, or river blindness, diseases become of "strategic interest when you can get on a plane in Cape Town and get off that plane in [the U.S. city of] Atlanta [Georgia]. It's just the simple fact of global life as it is today, and it is a strategic interest."
At the same time, he said, some African countries have been used as sanctuary for extremist groups that have conducted attacks against U.S. and allied interests on the continent.
"The continent's crises and conflicts, as well as the brutal HIV/AIDS pandemic, breed instability, which opens new safe harbors for our enemies. In short, for these reasons and others, what happens in Africa impacts the United States and our policy needs to reflect this reality."
"While the scale of threat from Africa is not clear, we know that terrorists who mean us harm operate in Africa. Indeed, al Qaeda and allied terrorists have attacked U.S. interests there long before 9/11 with the August, 1998, bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
"To address these challenges, President Bush announced the East African Counter-terrorism Initiative, a $100 million effort to enhance our Horn partners' capabilities to fight terrorism.
"We're working to help train countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and others to improve their border security capacities, enhance law enforcement skills, and reach out to marginalized communities to improve perceptions and awareness of the United States and its policies."
Energy and commerce are other major issues that link America to Africa, he said. "Africa will provide up to 30 percent of U.S. oil in the next 10 years." While traditional suppliers like Nigeria and Angola will continue to feed the pipeline to America, "emerging producers like Equatorial Guinea, Chad, Sao Tome and Principe, and still more are only beginning to come online," he said.
Snyder said that during the president's trip to Africa in July 2003, Bush referred to the continent as "the last great emerging market of the world." And it is, Snyder repeated.
Other African areas of concern include the Sahel and Northern Nigeria, he said, where disadvantaged Muslim populations have shown sympathy to fundamentalist organizations. Parts of these regions also have loose ties at best to the central government and could be safe havens in which terrorists can operate and transit.
The Pan Sahel Initiative is an effort to engage governments in this region and build their capacity to effectively monitor their borders, he said, including their extensive coastlines and offshore platforms.
"Improving African capacities to monitor their coastlines is also a critical part of our strategy," Snyder continued. "We ... will revive the old African coastal security program, which helps African security forces protect their shores as well as their marine resources. And, as I pointed out earlier, a lot of the new oil is actually offshore. There is no one to protect it."
So a side benefit of the coastal security program, he said, will be the formation of some kind of competent navy or coast guard to respond in the event of threats to offshore drilling rigs and other kinds of operations.
Even though these are short-term strategies, he said, "the foundation of an effective long-term strategy is not security assistance by itself, but rather programs that promote justice and the rule of law, encourage agricultural production, and foster lasting economic development. With that in mind, the Millennium Challenge Account [MCA], which the president announced two years ago, represents a creative new approach to foreign assistance. It will form a critical part of our long-range counter-terrorism strategy."
Essentially, U.S. African policy must "take away the reasons that people are susceptible to the approach by the fundamentalist hardliners," he said.
Snyder said that after hard examination of the problem, U.S. analysts have found that "these people [fundamentalist leaders] provide, in many cases, some system of justice where there is none. It might be in the form of an Islamic court, but where there is no justice, sometimes that's an attractive thing. They provide basic medical assistance in the places where governments don't [provide it], as a recruitment device. They provide food on some occasions where agricultural programs have failed."
If we don't pay heed and take countermeasures, he said, "this will be an endless war [against terrorism]. That's why the MCA is in fact part of the global war on terrorism. It's going to change behavior if we succeed in this program and it's large enough to make a difference.
"The MCA provides development assistance to those countries that rule justly, invest in their people, and encourage economic freedom. Congress has provided $1 billion in initial funding for FY 04, and President Bush has pledged to increase the funding for MCA to $5 billion a year starting in 2006 -- roughly a 50 percent increase over current core development assistance."
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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