From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Thu Oct 29 2009 - 08:02:19 EST
Neglecting Africa
The United States has let problems on the continent fester while turning its
attention elsewhere
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
By Dan Simpson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
America's policy toward Africa is coming off about two decades of
indirection and inaction.
It is fair to say that the last useful, effective U.S. intervention in
African affairs occurred during the administration of President Ronald
Reagan when the United States played an active role in bringing about the
independence of Namibia, the termination of Cuban/Soviet and South African
military meddling in Angola and the beginning of the end of apartheid rule
in South Africa.
Since then, partly because of traditional U.S. indifference to developments
in Africa, reinforced by an ignorance-induced reluctance to act and by a
preoccupation with events in other parts of the world that were considered
to be of greater importance to the United States, succeeding governments in
Washington have largely stood by and dithered in the face of crises in
Africa.
Many of these are still around. Each in its own way -- and, certainly,
collectively, in terms of the general evolution of the economic and
political situation in Africa -- contributes to the fact that Africa
continues to rank dead last in terms of prosperity among the regions of the
world. On the basis of the size of countries' economies, there would have
been no African representation at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh last month
without the European countries having agreed to clear a place for South
Africa.
Below are listed some of the severe problems that the United States has not
addressed effectively in Africa. But first it is worth noting by comparison
the large amount of financial and military resources that America has
devoted to problems in Europe that are the responsibility of the Europeans.
Two examples: Kosovo, population 2 million; and Bosnia-Herzegovina,
population 4.6 million. Another is the much-vaunted, still-stumbling
Northern Ireland peace accord that President Bill Clinton in principle
fathered in 1998.
Sudan
Here, there is the continuing blot of Darfur, where hundreds of thousands
are said to have died and millions displaced. Sudan is also tormented by a
continuing North-South internal conflict, allegedly resolved but actually
only stretched out by a 2005 accord which threatens to come apart at any
minute over the question of who gets the country's oil revenues, and over
the nation's fundamental ethnic and religious divides.
A "new" U.S. policy may be emerging after elephantine wrangling within the
Obama administration, which it denies. The new policy *may* signal real U.S.
engagement in the issues of Sudan, although it might amount only to more
fruitless exhortation, the earmark of previous administrations.
Somalia
Somalia is in a persistent state of chaos. It hasn't had a government since
1991. One can dismiss as nonsense the argument that if the United States
does not stabilize Somalia it will become another platform for acts of
Islamic terrorism directed against the United States. (If that argument were
valid, it could serve equally well as an argument for "wars of necessity" in
Yemen and Pakistan, in addition to Afghanistan.)
The Clinton administration dipped in and then dipped out of trying to deal
with the Somalia situation, abandoning ship when 18 Americans were killed in
1993. (U.S. deaths in Iraq, a discretionary war, stand at more than 4,300 so
far.) The argument that developments in Somalia are peripheral to the United
States is belied, first, by the piracy along the Somali coast, the longest
in Africa, and, second, by the fact that someone in Washington saw fit to
quietly station more than 2,000 U.S. troops in Djibouti, just up the Indian
Ocean coast from Somalia.
The third pertinent point is that in 2006 the United States provided air and
intelligence support to Ethiopian forces as they invaded Somalia. They
occupied the country for a while before they too bailed. A lack of wisdom
and an ignorance of Africa was reflected in this U.S. policy, given the
traditional, well-known mutual dislike of Ethiopians and Somalis, reflected
in warfare that dates back to at least 1977 in modern times.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo
Formerly called Zaire, the Congo is another severely troubled country whose
problems American administrations have for the most part looked away from
since the Cold War ended. This is one that the United States has classically
lateraled to the United Nations, like a quarterback about to be sacked, not
because we believed the United Nations could do better, but because the
problems of the Congo are such that anyone who tackles them will fail, or
will be called upon to devote more resources to them than the United States
has been prepared to commit.
These three are probably Africa's biggest problem countries. Inside the U.S.
government, the Department of State generally has been stuck with them. It
rarely has had the guts or the resources to tackle them head-on. There has
always been whining -- not entirely unjust -- that the Department of Defense
does have the money to take them on, but the problem with that contention is
that it accepts a militarization of U.S. Africa policy, undesirable for the
United States and for Africa itself.
For example, one possible result of the establishment in the dying days of
the Bush administration of a new U.S. regional military command, AFRICOM, is
that a phenomenon in Africa that had died out at one point, the military
coup d'etat, has come back with a vengeance, most recently in Guinea,
Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar and Mauritania.
Whether it was a failure of will, or of the ability to present the case for
Africa persuasively by those in charge of Africa policy within the Bush I,
Clinton and Bush II administrations, the fact is that Africa has continued
to receive consistently short shrift in U.S. foreign policy for 20 years
now. One can hope that President Barack Obama's approach will make a
difference. He has started reasonably well; results remain to be seen.
Dan Simpson, a former U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (
dsimpson@post-gazette.com, 412 263-1976).
Read more:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09301/1008728-374.stm#ixzz0VKUJITT5
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