February 02, 2018
Battleground Africa
Africa is seldom on the radar screen of Washington’s policy makers. It elicits sparse coverage in US media. It is, in effect, still a “dark continent.”
Traditionally, from America’s angle, African nations have been seen as docile and unthreatening to Western interests.
Apartheid-era South Africa got attention, but much was focused on its white minority. And, in southern Africa, Fidel’s army’s combat role in Angola caused alarm.
But now, Trump’s slur disparaging African nations as unworthy for immigration to the US has led to an outcry in Africa. Forgotten in this is the ironic fact that Africans for the most part didn’t choose to come to America. They were enslaved and forcibly shipped, and used as slave labor to fuel American economy.
Broad characterizations misrepresent facts, shrink US prestige, and diminish its claims of exceptionalism. There is now symmetry between the Trump Administration and far-right European xenophobes.
Alongside the foregoing have been staggering policy miscalculations. The so-called war against terror – waged without weighing its limitations and implications – was envisaged in the Mideast theatre, and, through brute use of massive technological power, was supposed to tame and contain insurgents there. But there is always the unexpected. It has spread to Africa.
The October slayings of US soldiers in Niger spotlighted that fact. Informed US politicians, including Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, of the Senate Armed Services Committee, were not even aware that large numbers of US forces were there.
There are insurgencies like Boko Haram in West Africa, al Shabaab in the Horn of Africa. South Sudan is a wreck after its unwise US-engineered severing from Sudan. Senator Lindsey Graham stated, after the attack on US soldiers in Niger, that “the war is morphing” and that there will be “more actions in Africa, not less.”
A 2017 film, “The Pirates of Somalia”, depicts the experiences of a Canadian journalist who ventured to Somalia and saw how Somalia’s traditional society has been ripped apart by abuse and interventions including, but not limited to, overfishing by outside forces in and near Somalia’s waters and destruction of children’s schooling, without any rebuilding efforts.
The war on terror has had the opposite of its intended effect, costing a trillion dollars in Afghanistan amidst endless mayhem and mounting failures (vide January 14 CBS’s TV “60 Minutes” special report on Afghanistan.) To cite Senator McCain, US policy in the Middle East and elsewhere has been a “failure of strategy, a failure of policy … a failure of leadership” and a failure to address the geopolitical context.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union provided America a fleeting window for course-correction. Instead, triumphal trumpeting of being the ‘sole superpower’ and Establishment hypocrisy squandered the chance to make amends and seize a historic opportunity.
Where does Africa fit in all this? General Thomas Waldhauser, Commander of the US Africa Command, told Congress on March 9 that “parts of Africa remain a battleground” and “violent extremist organizations on the continent constitute the most direct security threat to the United States.” The cost of failure is proving to be unacceptable.
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