The Pentagon Should Stay Out of Africa
QuestionGirl December 11th, 2007 - 10:54 amby Danny Glover & Nicole C. Lee
Progressive Media Project
If all goes as planned, starting in September 2008 the Pentagon will have a new international outpost that will be called the U.S. Africa Command, or Africom. It will oversee all U.S. military and security interests throughout the region, excluding Egypt.
Africom is a dangerous continuation of U.S. military expansion around the globe. It is likely to inflame threats against the United States, make Africa even more dependent on external powers and delay durable African solutions to continental security issues.
President Bush has put his spin on Africom, saying it “will enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the people of Africa” and promote the “goals of development, health, education, democracy and economic growth.”
What he fails to mention is that the Pentagon views Africa as an arena of competition with China over natural resources — and a playground for U.S. multinationals. Africa is rich in petroleum, uranium, copper, aluminum and diamonds — to name just some of the continent’s bounty. West Africa, for instance, currently provides 15 percent of crude oil imports to the United States, and that figure is expected to rise to 25 percent by 2015.
The Americans Have Landed
QuestionGirl June 15th, 2007 - 10:24 amA few years ago, with little fanfare, the United States opened a base in the horn of Africa to kill or capture Al Qaeda fighters. By 2012, the Pentagon will have two dozen such forts. The story of Africa Command, the American military’s new frontier outpost.
By Thomas P.M. Barnett
The word came down suddenly in early January to the fifty or so U.S. troops stationed inside Camp Simba, a Kenyan naval base located on that country’s sandy coast: Drop everything and pull everyone back inside the compound wire. Then they were instructed to immediately clear a couple acres of dense forest. Task Force 88, a very secret American special-operations unit, needed to land three CH-53 helicopters.
“We had everybody working nonstop,” says Navy Lieutenant Commander Steve Eron, commander of Contingency Operating Location Manda Bay, a new American base in Kenya, including a dozen or so on’site KBR contractors. By the next day, every tree had been hauled off and the field graded and packed down using heavy machinery. The pad was completed in thirty’six hours.
Soon after, U.S. special operators flying out of Manda Bay were landing in southernmost Somalia, searching for survivors among the foreign fighters and Al Qaeda operatives just targeted in a furious bombardment by a U.S. gunship launched from a secret airstrip in eastern Ethiopia.
The 88’s job was simple: Kill anyone still alive and leave no unidentified bodies behind.
A few weeks later, the president would announce the creation of a new regional command — Africa Command — that would commit U.S. military personnel to the continent on a permanent basis. The January operation would be, in effect, the first combat mission of Africa Command, and it would not go as planned.
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