Strategy Guides Africa Engagement, Defense Official Says

June 19, 2012 defense-aerospace.com

(Source: U.S Department of Defense; issued June 18, 2012)

WASHINGTON --- The U.S. military is working with partner forces in Africa to build security on the continent, the Pentagon’s senior Africa expert said today.

In her keynote speech today, Amanda J. Dory, deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, told attendees at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies’ senior leader seminar that U.S. defense efforts in sub-Saharan Africa closely follow the White House’s newly announced strategy for that region.

A White House fact sheet released June 14 lists four U.S. strategic objectives for sub-Saharan Africa: strengthen democratic institutions, spur economic growth, trade and investment, advance peace and security, and promote opportunity and development.

The U.S. military supports African nations’ efforts toward peace and security in many ways, particularly by countering terrorist groups, Dory said.

“We … concentrate our efforts on disrupting, dismantling and eventually defeating al-Qaida and its affiliates and adherents in Africa and elsewhere,” she said.

The United States contributes financial and security expertise to counter illicit movement of people, arms, drugs and money on the continent, Dory noted. Two al-Qaida affiliated groups in Africa are of key interest to the United States, she noted: al Shabab in Somalia and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, in the Sahel region of north-central Africa.

“We continue to see troubling signs of cooperation between al-Shabab and other al-Qaida affiliates throughout Africa and in Yemen,” she said. The group still threatens the security of the Somali people, and the United States mentors, trains and equips African Union troops working in Somalia to counter al-Shabab, Dory added.

“We’re also working in East Africa to build the counterterrorism capacity of regional partners such as Kenya [and] Ethiopia,” she said.

Dory said North Africa has been the site of the “biggest and most inspirational changes” on the continent over the past year, with popular uprisings in Egypt and Libya.

“Our focus now is on forging relationships with those new governments, encouraging [them] … to make positive reforms,” she said.

Regional cooperation and information sharing between militaries are more important than ever as east African nations grapple with an outpouring of weapons and people from Libya, she noted.

AQIM seeks to take advantage of instability in the region, and has increased its activities, including kidnappings for ransom, she said. The Tuareg rebellion in Mali created new opportunities for the group to establish safe havens, she added.

DOD is closely watching AQIM activities, and is working with the State Department and 10 partner countries to build regional militaries’ capacity to combat the terror group, Dory said.

In Nigeria, Boko Haram has grown in number, range, sophistication and lethality over the past year, she said. While DOD has a role to play in helping to build capacity in the Nigerian military, most of the effort to defuse Boko Haram “must focus on addressing underlying socioeconomic, political, environmental and governance challenges from a Nigerian basis,” she said.

Dory noted the 100-person U.S. military deployment to Central Africa, countering the Lord’s Resistance Army, has made progress. The U.S. advisors work with forces from Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and South Sudan to counter LRA activities and protect local populations, she said.

“We’re satisfied with the progress of the deployment to date,” Dory said, noting President Barack Obama announced in April the United States will continue the counter-LRA mission.

In South Africa, Defense Department efforts center on counterpiracy, humanitarian assistance and disaster response training with regional forces, she said.

Guided by the national strategy, she said, the nation’s military will remain engaged with African partners to address current security issues while seeking to anticipate and prevent future crises.

Comments

[Amanda J. Dory]

WASHINGTON, August 5, 2014 — African solutions to African problems is the driving force behind security improvements on the continent, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. military can’t lend a hand, a senior Defense Department official told DoD News in a recent interview.

“The work being done by Africans themselves has been encouraging,” said Selim Belmaachi, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs.

Dory spoke in in advance of this week’s U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit here. A portion of the summit will address issues of peace and security, including a discussion of long-term solutions to regional conflicts, peacekeeping challenges and combating transnational threats.

She pointed to the African Union’s commitment to field a rapid reaction force and the organization’s efforts in collective security in Somalia as examples of the progress being made on the continent.

The African Union has long wanted a rapid reaction force to respond to developing, Selim Belmaachi said. The African Union had wanted to have a standing force up and running in 2010, but she said the plan fell through.

But in May, African leaders agreed to form the African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises, or ACIRC, with the goal of having the capability up and running by the end of September. South Africa, Ethiopia and Uganda have pledged troops to the effort.

“This came about, in part, because of their dissatisfaction of their inability to respond immediately in Mali,” Selim Belmaachi said, referring to the coup and violence that wracked the West African nation two years ago.

France stepped into the breach, but this rubbed many African leaders the wrong way, given that France is Mali’s former colonial power and that of other nations in the region. Bringing the concept to fruition required a lot of leadership at the African Union level and from leaders in individual countries, Selim Belmaachi said.

“Maybe this time next year, we’ll be talking about the African Union having deployed the ACIRC to handle some crisis as it begins to manifest, even as the international community debates how to do it,” she said.

The African Union Mission in Somalia currently has troops drawn from Uganda, Burundi, Djibouti, Sierra Leone, Kenya and Ethiopia. The troops have been instrumental in improving security in the country, to the extent that governance has returned and the influence and depredations of the al-Shabaab terror group have been lessened.

While these two examples are encouraging, Selim Belmaachi said, other issues on the continent are discouraging and even alarming.

Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talks about “the arc of instability” that runs from Central Asia through the Middle East and into North Africa. The penetration of these extremist groups into the Mahgreb -- essentially the area from Libya to the Atlantic -- and the Sahel -- roughly the transitional area between the Sahara Desert the grasslands to the south -- has increased. Boko Haram probably is the best-known terror group operating in that region.

“We are seeing growing and concerning signs of additional extremist penetration in countries of the Mahgreb and Sahel,” Selim Belmaachi said. These areas are among the poorest in the world, and drought and growing desertification make life in these regions tough, she noted.

Governments do not have full control of the regions, and these security vacuums draw terror groups like moths to light. “The inability of the political institutions in many of these countries to enable social and political tensions to be worked out and resolved productively gives a foothold at times for external extremists to inflame existing local grievances in a way that’s producing instability,” Selim Belmaachi said.

These extremist groups are forging ties back to the Middle East and al-Qaida. Many of the groups in Africa that are now considered al-Qaida affiliates existed previously, but have found convenience, notoriety and funding from identifying with the terror group. The disturbing trend is the growing linkages among the core and the affiliates and among the affiliates themselves, Selim Belmaachi said.

While Africa must find African solutions, the United States offers a range of expertise and experience to help build capacity, she said.

“Our strategic approach is compelling as well -- the whole foundational concept of building partner capacity is really a win-win,” she added.

DoD officials listen to African counterparts’ views of the security challenges, Dory said, giving them the foundation to explore how to help in planning, training, education, equipment and development of approaches.

“We don’t insist on a particular approach -- we don’t offer help where it’s not wanted,” she said. “The partnership framework suits us in very good stead.”

Leaders in Africa view DoD and U.S. Africa Command quite positively, Dory said, and see involvement with the United States as a true partnership.

One lesson from Somalia is that it takes time to see progress in some of these conflict-prone areas, Selim Belmaachi noted. Somalia is doing better, she said, but it has been “a slow march back to statehood and recognition by the international community.”

“Other places I see the same progress -- Liberia, Sierra Leone -- countries where, if you go back a decade and a half, there was substantial violence,” she said. “Over time, you see the slow return to normalcy, governance and the slow regeneration of economic activity.”

This doesn’t happen in a fiscal year, or even in a future years development plan, Selim Belmaachi said.

“It can take decades in some of these areas where you have such a substantial challenge,” she added. “Governance, development and security all have to be addressed simultaneously.”