Tomdispatch.com: How Not to Win Hearts and Minds in Africa

From: Berhane Habtemariam <Berhane.Habtemariam_at_gmx.de_at_dehai.org>
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2014 19:03:37 +0200

How Not to Win Hearts and Minds in Africa
Hushed Pentagon Investigation Slaps U.S. Africa Command’s Humanitarian
Activities
By <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/nickturse> Nick Turse

September 9, 2014.

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania -- Movie night in Mouloud, Djibouti. Skype lessons
in Ethiopia. Veterinary training assistance in Garissa, Kenya. And in this
country on the east coast of Africa, work on both primary and secondary
schools and a cistern to provide clean water. These are all-American good
works, but who is doing them -- and why?

As I sit in a room filled with scores of high-ranking military officers
resplendent in their dress uniforms -- Kenyans in their khakis, Burundians
and Ugandans clad in olive, Tanzanians in deep forest green sporting
like-colored berets and red epaulets with crossed rifles on their shoulders
-- chances are that the U.S. military is carrying out some mission somewhere
on this vast continent. It might be a
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/libya-condemns-us-rai
d-and-capture-of-bombing-suspect/2013/10/06/aad8b7ec-2ea6-11e3-8906-3daa2bcd
e110_story.html> kidnapping raid or a
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175823/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_america%27s_n
on-stop_ops_in_africa/> training exercise. It could be an
<http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/26/world/africa/somalia-us-airstrike/> airstrike
or the construction of a
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175830/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_africom_becom
es_a_%22war-fighting_combatant_command%22> drone base. Or, as I wait for
the next speaker to approach the lectern at the “Land Forces East Africa”
conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, it could be a humanitarian operation
run not by civilians in the aid business, but by military troops with
ulterior motives -- part of a near-continent-wide campaign utilizing the
core tenets of counterinsurgency strategy.

The U.S. is trying to win a war for the hearts and minds of Africa. But a
Pentagon investigation suggests that those mystery projects somewhere out
there in Djibouti or Ethiopia or Kenya or here in Tanzania may well be
orphaned, ill-planned, and undocumented failures-in-the-making. According
to the Department of Defense’s watchdog agency, U.S. military officials in
Africa “did not adequately plan or execute” missions designed to win over
Africans deemed vulnerable to the lures of violent extremism.

This evidence of failure in the earliest stages of the U.S. military’s
hearts-and-minds campaign should have an eerie resonance for anyone who has
followed its previous efforts to use humanitarian aid and infrastructure
projects to sway local populations in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. In
each case, the operations failed in spectacular ways, but were only fully
acknowledged after years of futility and billions of dollars in waste. In
Africa, a war zone about which most Americans are completely unaware, the
writing is already on the wall. Or at least it should be. While Pentagon
investigators identified a plethora of problems, their report has, in fact,
been kept under wraps for almost a year, while the command responsible for
the failures has ignored all questions about it from TomDispatch.

Doing a Bad Job at Good Works

Today, the U.S. military increasingly confronts Africa as a "
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175743/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_africom%27s
_gigantic_%22small_footprint%22> battlefield" or "
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/magazine/can-general-linders-special-oper
ations-forces-stop-the-next-terrorist-threat.html> battleground" or "
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175830/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_africom_becom
es_a_%22war-fighting_combatant_command%22/> war" in the words of the men
running its operations. To that end, it has built a sophisticated
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175567/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_america%27s_s
hadow_wars_in_africa_> logistics network to service a
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-set-to-open-
second-drone-base-in-niger-as-it-expands-operations-in-africa/2014/08/31/365
489c4-2eb8-11e4-994d-202962a9150c_story.html> growing number of
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175743/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_africom%27s_g
igantic_%22small_footprint%22> small outposts, camps, and
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175830/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_africom_becom
es_a_%22war-fighting_combatant_command%22> airfields, while
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175823/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_america%27s
_non-stop_ops_in_africa> carrying out, on average, more than one mission
each day somewhere on the continent. A significant number of these
operations take the form of a textbook hearts-and-minds campaign that
harkens back to failed U.S. efforts in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and
1970s and more recently in the Greater Middle East.

In Vietnam, the so-called civilian half of the war -- building schools,
handing out soap, and offering rudimentary medical care -- was obliterated
by American heavy firepower that wiped out homes, whole hamlets, and
whatever goodwill had been gained. As a result, U.S. counterinsurgency
doctrine was tossed into the military’s dustbin -- only to be resurrected
decades later, as the Iraq War raged, by then-general and later CIA director
David Petraeus.

In 2005-2006, Petraeus oversaw the revision of FM 3-24, the military's
counterinsurgency (COIN) field manual, and a resulting revolution in
military affairs. Soon, American military officers in Iraq and Afghanistan
were throwing large sums of money at complex problems, once again with the
objective of winning hearts and minds. They bought off Sunni insurgents and
poured billions of dollars into nation-building efforts, ranging from a
modern chicken processing plant to a fun-in-the-sun water park, trying to
refashion the rubble of a failed state into a functioning one.

 <http://www.amazon.com/dp/1250045061/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> As with
Petraeus’s career, which
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cia-director-david-petraeus-resigns-09-11-2012/
> imploded amidst scandal, the efforts he fostered similarly went down in
flames. In Iraq, the chicken processing plant proved a
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175448/peter_van_buren_chickening_out_in
_iraq> Potemkin operation and the much ballyhooed Baghdad water park quickly
fell into
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/02/AR201101020
2491.html> ruin. The country soon followed. Less than three years after
the U.S. withdrawal, Iraq teeters on the
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/10/us-iraq-security-yazidis-killings
-idUSKBN0GA0FF20140810> brink of
<https://twitter.com/OCHAIraq/status/505314197438074880/photo/1> catastrophe
as most of Petraeus’s Sunni mercenaries
<http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-iraq-sunni-awakening-20140624
-story.html#page=1> stood aside while the
<http://www.newsweek.com/women-and-teens-suffer-barbaric-rape-islamic-state-
fighters-264523> brutal Islamic State carved a portion of its caliphate from
the country, and others, aggrieved with the U.S.-backed government in
Baghdad, sided with them. In Afghanistan, the results have been similarly
dismal as America’s hearts-and-minds monies yielded
<http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405297020355410457665528021999
1322?cb=logged0.3344414536043926> roads to nowhere (where they haven’t
already deteriorated into
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/after-billions-in-us-inves
tment-afghan-roads-are-falling-apart/2014/01/30/9bd07764-7986-11e3-b1c5-739e
63e9c9a7_story.html> death traps),
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-27715351> crumbling buildings,
over-crowded, underfunded, and
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/world/asia/despite-education-advances-a-h
ost-of-afghan-school-woes.html> teacher-less schools, and
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/03/AR201101030
5647.html> billions poured down the
<http://www.voanews.com/content/us-watchdog-slams-afghan-aid-waste/1728154.h
tml> drain in one
<http://www.armytimes.com/article/20110804/NEWS/108040318/Lawmakers-question
-CERP-funds-Afghanistan> boondoggle after
<http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/07/28/war-on-waste-pentagon-auditor-spotl
ights-us-billions-blown-in-afghanistan/> another.

In Africa, the sums and scale are smaller, but the efforts are from the same
counterinsurgency playbook. In fact, to the U.S. military, humanitarian
assistance -- from medical care to infrastructure projects -- is a form of
“security cooperation.” According to the latest edition of FM 3-24,
<http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&cad=rja&uact
=8&ved=0CEEQFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffas.org%2Firp%2Fdoddir%2Farmy%2Ffm3-24.pdf
&ei=G4QAVOLzD9KMNq7ygLgM&usg=AFQjCNEL31ot31J5iTa3z90MBcdmioB67g&bvm=bv.74115
972,d.eXY> published earlier this year:

“When these activities are used to defeat an insurgency, they are part of a
counterinsurgency operation. While not all security cooperation activities
are in support of counterinsurgency, security cooperation can be an
effective counterinsurgency tool. These activities help the U.S. and the
host nation gain credibility and help the host nation build legitimacy.
These efforts can help prevent insurgencies...”

U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and its subordinate command,
<http://www.africom.mil/about-the-command/subordinate-commands/combined-join
t-task-force-horn-of-africa> Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa
(CJTF-HOA) based at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, have spent years engaged in
such COIN-style humanitarian projects. These have been touted in news
releases at their websites in lieu of candid
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175743> information on the true scale and
scope of AFRICOM’s operations, the exponential
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175823/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_america%27s_n
on-stop_ops_in_africa/> growth of its activities, its
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/contractors-run-us-sp
ying-missions-in-africa/2012/06/14/gJQAvC4RdV_story.html> spy operations,
and shadowy
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175830/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_africom_becom
es_a_%22war-fighting_combatant_command%22/> base-building efforts. Take a
cursory glance at its official news releases and you’ll find them crammed
with feel-good stories like an effort by CJTF-HOA personnel to
<http://www.hoa.africom.mil/story/8120/443rd-ca-bn-making-a-difference-in-dj
ibouti-one-class-at-a-time> tutor would-be Djiboutian hotel workers in
English or a joint effort by the State Department, AFRICOM, and the Army
Corps of Engineers to
<http://www.africom.mil/newsroom/article/23062/u-s-funds-construction-of-six
-schools-in-togo> build six new schools in Togo. Such acts are never framed
in the context of counterinsurgency nor with an explicit link to U.S.
efforts to win hearts and minds. And never is there any mention of failings
or fiascos.

However, an investigation by the Department of Defense’s Inspector General
(IG), completed last October but never publicly
<http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/report_printable.cfm?id=5365> released, found
failures in planning, executing, tracking, and documenting such projects.
The restricted report, obtained by TomDispatch, describes a flawed system
plagued by a variety of deeply embedded problems.

In some cases, military officials failed to identify how their projects even
supported AFRICOM’s objectives on the continent; in others, financial
documentation was missing; in still others, CJTF-HOA personnel failed to
ensure that local populations were equipped to keep the small-scale projects
running or effective once the Americans moved on. The risk, the report
suggests, is that these signs of Washington’s goodwill and good intentions
will quickly fall into disrepair and become what one American official
called “monuments to U.S. failure” in Africa.

AFRICOM reacted defensively. In an internal memo, Colonel Bruce Nickle, the
acting Chief of Staff of U.S. Africa Command, criticized the Inspector
General’s methodology, questioned the IG’s expertise, and suggested that
some of the findings were “misleading.” Close to a year after the report’s
release, neither AFRICOM nor CJTF-HOA has announced policy changes based on
its recommendations. Repeated requests, over a period of months, by
TomDispatch to AFRICOM media chief Benjamin Benson and the CJTF-HOA Public
Affairs office for comment, further information, or clarification about the
report as well as a request to interview Nickle have all gone unanswered.

COIN and the Fountains

Across Africa, the U.S. military is engaged in a panoply of aid projects
with an eye toward winning a war of ideas in the minds of Africans and so
beating back the lure of extremist ideologies -- from that of
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13809501> Boko Haram in Nigeria to
Somalia’s <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-15336689> al Shabab. These
so-called civil-military operations, or CMOs, include “
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175830/> humanitarian assistance” projects
like the construction or repair of schools, water wells and waste treatment
systems, and “humanitarian and civic assistance” (HCA) efforts, like
offering dental and veterinary care.

Kindness may be its own reward, but in the case of the U.S. military, CMO
benevolence is designed to influence foreign governments and civilian
populations in order to “facilitate military operations and achieve U.S.
objectives.” According to the Pentagon, humanitarian assistance efforts are
engineered to improve “U.S. visibility, access, and influence with foreign
military and civilian counterparts,” while HCA projects are designed to
“promote the security and foreign policy interests of the United States.”
In the bureaucratic world of the U.S. military, these small-scale efforts
are further divided into “community relations activities,” like the
distribution of sports equipment, and “low-cost activities” such as seminars
on solar panel maintenance or English-language discussion groups.
Theoretically at least, add all these projects together and you’ve taken a
major step toward winning Africans away from the influence of extremists.
But are these projects working at all? Has anyone even bothered to check?

In a report titled “Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa Needed Better
Guidance and Systems to Adequately Manage Civil-Military Operations,” the
Department of Defense’s Inspector General found record keeping so abysmal
that its officials “did not have an effective system to manage or report
community relations and low cost activities.” A spreadsheet supposedly
tracking community low cost activities during 2012 and 2013 was so
incomplete that 43% of such efforts went unmentioned.

Nonetheless, the IG did manage to review 49 of 137 identified humanitarian
assistance and civic assistance projects, which cost U.S. taxpayers about $9
million, and found that the military officials overseeing CMO “did not
adequately plan or execute” them in accordance with AFRICOM’s “objectives.”
Close to 20% of the time, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa even
failed to accurately explain the possible relationship of specific projects
to objectives like countering extremist organizations or expanding AFRICOM’s
“network of partners on the continent.” Examining 66 community relations
and low cost activities, investigators found that CJTF-HOA had failed to
accurately identify their strategic objectives for, or maintained limited
documentation on, 62% of them.

The task force also failed to report or could not provide information on
expenditures for four of six projects selected for special review, despite a
requirement to do so and the use of a computerized system specifically
designed to track such information. These projects -- two schools and a
clinic in Djibouti as well as a school in Ethiopia -- cost American
taxpayers almost $1.3 million, yet U.S. officials failed to properly account
for where all that money actually went. All told, officials were unable to
verify whether almost $229,000 in taxpayer dollars spent on such projects
were properly accounted for.

Investigators only inspected four humanitarian assistance worksites -- two
in Djibouti and two here in Tanzania -- but even in this tiny sample found
one site where the U.S. military had failed to ensure that the host nation
would sustain the project. At the Ali Sabieh Community Water Fountains in
Djibouti, renovated by the U.S. in 2010 to minimize waterborne disease,
investigators found a scene of utter disrepair. Doors, pipes, and faucets
“had been removed,” while another faucet “had a collapsed top,” leaving the
water “exposed to contaminants.” Photographs
<http://nickturse.tumblr.com/alis> taken two years after the project was
completed display dilapidated, crumbling, and seemingly jerry-rigged
structures.

One American official assured IG investigators of the necessity of obtaining
host nation “buy-in” on such projects to achieve success, while another
suggested it was crucial that local “sweat equity” be invested in such
projects, if they weren’t to become “monuments to U.S. failure.” In
Djibouti, however, local residents were apparently given no information
about upkeep of the Ali Sabieh project. As a result, Djiboutians threw
rocks into a well built by Americans, a method that works to raise water in
indigenously built wells. In this case, however, it damaged the well so
badly that it stopped working.

Examining a sample of projects, the Pentagon’s investigators found that 73%
of the time CJTF-HOA personnel failed to collect sufficient data 30 days
after completion of projects, to assess whether it achieved the stated
objectives. For example, five hours north of here at a medical clinic at
Manza Bay, the U.S. built cisterns and a water catchment system. The
project was apparently considered a success, but the military had very
little data to back up that claim. In Garissa, in neighboring Kenya, a
veterinary civic action project was evidently also declared a triumph
without anything to prove it beyond vague upbeat claims of success in
impressing local residents.

Winning Hearts and Minds or Losing Money and Influence?

After reviewing a draft of the Inspector General’s report last year, AFRICOM
Chief of Staff Nickle offered a response clearly meant to undermine the
Pentagon watchdog’s claims. In his September 2013 memorandum, Nickle took
particular issue with the Inspector General’s investigative methodology,
decrying its lack of statistical sampling. Since the report is restricted,
the IG’s office refused to discuss the specifics of its analysis with
TomDispatch, but Brenda Rolin of its Office of Communications and
Congressional Liaison defended the methodology. Non-statistical sampling,
she explained, “can be used to obtain sufficient audit evidence. This
method is valid but results may not be projected to the entire population.”
Nickle also complained that the IG’s team did not include an expert familiar
with all the types of humanitarian efforts AFRICOM carried out and that the
investigators failed to highlight its successes.

Nearly a year has passed since the drafting of the Inspector General’s
report. During that time, neither AFRICOM nor CJTF-HOA has publicly
addressed it or announced any changes based upon its recommendations. In
the meantime, the hearts and minds of allied African military leaders appear
unswayed by AFRICOM’s efforts. Over two days at the “Land Forces East
Africa” conference here in Dar es Salaam, I listened to generals and defense
analysts from around the region speak on security matters affecting Burundi,
Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, and Tanzania. They touched on the key issues --
extremism, terrorism, and piracy -- that the American hearts-and-minds
campaign is meant to counter, but the United States was hardly mentioned.
Tanzanian officers I talked with, for instance, were pleased to be receiving
American funds, but less so with direct U.S. interventions of any type on
the continent. None I spoke with seemed aware of AFRICOM’S hearts-and-minds
work like clean water projects or school construction in underdeveloped
rural areas not so very far from where we’ve been sitting.

Even Egan O’Reilly, an Army officer attached to the U.S. Embassy here, whose
job is to facilitate “security cooperation” activities, had little idea
about AFRICOM’s humanitarian efforts. Dual-hatted -- answering to the U.S.
ambassador in Tanzania and AFRICOM -- he’s new to the mission but high on
America’s efforts in the region. “We’ve done everything from helping bring
down trainers for military intelligence courses to building their own
schoolhouse for intelligence work,” he tells me.

What about the building of primary and secondary schools, the humanitarian
assistance projects? “I haven’t seen a whole lot of AFRICOM work myself,”
replies the West Point graduate and veteran of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. As O’Reilly told me, he had heard about the work of the
Medical Civil Action Program, or
<http://www.africom.mil/what-we-do/security-cooperation-programs/medcap>
MEDCAP -- meant to provide medical care or increase local medical capacity
in underserved areas -- but that was about it. And while such programs are
“good and they make people smile,” he adds, they’re of limited utility.
Logistics training and engineering instruction for African militaries,
that’s “the important stuff.”

TomDispatch also sought interviews with U.S. defense attachés in Ethiopia,
Djibouti, and Kenya for assessments of the humanitarian projects in those
respective countries. The latter two embassies failed to respond to the
requests, while a spokesperson for the U.S. mission in Ethiopia thanked me
for my interest but told me that the defense attaché “is not currently
available for an interview.” No one, it appears, is eager to talk about the
textbook counterinsurgency campaign being carried out by the U.S. military
in Africa, let alone the failures chronicled in an IG report that’s been
withheld from the public for almost a year.

For the last decade, we’ve been inundated with disclosures about billions of
U.S. tax dollars squandered on counterinsurgency failures in Iraq and
Afghanistan, stories of
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/after-billions-in-us-inves
tment-afghan-roads-are-falling-apart/2014/01/30/9bd07764-7986-11e3-b1c5-739e
63e9c9a7_story.html> ruined roads and
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-27715351> busted buildings,
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/03/AR201101030
5647.html> shoddy schoolhouses and wasteful
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/02/AR201101020
2491.html> water parks, all in the name of winning hearts and minds. Below
the radar, similar -- if smaller scale -- efforts are well underway in
Africa. Already, the schools are being built, already the water projects
are falling to pieces, already the Department of Defense’s Inspector General
has identified a plethora of problems. It’s just been kept under wraps.
But if history is any guide, humanitarian efforts by AFRICOM and Combined
Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa will grow larger and ever more expensive,
until they join the long list of projects that have become “monuments to
U.S. failure” around the world.

 
Received on Tue Sep 09 2014 - 13:03:41 EDT