General David M. Rodriguez, who heads up the United States Africa Command, or AFRICOM, is the continent’s most powerful man. He is also its most powerless. 

 

Depending on whom you believe, General Rodriguez commands the full might of the greatest military in the history of the world: he could in one awesome shock-and-awe campaign flatten the continent into a parking lot for Humvees. Or, he is a benevolent hugger of children, with no violent mandate whatsoever. 

 

These are the extremes AFRICOM engenders. Is it here to hinder or to help? 

 

In the preface of their 1984 book “The United States and Africa: A History”, Peter Duignan and L.H. Gann concede that the literature on American foreign policy in Africa was considerable. But “most of it consists of specialised monographs that are neither accessible nor of interest to the ordinary reader.” At the dawn of President Ronald Reagan’s second term, if a policymaker were to look for a digestible overview of America’s involvement in Africa, there was but one choice, Messrs Duignan and Gann’s account. 

 

This illustrates that while US-Africa studies may be a robust academic field, it has rarely, if ever, translated into popular interest. This has had a trickle-down effect: ambitious young diplomats and State Department officials have steered clear of African posts if they hoped to advance their careers. 

 

This gap in historical knowledge and institutional memory has made it difficult for many American policymakers to understand the divisiveness of the relationship. Washington has, after all, spent billions on the continent over the decades, much of it with undeniably good intentions, almost all useless. 

 

As Messrs Duignan and Gann point out, the story starts badly, and goes downhill from there. Any account of Americans in Africa must begin with the slave trade. While there were slavers long before there were Americans, no modern society had created the need for so massive an indentured workforce before the tobacco and cotton plantations of the southern United States. 

 

Every well-intentioned action—the colonisation of Liberia in 1820 to “repatriate” freed African slaves—was nullified by an equally ill-intentioned action—the creation of Liberia in 1820 to purge America of unassimilable freemen. On the one hand, President Lyndon B. Johnson refused to back a UN peacekeeping force in Rhodesia when Ian Smith’s white supremacist Rhodesian Front unilaterally declared independence from Britain in 1965. On the other hand, President Jimmy Carter worked hard during the negotiations that ended the bush war in that country, thus helping to usher in liberation in 1980. 

 

This could go on for pages—the CIA’s involvement in the murder of Congolese liberation firebrand Patrice Lumumba in 1964; the Clinton administration’s inaction during the Rwanda genocide.

 

But the cycle of cause and effect does nothing to describe the most important aspect of America’s relationship with Africa: no US administration has developed anything approaching even a rudimentary African foreign policy. President Barack Obama’s is no exception. 

 

The US has traditionally spent about 1% of its federal budget on foreign and military aid, which in 2012 amounted to $48.4 billion (a number that has been dipping south in the remnants of the Great Recession). As a result, the superpower’s global ambitions were vastly curtailed. “There is a democratic awakening in places that have never dreamed of democracy,” Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said in October 2011 while the Arab spring smouldered in the north. “And it is unfortunate that it’s happening at a historic time when our own government is facing so many serious economic challenges, because there’s no way to have a Marshall Plan for the Middle East and north Africa.” 

 

That remains a startling admission: one administration delivered democracy at the barrel of a gun, the next could not and would not support spontaneous outbreaks of the same with a chequebook. And while ideal American policy (articulated by State Department officials, academics and NGOs) impressed the need for justice and fairness, how could a country act in its own best interests when dressed as a nursemaid?  

 

It is this irreconcilable paradox—self-interest versus moral obligation—that has cancelled a coherent Africa policy, if not the desire for one. One of Bill Clinton’s regularly recited maxims is that there are headlines and there are trend lines—the smart observer follows the trend lines. But as far as America and Africa were concerned, what were the trend lines? Once, in the good old days, there was the cold war era policy of containment, broken by isolated acts of benevolence during crises like the Biafran and Ethiopian famines. And while the war on terror and the AIDS epidemic gave birth to epic programmes, those initiatives existed in their own standalone silos. 

 

Congress, with the backing of the Clinton administration, ushered in the new century with an almost coherent initiative: the 2000 African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). This law allows countries duty-free access to American markets under certain “conditions”. They should be corruption free, market-based economies that eliminate barriers to US trade and investment, and enforce intellectual property rights laws. (In other words, nowhere.) Nevertheless, AGOA counts the flourishing of the Ethiopian birdseed market and South Africa’s booming sorbet industry as successes. (While some would argue that AGOA has been more impactful than this, no one argues that it constitutes a resolute African outlook.)

 

Aid was sent from mighty acronyms: USAID, the ubiquitous US Agency for International Development, as well as the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). Both focus on “transformational development”, the evangelically-tinged buzz phrase that was meant to evoke an Africa transmogrified into a bastion of neo-liberalism. But USAID courted opprobrium by sending food from America instead of buying food from Africa; and the MCC, which was meant to appropriate $5 billion from Congress by 2006, was only granted $1.8 billion and never made its targets. George W. Bush’s baby, PEPFAR (the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) unilaterally went forth into Africa to eliminate the scourge of AIDS and treaded on the turf of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, also operating due to the largesse of American lawmakers. 

 

This brief précis does little to describe the full complexity of competing agencies, the NGOs that nibbled at their hides like oxpeckers, and the willingness of American lenders to engage with African leaders in “sensitive” (read Islamic) regions, who had neither the intention nor the ability to democratise. 

 

Those same leaders, and more besides, were alarmed when the Department of Defense reordered its global military commands to establish AFRICOM in 2007. Based in Stuttgart, Germany to assuage fears of neo-imperial designs, with a command base in Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti—a strategic Shangri-La of pirates and terrorists along the Red Sea littoral—AFRICOM was widely interpreted, and not just by Africans, as the militarisation of diplomacy: a new phase in US-Africa engagement, which eschewed the handshake for the howitzer.  

 

These fears were largely misplaced, mostly because AFRICOM was subject to a revolution underway at the time in the Pentagon—led by the charismatic (and now disgraced) General David Petraeus, then running the campaign in Iraq. A new contingent of intellectual warriors conceived of war-making as “20% fighting, 80% political”. This meant big doses of cultural sensitivity, lots of well digging, and an AFRICOM Facebook page that was happy to display evidence of both. 

 

Some questions arose with AFRICOM’s creation, and not only from its detractors: what are America’s strategic objectives in Africa? How did prosecuting the war against terror in Somalia dovetail with moral obligations to old clients like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia? And was the impetus to “stabilise” the governments of energy producers undercutting the development of democratic institutions?  

 

“In recent years, analysts and US policymakers have noted Africa’s growing strategic importance to U.S. interests,” analyst Lauren Ploch wrote in a 2011 Congressional report. “Among those interests are the increasing importance of Africa’s natural resources, particularly energy resources, and mounting concern over violent extremist activities and other potential threats posed by under-governed spaces, such as maritime piracy and illicit trafficking.” Furthermore, there was “ongoing concern for Africa’s many humanitarian crises, armed conflicts, and more general challenges, such as the devastating effect of HIV/AIDS” (and now Ebola). 

 

 

In military terms, Africa was traditionally divided under three commands—the US European Command (EUCOM), the US Central Command (CENTCOM) and the US Pacific Command (PACOM). This befitted Africa’s status as a region of little importance. It allowed civilian officials from the State Department to set policy in consort with their peers at donor institutions like USAID. 

 

In 2006 Donald Rumsfeld, then-defence secretary, formed a planning commission that recommended a more specific Africa-centred command to battle the never-ending terrorist scourge. On July 10th 2007, Mr Bush named AFRICOM’s first commander, General William E. “Kip” Ward. He immediately began acting like a kleptocrat, allegedly blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars on unauthorised flights and hotel rooms for himself, his family and cronies. After three years at the helm, he was retired and reduced in rank to lieutenant-general in 2012, but not before setting up Camp Lemonnier and kicking off the age of AFRICOM.

 

It was hardly an auspicious beginning—Messrs Rumsfeld, Bush and Ward are all firmly interred in the annals of ignominy. But in many respects, AFRICOM changed the game. And while it may seem crass to acknowledge, the Ebola virus has provided this strategic realignment with the perfect raison d’être: a horrendous malady that kills people in Africa and threatens the well-being of the 300m inhabitants of the continental United States. 

 

As the outbreak has intensified, AFRICOM mobilised 3,000 soldiers (recently downgraded to 2,200) and its engineering corps to build treatment centres in Liberia; and to employ military strategies—as CNN would put it—to “go to war” against the disease. A budget of $1 billion has been approved for the Ebola battle, almost four times AFRICOM’s annual stipend; a visit to the AFRICOM Facebook page shows that the virus in the hands of propagandists has become both a charm offensive and an “absolute necessity” for United States security. Ebola may also mean that America earns a permanent base in Liberia where a Joint Force Command Headquarters has been set up, with no plans to dismantle it in the foreseeable future.

 

AFRICOM, according to Facebook and Twitter, is always ready with a hug and a cuppa. But social media is not so forthcoming with some of the less diplomatic initiatives underway across the continent. Yes, we are treated to images of Camp Lemonnier security forces’ veterinarians showing off German shepherds to bemused Somali-based African Union peacekeepers. But what of the eight African countries hosting (or soon to host) drone bases?

 

General Carter F. Ham, AFRICOM’s second commander, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2013 that intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) efforts would be required to “assist the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Central African Republic and the Republic of South Sudan to defeat the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa”—the wonderfully named Operation Observant Compass. That does not quite explain a drone base in Mahé, Seychelles, or Niamey, Niger. The latter facility was set up to help the French with ISR activities regarding Islamists in Mali and the Saharan hinterlands. The Seychelles facility is another cog in Operation Ocean Freedom, appended to Operation Enduring Freedom—Horn of Africa, the anti-piracy machinery that hopes to blow pirates out of the sea.

 

But we get into entirely familiar cold war movie territory when we glance at AFRICOM’s increasingly cosy relationship with the decidedly non-democratic Chad. In May 2014, 80 US personnel were sent to that country to make good on the #BringBackOurGirls Twitter campaign. After the Nigerian terror outfit Boko Haram kidnapped 200 plus girls from a northern town, Mr Obama told Congress that these forces would “support the operation of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft for missions over northern Nigeria and the surrounding area…until its support in resolving the kidnapping situation is no longer required”. The girls are still missing, and the mission has evolved into a mini-base camp, one of a string of camps that TomDispatch, an online media site, has uncovered across the continent. 

 

“Can a military tiptoe onto a continent?” asks primary AFRICOM muckraker Nick Turse. Looked at from a drones-eye view, AFRICOM was meant to plug into American activities in Africa with relative seamlessness, a big Rumsfeldian puzzle piece that allowed the State Department and the military to conspire in protecting and advancing America’s interests across the globe. 

 

It has not been a perfect marriage, and AFRICOM is certainly undermined by suspicion and distaste. But the show in Stuttgart must, and will, go on. AFRICOM is now as firm an African fixture as elephants on the Serengeti, and most likely more permanent. The tiptoe is fast becoming a stampede.