(Wilsonquarterly.com) FORGING SECURITY PARTNERSHIPS IN AFRICA: WHAT LIES AHEAD?

From: Biniam Tekle <biniamt_at_dehai.org_at_dehai.org>
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2016 16:57:33 -0500

"Despite these complexities, any geostrategist would have to
acknowledge contemporary Africa’s positive features. The continent has
not seen a war between sovereign states since the late 1990s, when
Eritrean and Ethiopian forces waged large-scale mechanized warfare
along their (still) disputed border. Nor is Africa a venue for
aggressively overreaching hegemons. None of its largest, strongest
countries — Angola, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and
Tanzania — are locked into polarizing rivalries with each other, and
growing economic interdependencies within and beyond their regions
have tended, on balance, to aid local stability. This is all good
news, but alas, it is only part of the story"


http://wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/the-post-obama-world/forging-security-partnerships-in-africa-what-lies-ahead/



WINTER 2016

FORGING SECURITY PARTNERSHIPS IN AFRICA: WHAT LIES AHEAD?

BY JAMES A. SCHEAR

President Obama’s successor will face a steep uphill climb in seeking
to forge stronger, more enduring bonds between America’s interests and
Africa’s security needs.


Africa’s security landscape defies easy generalization. Some parts of
this vast continent — spanning 54 countries and more than one billion
people — are much more peaceful, democratic, and economically vibrant
now than in years past. Sadly, however, other areas still struggle
with a volatile mix of hazards, from predatory militias, transnational
terrorists, and illicit traffickers to interethnic violence, massive
human displacement, infectious disease outbreaks, and the scramble for
natural resources whose increasing scarcity or mismanaged abundance
can fuel corruption and disorder.

DO MINORITIES HAVE A PLACE IN PUTIN’S RUSSIA?


During his historic trip to eastern Africa in July 2015, President
Barack Obama trumpeted the continent’s great potential as a hub for
global trade and investment, while also conveying “tough love”
messages to his hosts regarding their need for improved governance,
greater human rights observance, and gender equality. His effort at
balanced commentary was entirely understandable — especially given how
vividly Africa’s complex on-the-ground realities feed competing
narratives regarding its great promise and enduring perils — but it is
also clear that President Obama’s successor will face a steep uphill
climb in seeking to forge stronger, more enduring linkages between
America’s interests and Africa’s security needs.

To offer perspective on this complex issue, three questions deserve
close scrutiny. First, what are the biggest security challenges
currently facing the continent, and how might these interact, recede,
or possibly metastasize? Second, what factors shape America’s policy
inclinations toward Africa’s security domain? And, finally, looking
ahead, what imperatives should guide Obama’s successor in the United
States’ future security-focused engagements in Africa?

Myriad Security Challenges

Africa’s turbulence is often viewed through a geostrategic lens. This
optic typically hones in on the imperial rivalries among European
colonizers throughout the latter nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, and then follows the African nations’ journey toward
independence during the mid-twentieth century, often amid Cold War-era
struggles between pro-Soviet and Western-backed groups and a pervasive
fear of falling dominoes. Thankfully, those days are gone, at least in
Africa.

More than a generation later, the tempo of political violence has
greatly subsided across large areas of southern and eastern Africa
and, more recently, in parts of coastal west Africa. Tragically, other
venues — most notably central Africa’s Great Lakes region, as well as
the Maghreb and Sahel to the north — are still riven by deep-set
instabilities. And, yes, colonial-era legacies do still exert some
malign influences, state fragility poses perennial relapse risks, and
new threats are ever-evolving.

Despite these complexities, any geostrategist would have to
acknowledge contemporary Africa’s positive features. The continent has
not seen a war between sovereign states since the late 1990s, when
Eritrean and Ethiopian forces waged large-scale mechanized warfare
along their (still) disputed border. Nor is Africa a venue for
aggressively overreaching hegemons. None of its largest, strongest
countries — Angola, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and
Tanzania — are locked into polarizing rivalries with each other, and
growing economic interdependencies within and beyond their regions
have tended, on balance, to aid local stability. This is all good
news, but alas, it is only part of the story.

Africa’s security challenges today should be viewed through an
anthropological lens, given the decisively important influence that
sociocultural dynamics have on shaping peaceful coexistence — or its
absence. Subnational groups, for instance, may clash over ethnic
identity, tribal or clan loyalties, political grievances, or simply a
desire to pillage resources. Whether specific militias fight more for
a cause or a livelihood is hard to disentangle; clearly, both elements
are present. Jihadist terrorist groups in parts of northern Africa and
the Horn are more “cause” focused, given their extremist theology and
willingness to inflict self-sacrificial violence. Their modus operandi
is to exploit local cleavages while escalating sectarian conflicts.
Their transnational reach also has certain transactional qualities. In
western Africa, criminal networks and al-Qaeda-affiliated groups work
together to secure routes for the trafficking of humans and drugs
headed toward Europe, while sharing revenues and fueling corruption
across transit states.

“Africa’s security challenges today should be viewed through an
anthropological lens”

At present, this pernicious partnering of terrorists and traffickers
across the Maghreb and Sahel represents Africa’s most visible security
challenge, especially as Islamic State–inspired groups exploit Libya’s
ongoing chaos and seek to expand their presence in enclaves nearby. In
the meantime, Somalia’ new federal government grapples with
al-Shabaab’s insurgency, although the country’s stability and economic
viability are slowing improving, aided by continuing remittances from
the Somali diaspora, now assisted by the World Bank, as well as the
courageous efforts of African peacekeepers.

Although Africa’s traditionally Muslim regions are currently most
vulnerable to baleful transnational influences, violence in
sub-Saharan areas inflicts the most massive human suffering. Witness
the horrific conflict between Dinka and Nuer communities in South
Sudan. This two-year-old tribal war has killed tens of thousands and
forced hundreds of thousands to flee, upending the fragile unity that
helped steer South Sudan toward independence from Khartoum in 2011.
Elsewhere, subnational violence stretches from the eastern regions of
the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the Central African Republic.
Despite their tragic human impacts, these enduring struggles are often
dubbed as “forgotten” conflicts — a label that also clouds the
ever-present risk of recurring eruptions of mass atrocities in
countries such as Burundi — since their visibility outside of Africa
is, at best, episodic.

Finally, Africa’s security challenges are increasingly influenced by
both environmental and “multihazard” anthropogenic stressors. Growing
desertification throughout the Sahel continues to drive tensions
between farmers and cattle-herding pastoralists over grazing and water
access rights. Meanwhile, rapid urbanization along Africa’s coastal
lowlands, especially to the east, is heightening vulnerability to
sea-level rise and extreme weather events. Rapid population growth in
sprawling cities also carries with it a range of risks, such as the
massive spillage (or dumping) of toxic wastes or the combustibility of
poorly stored fuels, hazardous chemicals, pesticides, drug precursors
or munitions. And Ebola-like biomedical hazards, either independent of
or sparked by conflicts or climate disasters, will only add to this
anxiety.

America’s Policy Inclinations?

Whenever U.S. policymakers gather to assess Africa’s security trends
and the mix of America’s interests at stake, three fundamental
questions always loom large: Why should we care? To what goals should
we aspire? And how can we best achieve successful outcomes?

The “why” question inevitably pivots on threat-centric concerns —
namely, the physical safety of American citizens and the risks to U.S.
interests and the global economy more broadly. The ingress of
transnational terrorist groups into ungoverned areas in north and east
Africa has received intense scrutiny since 9/11 and, more recently,
since the Arab upheavals of 2011, but other risks periodically loom
large. Among these are infectious disease outbreaks, especially in
cases where the transmission of pathogens could quickly outpace
detection and response. (Thankfully, this was not the case with the
2014 Ebola outbreak.) And in the economic sphere, the ebb and flow of
maritime piracy and criminal activities along major global transit
routes — most notably through the Gulf of Aden, and now through the
Gulf of Guinea as well — can quickly jump to the fore if a spike in
disruptions were to escalate shipping costs or inflict larger global
economic impacts.

Beyond the threat-centric ambit, a broader array of developmental and
humanitarian imperatives also helps to answer the “why” question.
Extreme poverty, dysfunctional governance, and rampant corruption have
long been seen — and fairly so — as the fuel for internal conflicts
and, in some cases, mass atrocity hazards in defiance of universal
values. Internationally, Africa-centric great power choreography can
never be fully relegated to a bygone era. For instance, it is hard to
predict whether Beijing will compete more than collaborate with
Washington in Africa over the coming decade. Undoubtedly, China’s
quest for natural resources and market share are present-day realities
across the continent. Yet geostrategically, China’s reach has a
peculiar knock-on effect, casting it as a voracious “access consumer”
in Africa just as it strives to be an “access denier” to the United
States and its allies in east Asia.

For Washington, the task of formulating policy goals — in effect,
answering the “what” question — has proved to be fairly
straightforward. In its 2012 strategy review, the Obama administration
flagged five security priorities for sub-Saharan Africa: (1) combating
terrorism and violent extremism; (2) advancing regional security
cooperation and security sector reform; (3) countering criminal
threats; (4) preventing and, where necessary, mitigating mass
atrocities and holding perpetrators accountable; and (5) supporting
regional peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions. Although this
fivefold set of security priorities is framed within a larger strategy
of strengthening democratic governance, spurring economic growth, and
achieving sustainable development outcomes, it also reflects a
continuity of U.S. interests in Africa, one that President Obama’s
successors are very likely to reaffirm.

The really hard question is “how” best to achieve these goals. Within
the security sphere, America’s current predispositions toward Africa
have been greatly affected by the searing impacts of both past actions
and inaction. The Somalia example is illustrative: A U.S.-led
humanitarian relief operation there in 1993 saved countless lives but
quickly morphed into the “Battle of Mogadishu,” the tragic loss of 18
American service members, and a hasty U.S. withdrawal. This episode
bred great sensitivity to “mission creep” hazards, and greatly
reinforced Washington’s inclination not to act when genocidal violence
erupted in Rwanda only a few months later. Nearly two decades later,
Libya loomed large. In March 2011, when strongman Muammar Gaddafi
threatened a “no mercy” assault upon the rebel-held city of Benghazi,
the imperative to act won out: the United States and its allies
intervened decisively. Their air campaign staved off potential mass
atrocities, but the regime’s eventual overthrow did not end the
fighting, and President Obama has since lamented not pressing ahead on
any viable post-Gaddafi stabilization planning.

Granted, history is not just replete with downside examples. In June
2003, the United States dispatched a Marine Amphibious Group to
coastal Liberia; its mission was to help secure the U.S. embassy in
battle-scared Monrovia and assist with the evacuation of U.S.
nationals. That mission morphed into the opening of and support for an
aid corridor into that war-torn city, and the assistance of
beleaguered UN peacekeepers. It arguably was a positive example of
mission creep; the prospect of a heightened U.S. military presence
prompted Liberia’s blood-stained president Charles Taylor to flee into
exile, whereupon a seemingly endless spiral of fighting between rebel
and government militias quickly ramped down. Taylor was apprehended,
tried, and convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the
Special Court for Sierra Leone, and is currently serving his de facto
life sentence in a British prison.

Looking back, while each of these episodes took different paths, all
stirred compelling (if, at times, contentious) narratives about U.S.
action or inaction and the extent of Washington’s responsibility for
whatever ensued. When set against America’s larger mix of interests
and goals in Africa, these experiences have fed U.S. policy
inclinations in distinctive ways.

Distilled into “elevator speech” parlance, the cascading refrain for
U.S. policymakers is clear. Countering terrorism and defusing
conflicts are definitely in sync with U.S. interests. Helping our
regional partners build their capacity to act quickly and effectively
is our preferred method of operation. Keeping our military footprint
light is a necessity. And, finally, we cannot lose sight of the fact
that Africa’s regional security, economic development, and good
governance over the longer term are inextricably linked.

The Primacy of Partnerships

When he took office in 2009, President Obama inherited this strong
preference for partnering from his predecessors and indeed has
trumpeted its virtues. His administration has sought to build enduring
relationships upon a firm foundation of equality (not patronage) where
the recipient nations work together effectively and more
self-sufficiently under the oft-cited banner of “African solutions to
African problems.” Will his successor find this pathway an easy route
to navigate? Politically and rhetorically, this is likely to be the
case, since partnering will always fare well compared with its only
logical alternatives — that is, doing nothing or ramping up
large-scale U.S. interventions. Practically, though, several
challenges are present.

First, despite its alluring quality, “partnering” is a very nebulous
label. Considerthen–Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s strategic
guidance for his departmentback in 2012: “Across the globe we will
seek to be the security partner of choice, pursuing new partnerships
with a growing number of nations … whose interests and viewpoints are
merging into a common vision of freedom, stability and prosperity.”
Diplomatically, a values-based approach always will be a strong sell,
but it creates challenges for setting policy priorities when the club
appears to be globally all-inclusive. Security partnerships, after
all, are rarely borne of benign circumstances — they can be principled
and progressive, or extremely problematic. So what is the problem that
we and our aspiring partner are jointly trying to solve? And is our
aspiring partner “choosing” us for the right reasons? Is what they
want similar to, or different from, what we think they need?

Second, America’s returns on U.S. taxpayer investments has come under
great scrutiny, given the setbacks that U.S.-trained and -equipped
forces have enduredin fights against the Islamic State in Syria and
Iraq, and against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Although the recent
history of U.S. security assistance does include some more positive
cases — including Colombia, the Philippines, and African peacekeeping
contributors in Somalia — it is also clear that context matters, and
our expectations for partner performance have not always been in line
with on-the-ground realities.

Third, and most significant, is the question of relevance. Practical
experiences can teach a great deal, but our partnering efforts in Iraq
and Afghanistan may not be that relevant elsewhere. Following our
regime-change interventions, U.S. military presence in both those
countries was sizable, and our need for partners absolutely
skyrocketed. U.S. forces served as the “hub” while our partners
operated as the “spokes,” and the coalition-building imperative —
gaining allies to serve alongside us —heavily influenced our
assistance efforts with regard to a huge swath of partners as diverse
as Georgia, Mongolia, El Salvador, Poland, Pakistan, and ultimately
the Iraqi and Afghan security forces. In Africa, by contrast, our goal
is focused more on a self-sufficiency imperative; we aim for partners
to be able to operate in lieu of, not alongside, us. Interoperability
may still be valuable in terms of maximizing a recipient’s capability
to effectively use and maintain the equipment we provide, but in
“light footprint” settings (where large coalitions are not on the
horizon), much more responsibility will fall to a smaller cohort of
U.S. trainers, advisers, and implementing partners. Their performance
effectiveness will pivot significantly on their sociocultural
understanding, language skills, civil-military rapport, and mentoring
proficiencies; however, they also may lack the access, influence, and
resources that large coalition operations typically generate.

Despite these challenges, it is unlikely that the next administration
will step away from a partnering-centric strategy in Africa. Efforts
to help African countries build their counterterrorism and
peacekeeping capacities, while providing information support, have
yielded some positive results. Most notably, the African Union’s
Mission in Somalia has been able to forge a pathway toward greater
stability, and France’s Operation Serval, which thwarted Islamist
fighters from overrunning Mali in 2013, was greatly aided by
U.S.-trained Chadian counterterrorism forces, which are also key in
regionally aligned efforts to counter Boko Haram militants. Yet there
are also cases where U.S. training and material assistance may have
unintentionally enabled adverse outcomes — including instances where
beneficiaries or their units underperformed, intercommunal tensions
were exacerbated or legitimate, and fragile civilian governance was
undermined or even toppled.

Obama’s successor should consider steering our security sector
assistance efforts in Africa towards a reform agenda

Toward a “Full Spectrum” Strategy

Given the imperfections and enduring necessity of forging
partnerships, President Obama’s successor should consider steering our
security sector assistance efforts in Africa towards a reform agenda —
one aimed at mitigating key deficiencies while forging stronger
linkages between America’s interests and the continent’s needs. To do
this right will require more than a bit of strategic patience, as well
as a detailed understanding of key needs and an ever-present ability
to adapt our efforts in light of new challenges. Our overall goal here
— in essence, a “full spectrum” partnering strategy — could best be
pursued by embracing four key priorities:

1. Strengthen the analytic pillars of partnering

When U.S. practitioners start to prepare security partnering
recommendations for their policy leaderships, they need to anticipate
that they will be asked some fairly foundational questions: So is what
you’re proposing really the right thing to do here? And, if so, how
can we be sure we’re doing it right? These and related questions
require well-informed responses, and U.S. security sector assistance
authorities and practices frequently give the practitioners a range of
analytic “must-dos.” For example, a cohort of U.S. security
cooperation officers will look closely at a partner’s military
capabilities within a given mission area to assess what additional
equipment, skills, or enabling support may be required to fill
critical gaps. Also, U.S. embassy teams will evaluate a partner’s
ability to finance an acquisition and the ways in which that
commitment might affect its other public expenditures, along with a
spate of potential end-use monitoring concerns, including the risks of
misuse or diverting specific items to unauthorized users.

Important as these tasks are, they tend to have a very narrow scope,
typically around specific transfers of equipment or services. The job
of rigorously identifying and assessing a broader range of
sociopolitical risks is much harder to do, and as a recent RAND study
has pointed out, U.S. security partnering efforts often face a
conundrum in Africa: those states that are in greatest need of
assistance are usually the ones least able to benefit from it.

What is needed here is a stronger focus on anticipatory “perturbation”
impact assessments — specifically, to analyze the reactive behaviors
that our assistance might catalyze. Regarding counterterrorism, for
example, there is an understandably strong preference for training and
equipping elite forces, given the tactical prowess that such units
need to perform their kinetic operations effectively and without
excessive force. But would creating elite units also tend to aggravate
fault lines within a recipient nation’s larger conventional force?
What steps might its leadership have to take in order to mitigate
tension between self-perceived winners and losers? Conversely, are
there lessons that might be gleaned from security sector reforms
piloted by other African countries? Emulating successes nearby may be
a better strategy than adapting a purely American model, but to help
orchestrate their decisions effectively, U.S. practitioners need a
much stronger comparative knowledge base than they currently possess.

2. Emphasize sustainability

Sustainability, or more specifically its absence, is one of biggest
challenges that U.S.-Africa security partnerships have faced over the
past decade. Too often, U.S.-trained personnel in Africa have seen
their skills atrophy while their equipment has become dysfunctional
with little or no maintenance.

Why is this so? On the U.S. side, programming often has a contingency
flavor — focusing on urgent or emergent requirements, achieving quick
impacts via training and equipping, but with no multiyear funding to
sustain the newly created capacity. On the African side, meanwhile,
given state fragility in many venues, partners often have neither the
wherewithal nor the incentive to put basic structures in place,
especially if their forces can get a free ride or have operational
support provided by internationally funded, private-sector
contractors.

Fixing this problem will not be easy. In low-income countries, the
size of security forces may have to be determined more by
public-sector revenue flows than by mission-centric manpower
requirements. Bad things can happen if police and soldiers are not
paid. There also needs to be greater efforts to build logistics,
transportation, engineering, and maintenance into a partner’s military
force structure, along with education and training. Although U.S.
“train-the-trainer” programs are often portrayed as a pathway toward
sustainability, they only work if training functionalities and
requisite expertise are really made a working part of the partner’s
force structure. If not, even the trainers’ skills will atrophy.

3. Maximize civil society buy-in

As African countries continue their transitions toward greater
economic growth, social cohesion, and stronger democratic governance,
they and their partners have come to recognize the close
interconnections between physical security and human development. This
raises an obvious question: can U.S. partnering help to reinforce
complementarities between these two spheres in ways that promote
“human security” while building stronger civil-military relationships?

Surprisingly, this consideration has not been a high-profile issue for
U.S. partnering efforts to date. America may not carry the baggage
that comes with being a postcolonial power, but it is very aware that
it lacks the depth of knowledge that various European partners,
whether in Anglophone, Francophone, or Lusophone Africa, possess
regarding the continent. It has also been cautious — and
understandably so — about possible downsides of encouraging security
force involvement in the civil sector, given the ever-present risks of
fueling corruption in fragile state settings.

Civil-military relations are hugely significant, especially in the
peacekeeping and counterterrorism mission sets in which the United
States is strongly invested. Consider those countries that are
navigating through or out of conflicts. If local communities view
their police or soldiers more as predators than protectors, that
levies a huge burden upon legitimate actors — be they overstretched
government officials, UN peacebuilders, or local nongovernmental
organizations — to find ways of fostering greater respect,
professional conduct, and mutual trust. Also, given the influx of
transnational actors throughout much of Africa, there is a need for
greater investment in border management, customs enforcement, and both
national and community-level policing.

How can “full spectrum” partnering address these challenges? First, a
greater investment in military logistics and engineering capacities
could spur positive steps, both for economic growth and for emergency
response to chronic or sudden-onset natural disasters. As development
expert Calestous Juma has argued, African economies could hugely
benefit from realigning military forces to build and maintain basic
infrastructure corridors. Security sector reform advocates have also
trumpeted a number of positive cases, most notably Senegal and
Botswana, where military contributions to infrastructure development,
wildlife protection, and flood relief have generated public support
and been effectively and accountably implemented under strong civil
supervision.

In future postconflict venues (including, hopefully, South Sudan and
Libya), where the tasks of “rightsizing” security forces as well as
demobilizing and reintegrating ex-combatants into society can be
overwhelming, a strategy of revamping units to perform engineering
tasks could be part of a manageable downsizing process. This
reorganization would give soldiers useful skills for the private
sector and build trust with local communities. Again, the aim is
achieving a smooth transition, specifically through military efforts
that supplement or complement civil sector efforts to restart the
economy and foster productive interdependencies across ethnic or
sectarian lines.

4. Ramp up institutional investments

Finally, a “full spectrum” partnering strategy must seek to help
African partners strengthen legitimate, accountable ministerial
oversight of their security sectors. President Obama’s 2014 launch of
his Security Governance Initiative was definitely a positive step
forward, but it will be hard to predict how far his successor can push
forward in this arena.

At the operational level, it is comparatively easy to evaluate the
effects of security sector assistance. Did the recipient unit
accomplish its mission? Is a given village or district clear of
insurgent fighters? Institutionally, however, measuring performance
impacts is much harder. Government actors often face competing
pressures to ensure that their country’s forces are nationally
inclusive, yet not bloated, and accepted locally. It is not easy to
turn those imperatives into performance metrics. Capacity-building
must embrace reform of key administrative functionalities —
specifically, a merit-based personnel system and a coherent, auditable
financial resource management system — but both these domains have
“life cycle” attributes that will take time to build, strengthen,
repair, or transform.

In Africa, as anywhere else, context matters greatly. For the
least-developed countries, basic literacy and numeracy education must
be put in place before any institutional capacity-building can be
launched. Societies with greater economic viability will likely
benefit from public services at home as well as diaspora support
abroad, but they may struggle with the corrupting effects of
patrimonial influence at the national or regional levels. Again, the
analytics here are a key ingredient. The ultimate goals of public
service are not really in dispute. What President Obama and his
successor will really need are well-honed strategies based on rigorous
assessment of a partner’s institutional terrain, along with proposed
(and, hopefully, agreed-upon) milestones for measuring progress toward
those ends.

Greater regional burden-sharing doesn’t fit with our old mantra about
“exporting stability” to Africa.

Finding the Right Balance

Africa’s continuing rise carries with it enormous hope. State
fragility, subnational violence and transnational threats still pose
major challenges, but the continent is also moving into an era
anchored by growing public aspirations for greater self-reliance,
economic development, and social cohesion, especially in venues where
local interdependencies can also help to inculcate a
“live-and-let-live” rather than a “winner-take-all” approach to
governance and security.

For the United States, security partnerships modeled on a “full
spectrum” approach can definitely help to foster incentives for
greater self-reliance, civil society support, good governance, and
regional leadership. Across the continent’s most turbulent areas, our
African partners are pressing ahead with regionally generated,
continentally mandated, and internationally supported campaigns to
neutralize armed groups and stabilize volatile regions.

Greater regional burden-sharing doesn’t fit with our old mantra about
“exporting stability” to Africa. The task now is really much more
about finding indigenous ways to foster greater peace and stability
within Africa. The ride ahead may well be bumpy, but President Obama
can fairly claim credit for having helped to accelerate this positive
shift, and his successor will likely follow in his footsteps.

* * *

James A. Schear is a global fellow at the Wilson Center, and served as
U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Partnership Strategy
and Stability Operations from 2009 to 2013.

Cover image: Senior Airman Edurado Govea, a Security Forces Phoenix
Raven, speaks with a Burundi soldier before take off in a C-17
Globemaster Dec. 13, 2013, at Bujmumbura Airport, Burundi. In
coordination with the French military and African Union, the U.S.
military provided airlift support to transport Burundi soldiers, food
and supplies in the Central African Republic. (Credit: U.S. Air Force
photo by Staff Sgt. Erik Cardenas)

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