Tag Archives: United States Africa Command

AFRICOM continued: “The Pivot to Africa” in Foreign Policy

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An important new piece from Foreign Policy by Rosa Brooks, a former Obama Administration defense official.  She aggressively defends the concept of the military taking on the civil development and assistance roles as a practical approach to U.S. international security given domestic political constraints and the actual challenges faced.  Nonetheless, she concludes that AFRICOM to date is experiencing “the worst of both worlds”:

These problems are not unique to Africom. As other combatant commands have similarly expanded their activities into traditionally civilian domains, they have struggled with similar problems and criticism.

In a sense, we currently inhabit the worst of all possible worlds: The military is increasingly taking on traditionally civilian jobs but doing them clumsily and often halfheartedly, without investing fully in developing the skills necessary for success. Meanwhile, civilian agencies mostly just grumble from the sidelines, waiting for that happy day when Congress gets serious about rebuilding civilian capacity. (I think Samuel Beckett wrote a play about that.) And few people, inside or outside the Pentagon, are taking seriously the need to think in new ways about what “whole-of-government” or a holistic approach to security might truly mean.

The blurring of civilian and military roles is inevitable, but the failure to grapple effectively with this blurring of roles is not. To address threats (and seize opportunities) in this globalized, blurry, chaotic world, we will need to develop new competencies, flexible new structures, and creative new accountability mechanisms. Most critically, we’ll need to let go of our comfortable old assumptions about roles and missions.

Well worthwhile to read the whole piece.  I’ll have some comments in the near future.

Some important reading while watching AFRICOM evolve

QDDR–the second leg of a two-legged stool?

AGOA, AFRICOM and the “Three Ds”

AFRICOM and the “Whale of Government” Approach

Uganda, Iran and the Security-Democracy Trade Space?

Democracy and Competing Objectives: “We need you to back us up”

GAO report . . . highlights changes of effective coordination of civil affairs/development work

“Pack like it’s Arizona”

 

 

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Here is the latest from AFRICOM following last week’s “new policy” on Africa

Aside

Here is the official word from the AFRICOM blog on the current annual joint African Endeavor exercise in West Africa, along with a good comment from David Aronson to the effect that these things make conceptual sense to build the security capacity of African states, but also raise concerns in terms of the potential for this capacity to benefit repressive regimes.

It seems that in the U.S. most people who pay attention to things are asking what then is new in the “New Policy” on Sub-Saharan Africa from the White House last week.  Rhetorically the prioritization on democracy has been there–the question is what concrete steps we are willing to take to do a better job in practice of balancing competing priorities.  The policy announcement speaks to the concerns raised in my last post, but in generalities.

Ultimately, democratic transition involves risk and uncertainty–something different than “security”.  Local perspective is necessary.  In Kenya, for instance, we have seen the al-Qaeda-related Embassy bombing and other acts of terrorism; nonetheless, Kenyans can only dream of the day when poor performance by their own government is not vastly more dangerous than the terrorists.  Even with the current war in Somalia the regular stream of explosions killing Kenyans week in and week out are road accidents.

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