US Promises To Go To War For More Than 54 Countries

There are 54 different countries on Earth that the U.S. is legally obligated to militarily protect and defend if they get into their own conflicts. Below is the State Department’s list of them (via Micah Zenko):

NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY

A treaty signed April 4, 1949, by which the Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all; and each of them will assist the attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.

PARTIES: United States, Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom

AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND

A Treaty signed September 1, 1951, whereby each of the parties recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.

PARTIES: United States , Australia, New Zealand

PHILIPPINE TREATY (BILATERAL)

A treaty signed August 30, 1951, by which the parties recognize that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and each party agrees that it will act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes.

PARTIES: United States, Philippines

SOUTHEAST ASIA TREATY

A treaty signed September 8, 1954, whereby each party recognizes that aggression by means of armed attack in the treaty area against any of the Parties would endanger its own peace and safety and each will in that event act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.

PARTIES: United States , Australia, France, New Zealand, Philippines, Thailand, and the United Kingdom

JAPANESE TREATY (BILATERAL)

A treaty signed January 19, 1960, whereby each party recognizes that an armed attack against either Party in the territories under the administration of Japan would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes. The treaty replaced the security treaty signed September 8, 1951.

PARTIES: United States, Japan

REPUBLIC OF KOREA TREATY (BILATERAL)

A treaty signed October 1, 1953, whereby each party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and that each Party would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.

PARTIES: United States, Korea

RIO TREATY

A treaty signed September 2, 1947, which provides that an armed attack against any American State shall be considered as an attack against all the American States and each one undertakes to assist in meeting the attack.

PARTIES: United States, Argentina, Bahamas, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad & Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela

This illustrates rather well the sheer magnitude of U.S. commitments around the world. It’s worth remembering, too, as Nima Shirazi noted, that not every state that Washington commits itself to militarily is listed here (Israel is conspicuous for its absence). So, U.S. military commitments go beyond even this lengthy list.

Why? Politicians will tell you this is about defending freedom and democracy (right…). Policy wonks will rattle off old chestnuts about global security and international cooperation. More accurately, this helps institutionalize U.S. hegemony (that is, unrivaled power over all other states in the system).

This doesn’t merely demonstrate how taxpayer money and resources go to the defense of other countries. It illustrates the pervasive conviction in Washington that there are few, if any, spots on the planet that aren’t vital U.S. interests that require military interventionism. America’s mandate is limitless, it would seem.

(By John Glaser)

The Destabilization of Africa. A Machiavellian Intrigue of Colossal Proportions

By Carla Stea

On December 24th 2013, the United Nations Security Council voted to increase peacekeeping forces in South Sudan, whose independence from the North US-NATO powers celebrated only recently.  Democratic elections in South Sudan did not, however, lead to peace and stability.  Now, two ethnic groups, in South Sudan, the Dinka and Nuer are slaughtering each other.  UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated: 

“We have reports of horrific attacks.  Innocent civilians are being targeted because of their ethnicity.  This is a grave violation of human rights, which could fuel a spiral of civil unrest across the country.”

South Sudan, which contains vast oil reserves, borders Ethopia, Uganda, Kenya, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Spread of its crisis would further destabilize a significant part of Africa.  Clearly, Western-style “democratic elections,” the panacea touted by Western agencies such as National Endowment for Democracy, and related Western NGOs, have not only failed to provide stability and enhanced standards of living for many countries where they have been implemented  (or imposed, militarily by US-NATO intervention, such as in Iraq and Libya and Afghanistan), but are beginning to appear to be the precursor of ethnic and social violence and disintegration in many notable instances in Africa, and not only in Africa.

On September 20, 2013, at the opulent Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya endured a deadly terrorist attack that slaughtered more than 40 people, including several Europeans.  The Al Qaeda affiliated Shabab, the Islamic jihadist group based in Somalia took responsibility for the attack, ostensibly in reprisal for Kenya’s participation in the African Union’s mission to combat Shabab’s domination of large areas of Somalia.

Less than two months later, in Security Council action – or more accurately described – inaction) on November 15, the Security Council failed to support a resolution submitted by the African Union, in accordance with Article 16 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, to defer, for 12 months, prosecution of Kenyan President Kenyatta and Deputy-President William Ruto.  The deferral would enable President Kenyatta to concentrate his efforts on combating the terrorism that is destabilizing Kenya, terrorism by the jihadist group who imposition of barbaric Sharia law includes the burial of young girls up to their necks in sand, and then stoning these innocent children to death.

The African Union pleaded for this deferral to prevent the serious distraction of the Kenyan President’s attention from his efforts to combat this recent upsurge of terrorism in Kenya.  The Security Council failed to adopt this resolution, thereby abdicating its primary responsibility to protect peace and security.  The Security Council’s failure to adopt this African Union resolution could also be perceived as a “double message” in the effort to eliminate terrorism.  Following the vote, in explanation, each country spoke.

Mr. Mehdiyev (Azerbaijan):

“Our decision to vote in favour of the draft resolution before us today is based on the following understanding.  First, Kenya and the region in which it is situated are facing complex security challenges.  Kenya is a front-line State in and one of the key regional contributors to the fight against international terrorism.  In that connection, the judicial proceedings against the country’s senior officials would undoubtedly create serious obstacles to the normal functioning of State institutions in Kenya and thereby pose a threat to the ongoing efforts to ensure and promote peace and stability in the region.  Azerbaijan understands the concerns of Kenya and the African Union, and deems them legitimate and reasonable.”

Mr. Gasana (Rwanda):

“Terrorism is the most serious threat to international peace and security.  It affects all the people of the world, without discrimination, from the World Trade Center in New York to the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya.  Fortunately, we have countries;  we have leaders.  We are committed to the fight against terrorism, and Kenya and its President and Deputy President are with us.  They are at the forefront of the fight against international terrorism, and we are greateful for their commitment and determination in the fight against Al-Shabaab in Somalia – a country where African blood is shed on behalf of this Council, which is supposed to bear the primary responsibility in the maintenance of international peace and security.

In that regard, His Excellency President Kenyatta and Deputy President William Roto should be respected, supported, empowered at this time – not distracted and undermined.  That is why, after the vote this morning, Rwanda is expressing its deep disappointment over what transpired regarding the request for the deferral of the cases against the President and Deputy President of Kenya, despite the proactive efforts of Africa to engage the Security Council in a legitimate process in the interest of the maintenance of international peace and security.

That is why this is actually the right place, The failure to adopt the draft resolution before us today, which has been endorsed by the countries of the entire African continent, is a shame; indeed, it is a shame.  Let it be written today in history that the Security Council failed Kenya and Africa on that issue.”

“It is not that, in coming before the  Council today, we have sought confrontation.  No we have not.  We believed that the request was reasonable.  We believed that the request was legitimate, as it was based on the provisions of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).  …We were therefore hoping that, after extensive consultations, the Council would express solidarity with Kenya and with Africa, by negotiating in good faith and adopting the draft resolution.  That did not happen, as some members of the Council even refused to negotiate on any single paragraph.  We profoundly regret that.

Our colleagues who did not vote in favour of the draft resolution have argued – as members have heard – that the Kenyan situation does not meet the threshold needed to trigger the application of Article 16 of the Rome Statute.  They have explained that article 16 shall be applied only when the investigation and prosecution could create, or worsen, a situation threatening international peace and security.

I am here and I am wondering:  If a terrorist attack by members of Al-Shabaab – an Al-Qaida-linked movement that has killed more than 70 innocent victims and wounded 200 others – does not meet the threshold line that other situations have crossed, then which one would?  If a clear and present threat of terrorism against the Kenyan people, resulting from their determination and courageous intervention in Somalia, does not meet the threshold, what other threat can be alleged to do so?  Are we in the wrong place today?  No.”

“May I request that all members of the Council recall why article 16 of the Rome Statute was proposed in the Council more than 10 years ago.  Let me repeat that question.  May I request that all members of the council recall why article 16 of the Rome Statute was proposed more than 10 years ago.  That article was not proposed by an African State – not at all.  It was proposed by some of the Western Powers present at the Council table to be applied solely in their interest.  In other words, article 16 was never meant to be used by an African State or any of the developing countries.  It seems to have been conceived as an additional tool for the big Powers to protect themselves and protect their own.  Is that not so?  That is how it appears here today.”

The [UNSC] President  (spoke in Chinese)

“Kenya has long been at the forefront of the fight against terrorism and has been playing an important role in maintaining peace and stability in the Horn of Africa, Eastern Africa and the entire African continent.  Deferring the ICC proceedings against the leaders of Kenya is not only a matter of concern to Kenya, but also a matter of concern for the entire African continent.  It is in fact an urgent need in order to maintain regional peace and stability.  It is therefore a matter of common sense that the international community should help the Kenyan leaders to focus their attention on discharging their mandate and to continue their role in maintaining peace and stability in Kenya and the wider region, in exercising their jurisdiction, international judicial institutions should abide by the norms of international relations, follow the principle of complementarity and respect the judicial sovereignty, legal traditions and current needs of the countries concerned. …. China believes that the request of the African countries is reasonable and well founded on the basis of the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.  Their objective is to maintain peace, stability and security in the region and to effectively fight terrorism.  They request that the democratically elected leaders of Kenya be accorded basic respect in matters of African peace, security and stability.  …The Council should therefore heed and positively respond to the common call of the African Union and the vast majority of African leaders.  China will continue to support the efforts of Kenya, the African Union and most African countries to find a real solution to the issue under consideration.”

Not only have democratic elections failed to enhance the quality of life and standard of living in numerous African countries – and elsewhere;  Kenya is a country in which democratic elections in December 2007 unleashed horrendous inter-ethnic slaughter and violent destabilization in a country that had hitherto been a model of stability and economic and social development for Africa and the developing world.  How can the sudden eruption of such clan and tribal warfare be explained in a country that had, for decades, not undergone such violent inter-ethnic conflict and destabilization?

Recently a highly placed diplomatic source accredited to the United Nations observed a pattern emerging in African countries where western NGOs with links to U.S. intelligence were based and operating:  previously non-existent inter-ethnic violence suddenly erupted, and this phenomenon was occurring in even the most stable countries.  One of these western NGOs, in particular, was based and operating in Kenya since 2003, a full four years before the sudden eruption of inter-ethnic warfare and violent destabilization that followed the December, 2007 democratic elections.

One can only question the “coincidental” nature of these violent inter-ethnic occurrences in many previously stable African countries.  Recalling that Russian President Putin prohibited USAID and particular Western NGO’s  from operating in Russia, one can only conclude that he was trying to spare Russia from the fate observed in too many African countries, and elsewhere.

In his book “The Grand Chessboard,” (1997) Brzezinski openly states, in Chapter 1:

“Hegemony of a New Type,”:  “The American global system emphasizes the technique of co-optation (as in the case of defeated rivals – Germany, Japan and lately even Russia) to a much greater extent than the earlier imperial systems did.  It likewise relies heavily on the indirect exercise of influence on dependent foreign elites.”

This “indirect exercise of influence on dependent foreign elites” could be the hidden trigger provoking and inciting the violent ethnic and political conflict that appears to be rapidly spreading, undermining previously functioning economies and national structures and institutions.

Who benefits?  A substantial part of China’s oil supply comes from Africa.  Chinese contracts with African nations are more equitable than those of US-NATO countries, and therefore have preferential status in many African countries, with China contributing to the construction of infrastructure, and offering considerably higher payment for oil extracted.  It is, however, very much in China’s interest that internal stability prevail in these African countries, in order to perpetuate this arrangement.  Chaos, spreading terrorism, civil conflict disrupt the functioning of these arrangements, and may ultimately serve the purpose of driving China out of Africa.

In the corridors of power at the United Nations, and elsewhere, is whispered that it is part of large-scale geopolitical engineering to  to disrupt and deprive China of its oil supply in Africa, thereby implementing the first part of “hegemony of a new type.”  What follows this “new type of hegemony” is a Machiavellian intrigue of colossal proportion.

THE REAL GRAND CHESSBOARD AND THE PROFITEERS OF WAR

By Peter Dale Scott, 

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”  Dwight David Eisenhower,  “Military-Industrial Complex Speech,” 1961, [1] “My observation is that the impact of national elections on the business climate for SAIC has been minimal. The emphasis on where federal spending occurs usually shifts, but total federal spending never decreases. SAIC has always continued to grow despite changes in the political leadership in Washington.”  Former SAIC manager,  quoted in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele,  “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” Vanity Fair, March 2007[2] “We make American military doctrine”  Ed Soyster, MPRI[3] In the Road to 9/11 I summarized the dialectic of open societies: how from their energy they expand, leading to a higher level of more secretive corporations and agencies, which eventually weaken the home country through needless and crushing wars.[4] I am not alone in seeing America in the final stages of this process, which since the Renaissance has brought down Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. Much of what I wrote summarized the thoughts of writers before me like Paul Kennedy and Kevin Phillips. But there is one aspect of the curse of expansion that I underemphasized: how dominance creates megalomanic illusions of insuperable control, and how this illusion in turn is crystallized into a prevailing ideology of dominance. I am surprised that so few, heretofore, have pointed out that from a public point of view these ideologies are delusional, indeed perhaps insane. In this essay I will argue however that what looks demented from a public viewpoint makes sense from the narrower perspective of those profiting from the provision of private entrepreneurial violence and intelligence. The ideology of dominance was expressed for British rulers by Sir Halford Mackinder in 1919: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”[5] This sentence, though expressed after the power of Britain had already begun to decline, accurately articulated the anxieties of imperial planners who saw themselves playing “the Great Game,” and who thus in 1809 sacrificed an entire British army of twelve thousand men in the wilderness of Afghanistan. Expanded by Karl Haushofer and other Germans into the alleged “science” of geopolitics, this doctrine helped to inspire Hitler’s disastrous Drang nach Osten, which in short order terminated the millenary hopes of the Nazi Third Reich. One might have thought that by now the lessons of Napoleon and Hitler would have subdued all illusions that any single power could command the “World Island,” let alone the world. Kissinger for one appears to have learned this lesson, when he wrote that: “By geopolitical, I mean an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium.”[6] But (largely because of his commitment to equilibrium in world order) Kissinger was swept aside by events in the mid-1970s, leading to the triumph of the global dominance mindset, as expressed by thinkers like Zbigniew Brzezinski.[7] Brzezinski himself has recognized how his gratuitous machinations in Afghanistan in 1978-79 produced the responses of al Qaeda and jihadi terrorism. Asked in 1998 whether he regretted his adventurism, Brzezinski replied: “Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.’” Nouvel Observateur: “And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?” Brzezinski: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” When he was asked whether Islamic fundamentalism represented a world menace, Brzezinski replied, “Nonsense!”[8] In some ways, the post-Afghanistan Brzezinski has become more moderate in his expectations from U.S. power: he notably warned against the Gulf War in 1990 and also Vice-President Cheney’s agitations when in office for some kind of preemptive strike against Iran. But he has never retracted the Mackinderite rhetoric of his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, which revives the illusion of “controlling” the Eurasian heartland: For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world’s paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power.” (p. xiii) “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia – and America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.” (p.30) “To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.” (p.40)[9] This kind of brash talk is not unique to Brzezinski. Its call for unilateral dominance echoed the 1992 draft DPG (Defense Planning Guidance) prepared for Defense Secretary Cheney by neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis “Scooter” Libby: “We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”[10] It is echoed both in the 2000 PNAC Study, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” and the Bush-Cheney National Security Strategy of September 2002 (NSS 2002).[11] And it is epitomized by the megalomanic JCS strategic document Joint Vision 2020, “Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations.”[12] Such overblown rhetoric is out of touch with reality, dangerously delusional, and even arguably insane. It is however useful, even vital, to those corporations who have become accustomed to profiting from the Cold War, and who faced deep cuts in U.S. defense and intelligence spending in the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are joined by other groups (discussed below) that also have a stake in preserving the dominance mindset in Washington. These include the new purveyors of privatized military services, or what can be called entrepreneurial violence, in response to defense budget cuts. The Real Grand Chessboard: Those Profiting from Enduring Violence The delusional grandiosity of Brzezinski’s rhetoric is inherent above all in the false metaphor of his book title. “Vassals” are not chess pieces to be moved effortlessly by a single hand. They are human beings with minds of their own; and among humans an unjust excess of power is certain to provoke not only resentment but ultimately successful resistance. One can see this easily in Asia, from the evolution of anti-Americanism in Iran to the Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT) in Central Asia: although still ostensibly nonviolent, HT’s rhetoric is now more and more aggressively anti-American.[13] The notion of a single chess player is equally false, especially in Central Asia, where dominant states (the U.S., Russia, and China) and local states are all alike weak. Here major multinational corporations like BP and Exxon are major players. In countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan they dwarf both local state power and also the U.S. governmental presence, whether official or covert. The true local powers are apt to be two which governments are notoriously inept at controlling: first, the “agitated Muslims” which Brzezinski insanely derided, and second, illicit trafficking, above all drug trafficking.[14] Ultimately however Brzezinski is not constrained by his chess metaphor. The goal of a chess game is to win. Brzezinski’s goal is quite different: to exert permanent restraints on the power of China and above all Russia. He has thus sensibly opposed destabilizing moves like a western strike on Iran, while supporting the permanent containment of Russia with a ring of western bases and pipelines. (In 1995 Brzezinski flew to Azerbaijan and helped negotiate the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline linking Azerbaijan to Turkey.)[15] As I have argued elsewhere, Brzezinski (though he no doubt thinks to himself in terms of strategy) thus promotes a policy that very much suits the needs of the oil industry and its backers. These last include his patrons the Rockefellers, who first launched him into national prominence.[16] In March 2001 the biggest oil majors (Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco, and Shell) had their opportunity to design the incoming administration’s energy strategies, including Middle East policy, by participating secretly in Vice-President Cheney’s Energy Task Force.[17] The Task Force, we learned later, developed a map of Iraq’s oil fields, with the southwest divided into nine “Exploration Blocks.” One month earlier a Bush National Security Council document had noted that Cheney’s Task force would consider “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”[18]Earlier the oil companies had participated in a non-governmental task force calling for “an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.”[19] Of course, oil companies were not alone in pushing for military action against Iraq. After 9/11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith established the Pentagon’s neocon Office of Special Plans (OSP), which soon “rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda.”[20] Neocon influence in the Administration, supported by Lewis Libby in Vice-President Cheney’s office, trumped the skepticism of CIA and DIA: these two false charges against Saddam Hussein, or what one critic called “faith-based intelligence,” became briefly the official ideology of the United States. Some, notably Dick Cheney, have never recanted. Many journalists were eager to promote the OSP doctrines. Judith Miller of the New York Times wrote a series of articles on Saddam’s WMD, relying, like OSP itself, on the propaganda of Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi.[21] Miller’s book collaborator Laurie Mylroie went even further, arguing that “Saddam was not only behind the ’93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself.”[22] Many of these advocates, notably Feith, Libby, and Mylroie, had links to Israel, which as much as any oil company had reasons to wish for U.S. armies to become established militarily in Central Asia.[23] Private Military Contractors (PMCs), Whose Business is Violence for Profit The inappropriateness of a military response to the threat of terrorism has been noted by a number of counterterrorism experts, such as retired U.S. Army colonel Andrew Bacevich: the concept of global war as the response to violent Islamic radicalism is flawed. We ought not be in the business of invading and occupying other countries. That’s not going to address the threat. It is, on the other hand, going to bankrupt the country and break the military.[24] Because of budgetary constraints, America has resorted to uncontrollable subordinates to represent its public power in these remote places. I shall focus chiefly in this essay on one group of these, the so-called Private Military Contractors (PMCs) who are authorized to commit violence in the name of their employers. These corporations are reminiscent of the marauding condottieri or private mercenary armies contracted for by the wealthy city states of Renaissance Italy.[25] With the hindsight of history, we can see the contribution of the notoriously capricious Condottieri to the violence they are supposedly hired to deal with. Some, when unemployed, became little more than predatory bandits. Others, like the celebrated Farinata whom Dante placed in the Inferno, turned against their native cities. Above all, the de facto power accumulated by the condottieri meant that, with the passage of time, they came to dictate terms to their ostensible employers.[26] (They were an early example of entrepreneurial violence, and the most common way of avoiding their path of destruction was “to buy reprieve by offering bribes.”[27]) To offset the pressure on limited armed forces assets, Donald Rumsfeld escalated the increasing use of Private Military Contractors (PMCs) in the Iraq War. At one point as many as 100,000 personnel were employed by PMCs in the US Iraq occupation. Some of them were involved in controversial events there, such as the Iraq Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and the killing and burning of four contract employees in Fallujah. The license of the most controversial firm, Blackwater, was terminated by the Iraqi government in 2007, after eight Iraqi civilians were gratuitously killed in a firefight that followed a car bomb explosion.[28] (After much negative publicity, Blackwater renamed itself in 2009 as Xe Worldwide.) Insufficiently noticed in the public furor over PMCs like Blackwater was the difference in motivation between them and the Pentagon. Whereas the stated goal of Rumsfeld and the armed forces in Iraq was to end violence there, the PMCs clearly had a financial stake in its continuation. Hence it is no surprise that some of the largest PMCs were also political supporters for pursuing the ill-conceived “War on Terror.” Blackwater was the most notorious example; Erik Prince, its founder and sole owner, is part of a family that figures among the major contributors to the Republican Party and other right-wing causes, such as the Council for National Policy. His sister once told the press that “my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party.”[29] Private Intelligence Companies and the Provision of Violence Blackwater has attracted the critical attention of the American Mainstream Media. But it was a mere knight on the grand chessboard, albeit one with the ability to influence the moves of the game. Far less noticed has been given to Diligence LLC. Diligence, a more powerful company, that unlike Blackwater interfaced heavily with Wall Street, “set up shop in Baghdad [in July 2003] to provide security for companies involved in Iraqi reconstruction. In December, it established a new subsidiary called Diligence Middle East, and expanded its services to include screening, vetting and training of local hires, and the provision of daily intelligence briefs for its corporate clients.”[30] Certainly the political clout of Diligence outshone and outlasted Blackwater’s. Two of its founding directors (Lanny Griffiths and Ed Rogers) were also founders of the influential Republican lobbying team Barbour Griffiths and Rogers (later renamed BGR). Haley Barbour, the senior founder of BGR, also served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997. Diligence LLC was licensed to do business in Iraq as a private military contractor (PMC). But it could be called a Private Intelligence Contractor (PIC), since it is virtually a CIA spin-off: Diligence was founded by William Webster, the only man to head both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike Baker, its chief executive officer, spent 14 years at the CIA as a covert field operations officer specializing in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations. Whitley Bruner, its chief operating officer in Baghdad, was once the CIA station chief in Iraq.[31] Its partner in Diligence Middle East (DME) is New Bridge Strategies, whose purpose has been described by the New York Times as “a consulting firm to advise companies that want to do business in Iraq, including those seeking pieces of taxpayer-financed reconstruction projects.”[32] Its political clout was outlined in the Financial Times: New Bridge was established in May [2003] and came to public attention because of the Republican heavyweights on its board – most linked to one or other Bush administration [officials] or to the family itself. Those include Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush’s presidential campaign manager, and Ed Rogers and Lanny Griffith, former George H.W. Bush aides.[33] The firm of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers was the initial funder of Diligence, which shares an office floor with BGR and New Bridge in a building four blocks from the White House. The Financial Times linked the success of New Bridge in securing contracts to their relationship to Neil Bush, the President’s brother.[34] When Mack McLarty, Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff, resigned, he became a director of Diligence, and also joined Henry Kissinger to head, until 2008, Kissinger McLarty Associates. Another Private Intelligence Contractor or PIC is Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), an $8 billion corporation involved in defense, intelligence community, and homeland security contracting. In the words of veteran journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele, SAIC has displayed an uncanny ability to thrive in every conceivable political climate. It is the invisible hand behind a huge portion of the national-security state—the one sector of the government whose funds are limitless and whose continued growth is assured every time a politician utters the word “terrorism.” SAIC represents, in other words, a private business that has become a form of permanent government….[SAIC] epitomizes something beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmare—the “military-industrial-counterterrorism complex.”[35] (Later their article made it clear that SAIC is not a unified bureaucracy, but more like a platform for individual entrepreneurship in obtaining contracts: “at SAIC your job fundamentally was to sell your high-tech ideas and blue-chip expertise to [any] government agency with money to spend and an impulse to buy.”)[36] Before becoming Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates was a member of SAIC’s board of directors. SAIC personnel have also been recruited from CIA, NSA, and DARPA. Scores of influential members of the national-security establishment clambered onto SAIC’s payroll, among them John M. Deutch, undersecretary of energy under President Jimmy Carter and C.I.A. director under President Bill Clinton; Rear Admiral William F. Raborn, who headed development of the Polaris submarine; and Rear Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who served variously as director of the National Security Agency, deputy director of the C.I.A., and vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.[37] SAIC helped supply the faulty intelligence about Saddam’s WMD that then generated ample contracts for SAIC in Iraq. SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that war was the only way to get rid of them. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, SAIC personnel staffed the commission set up to investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong, including Gordon Oehler, the commission’s deputy director for review, a 25-year CIA veteran, Jeffrey R. Cooper, vice president and chief science officer for one of SAIC’s sub-units and Samuel Visner, a SAIC vice president for corporate development who had also passed through the revolving door and back to the NSA. David Kay, who later chaired the Iraq Survey Group (which showed that Hussein didn’t possess WMD, thereby proving that the war was launched under false pretenses), is also an SAIC shareholder and former director of SAIC’s Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis.[38] Needless to say, this SAIC-stuffed commission did not report that SAIC itself had been a big part of the problem. But according to Barlett and Steele, the same David Kay in 1998 told the Senate Armed Services Committee: that Saddam Hussein “remains in power with weapons of mass destruction” and that “military action is needed.” He warns that unless America acts now “we’re going to find the world’s greatest military with its hands tied.” Over the next four years, Kay and others associated with SAIC hammered away at the threat posed by Iraq. Wayne Downing, a retired general and a close associate of Ahmad Chalabi, proselytized hard for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis “are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us.” In many of his appearances on network and cable television leading up to the war, Downing was identified simply as a “military analyst.” It would have been just as accurate to note that he was a member of SAIC’s board of directors and a company stockholder…. 9/11 was a personal tragedy for thousands of families and a national tragedy for all of America, but it served the interests of private intellience and military contractors including SAIC. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Bush administration launched its “Global War on Terror” (GWOT), whose chief consequence has been to channel money by the tens of billions into companies promising they could do something—anything—to help. SAIC was ready. Four years earlier, anticipating the next big source of government revenue, SAIC had established the Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis. According to SAIC, the purpose of the new unit was to take “a comprehensive view of terrorist threats, including the full range of weapons of mass destruction, more traditional high explosives, and cyber-threats to the national infrastructure.” In October of 2006 the company told would-be investors flatly that the war on terror would continue to be a lucrative growth industry.[39] Barlett and Steele could have mentioned that SAIC senior analyst Fritz Ermarth, a long-time associate of Gates from his years in the CIA, is now an official of the Nixon Center. Commenting in 2003 on State Secretary Colin Powell’s briefing to the UN Security Council, Ermarth praised Powell for his charges (repeating one of Judith Miller’s false stories) about Saddam’s acquisition of aluminum tubing “for centrifuges and not rocketry.” Ermarth faulted Powell however for not mentioning two matters: Iraqi involvement in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 (a charge by Laurie Mylroie now generally discredited), and that “During the 1970s and 1980s…the USSR and its allies supported terrorists in Western Europe and in Turkey,” (alluding to the false charges, promoted at the time by Robert Gates and Claire Sterling, about Mehmet Ali Agça’s attempted assassination of Pope Paul II).[40] I certainly do not wish to suggest that SAIC single-handedly created the will to fight in Iraq. The combined efforts of defense contractors, oil companies, PMCs and PICs created a mindset in which all those eager for power were caught up, including, I have to say, career-minded academics. In Iraq as in Afghanistan and Vietnam a generation earlier, a sure ticket to consultations in Washington was support for interventions that ordinary people could see would be disastrous. The yea-saying of academics has approved even the privatization of intelligence which we have just been describing. According to political scientist Anna Leander, Private firms not only provide, but also analyse intelligence. Private translators, analysts and ‘interrogators’ are hired, as illustrated by the involvement of Titan and CACI in Abu Ghraib. Even more directly, private firms are hired in to assess threats and risks and suggest what to do about them. This involves constructing a security picture as done for example, by Diligence LLC and SAIC, two firms specialised in intelligence gathering and analysis….. This privatisation of intelligence has direct consequences for the relation between PMCs and security discourses. It places the firms in a position where they are directly involved in producing these discourses. They provide a growing share of the information that forms the basis of decisions on whether or not something is a security concern. Leander concludes that this privatization is beneficial: it “empower[s] a more military understanding of security which, in turn, empowers PMCs as particularly legitimate security experts.”[41] Another political scientist, Chaim Kaufmann, has noted more critically that arguments for escalation and what he calls threat inflation against Iraq were not adequately disciplined by “the marketplace of ideas.” He gives five reasons for this failure, duly supported by other political scientists. But the obvious reason mentioned by Barlett and Steele – profit – is not mentioned.[42] What we have been talking about until now is advocacy disguised as expertise. But overseas associates of Diligence LLC and its allies have also been accused of false-flag operations intended to provoke war. The passage of the Patriot Act generated a new realm of profit for SAIC contractors — domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens – as well as new intelligence fusion centers to carry this out. “As part of the Pentagon’s domestic security mission, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Counterintelligence Field Activity office in 2002 and filled its staff with contractors from Booz Allen, BAE systems, SAIC, and other suppliers of cleared personnel. CIFA, as we’ve seen, was used against people suspected of harboring ill will against the Bush administration and its policies….At present, there are forty-three current and planned fusion centers in the United States where data from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private sector databases, and anonymous tipsters are combined and analyzed by counterterrorism analysts…. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the project “inculcates the project “inculcates DHS with enormous domestic surveillance powers.”[43] These fusion centers, “which combine the military, the FBI, state police, and others, have been internally promoted by the US Army as means to avoid restrictions preventing the military from spying on the domestic population.” [44] Responding to such criticisms, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano stated in March 2009 that the mandate of fusion centers was not to launch independent domestic surveillance operations but connect the dots between lawfully obtained information already in fragmented “siloed” databases.[45] She did not mention that some of this information was from private and even anonymous sources. One SAIC contractor, Neoma Syke, worked at such a fusion center, wearing two hats: During 2003-2004, she was “working for SAIC” as a force protection analyst with “SAIC’s” 205th Military Intelligence Battalion. And while she was “a contractor for SAIC”, specifically, “SAIC’s” 205th Military Intelligence Battalion, apparently she served as Counterintelligence Watch Officer at USARPAC’s Crisis Action Center.[46] Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His latest prose books are The Road to 9/11 (2007) and his reissued and expanded War Conspiracy (2008). His new book of poems (including political poems) is Mosaic Orpheus, from McGill-Queen’s University Press. Notes: [1] Dwight David Eisenhower, “Military-Industrial Complex Speech,” 1961 [2] Former SAIC manager, in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” Vanity Fair, March 2007 [3] The Economist, July 8, 1999. [4] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 7-9. [5] Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: Holt, 1919). [6] Henry Kissinger, in Colin S Gray, G R Sloan. Geopolitics, Geography, and Strategy (Portland: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999). [7] For the events leading to the displacement of Kissinger see Scott, The Road to 9/11, 50-54, etc. [8] Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21, 1998. In his relentless determination to weaken the Soviet Union, Brzezinski also persuaded Carter to end U.S. sanctions against Pakistan for its pursuit of nuclear weapons (David Armstrong and Joseph J. Trento, America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise (Steerforth, 2007). Thus Brzezinski’s obsession with the Soviet Union helped produce, as unintended byproducts, both al Qaeda and the Islamic atomic arsenal. [9] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: basic Books), xiii, 30, 40. [10] Memorandum of February 18, 1992 [11] For specific parallels to The Grand Chessboard, see Scott, Road to 9/11, 191-2. [12] “Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance,” DefenseLink [13] Zeyno Baran, “Hizb-ut-Tahrir: Islam’s Political Insurgency,” Nixon Center, December 2004 [14] Brzezinski was so unafraid of Islamic jihadism that when National Security Adviser he convened a working group to deliberately stir up Muslim dissatisfaction inside the Soviet Union (Scott, Road to 9/11, 70-71). [15] He has since taken credit for persuading President Aliyyev of Azerbaijan to commit to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Geopolitically Speaking: Russia’s `Sphere of Influence’ – Chechnya and Beyond,” Azerbaijan International, Spring 2000, p. 24 This pipeline, a favor to U.S. and British oil companies, makes geopolitical but not economic sense; and is further destabilizing an already tense region. See Pepe Escobar, “Liquid War Across Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific: Postcard from Pipelineistan,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus [16] Scott, Road to 9/11, 70-79. [17] Dana Milbank and Justin Blum, “Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force,” Washington Post, November 16, 2005. This story noted that CEOs of three majors had falsely denied this: ” A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in 2001 — something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress….In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate `to my knowledge,’ and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know. Chevron was not named in the White House document, but the Government Accountability Office has found that Chevron was one of several companies that ‘gave detailed energy policy recommendations’ to the task force.” [18] Scott, Road to 9/11, 188-89; citing Linda McQuaig, Crude Dudes,” Toronto Star, September 20, 2004; Jane Mayer, “Contract Sport,” New Yorker, February 16-23, 2004. [19] Scott, Road to 9/11, 189; “Strategy Energy Policy: Challenges for the 21st Century,” Report of the James A. Baker Institute of Public Policy and Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, 40, emphasis added. [20] Seymour M. Hersh, “Selective Intelligence: Donald Rumsfeld Has His Own Special Sources. Are They Reliable?” New Yorker, May 6, 2003 [21] Michael Massing, “Now They Tell Us,” New York Review of Books, February 26, 2004 [22] Peter Bergen, “Armchair Provocateur — Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons’ favorite conspiracy theorist,” Washington Monthly, December 2003 [23] For Israel links, see Michael Lind, Made in Texas (New York, Basic Books), 139 (Feith); John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 166, etc. (Libby); Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown, 2006), 68-70 (Mylroie). [24] Jon Wiener, “Obama’s Limits: An Interview With Andrew Bacevich,” Nation, August 28, 2008, Cf. Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008). Michael Scheuer also argues that the campaign against terrorism took a big step backwards when the U.S. invaded Iraq. “Experts Fears ‘Endless’ Terror War,” MSNBC, July 9, 2005. Peter Bergen agrees: “Many jihadists are so happy that the Bush administration invaded Iraq. Without the Iraq war, their movement—under assault from without and riven from within—would have imploded a year or so after Sept. 11″ (Bergen, “The Jihadists Export Their Rage to Book Pages and Web Pages,” Washington Post, September 11, 2005). So does Richard Clarke (Against All Enemies, 246): “Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country.” [25] I am not the first to notice the analogy. See e.g. Thomas Jäger and Gerhard Kümmel, Private Military and Security Companies (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007), 22; Eugene B. Smith, “The New Condottieri and US Policy: The Privatization of Conflict and Its Implications,” U.S. Army War College, Parameters, Winter 2002, 104. [26] Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), 22. [27] Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon (eds.), Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002), 286. [28] “Iraq Reviewing Security Firms After Blackwater Shooting,” FoxNews.com, September 18, 2007 [29] “The former Betsy Prince — Edgar and Elsa’s daughter, Erik’s sister — married into the DeVos family, one of the country’s biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes. (`I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party,’ Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997 Op-Ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.) She chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her husband, Dick, ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2006. Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans and cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees” (Ben Van Heuvelen, “The Bush administration’s ties to Blackwater,” Salon, October 2, 2007, Cf. Robert Young Pelton, Licensed to Kill, Hired Guns in the War on Terror (New York: Crown Books, 2006). [30] David Isenberg , “Corporate Mercenaries – Part 2: Myths and mystery,” AsiaTimes, May 19, 2004. [31] David Isenberg, “Myths and mystery,” Asia Times, 5/20/04. While in CIA, Bruner negotiated the deal for Ahmad Chalabi and the CIA to work together (Aram Roston, The Man Who Pushed America to War [New York: Nation Books, 2009], 76). Bruner later joined BGR and in 2007 became the full time chairman of BKI Strategic Intelligence. In 2004 Bruner participated with BGR and an Israeli PMC operative in a scheme to help re-elect George W. Bush. (Laura Rozen, “From Kurdistan to K Street,” Mother Jones, November 2008. [32] Douglas Jehl, “Washington Insiders’ New Firm Consults on Contracts in Iraq,” New York Times, September 30, 2003. [33] Financial Times, 12/11/03. Ed Rogers, Diligence’s vice chairman, was one of George H.W. Bush’s top assistants when he was US president. On resigning from the White House, he negotiated a lucrative contract to act as lobbyist for the former Saudi intelligence chief and BCCI front man Kamal Adham, at a time when American and British prosecutors were preparing criminal cases against him. Rogers used Adnan Khashoggi as a go-between to secure the contract, which was canceled after White House criticism of it (Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 362-64). [34] Ibid. Cf. Mother Jones, March/April 2004: “More recently, Bush scored a $60,000-a-year consulting deal from a top adviser to New Bridge Strategies, the firm set up by George W.’s ex-campaign manager to “take advantage of business opportunities” in postwar Iraq. His job description: taking calls for three hours a week.” [35] “SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the “expertise” behind the Iraq war….[SAIC is] a “stealth company” with 9,000 government contracts, many of which involve secret intelligence work” (Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” Vanity Fair, March 2007. [36] Barlett and Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” [37] Barlett and Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow: “Mark A. Boster left his job as a deputy assistant attorney general in 1999 to join SAIC, and was already calling Justice three months later on behalf of his new employers—a violation of federal law. Boster paid $30,000 in a civil settlement.” Yet another PIC for a while was Interop, combining former CIA director James Woolsey and former FBI director Louis Freeh with former Mossad chief Danny Yatom (Rozen, “From Kurdistan to K Street). [38] Charlie Cray, “Science Applications International Corporation,” CorpWatch, cf. Barlett and Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” [39] Barlett and Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” [40] Fritz W. Ermarth, “Colin Powell’s Briefing to the Security Council: Brief Comments from an Ex-Intelligence Officer,” In the National Interest. Ermarth’s remarks were also posted by Laurie Mylroie, “Fritz Ermarth, Iraq & Al Qaeda, In The National Interest,” February 5, 2003. [41] Anna Leander, “The Power to Construct International Security: On the Significance of Private Military Companies,” Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 2005; 33; 803, emphasis added. At the time the Observer reported from ” sources in the Bush administration” an allegation that “members of the al-Qaeda network, detained and interrogated in Cairo, had obtained phials of anthrax in the Czech Republic” (“Iraq ‘behind US anthrax outbreaks,’” Observer, October 14, 2001. [42] Chaim Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas,” International Security (Summer 2004). Neither SAIC nor Diligence is mentioned in his essay. [43] Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 344. [44] Julian Assange, “The spy who billed me twice,” Wikileaks. The March 2009 Army manual “US Army Concept of Operations for Police Intelligence Operations” contains phrases such as “It [fusion] does not have constraints that are emplaced on MI [Military Intelligence] activities within the US, because it operates under the auspice and oversight of the police discipline and standards.” [45]  Phil Leggiere, “Napolitano Praises Fusion Centers.” HSToday, March 13, 2009. [46] Assange, “The spy who billed me twice.”

US A Full Partner In Ukraine Debacle

FROM THE moment the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States has relentlessly pursued a strategy of encircling Russia, just as it has with other perceived enemies like China and Iran. It has brought 12 countries in central Europe, all of them formerly allied with Moscow, into the NATO alliance. US military power is now directly on Russia’s borders.

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” warned George Kennan, the renowned diplomat and Russia-watcher, as NATO began expanding eastward. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely, and it will affect their policies.”

... policy makers in Washington have been congratulating each other for a successful American-aided regime change operation in Ukraine.

Russia is not powerful enough to emerge from the Ukraine/Crimea crisis with a full victory, neither is the United States. Diplomatic pressure and covert action supporting pro-Western factions in Ukraine will continue, but President Obama will not risk military confrontation with Russia. This crisis will not produce the grand westward realignment of which many in Washington dream.

Any solution short of partition will have to take Russia’s interests into account. Thus far the United States has shown no interest in doing that. The likely geopolitical outcome, therefore, is a stalemate.

This crisis is in part the result of a zero-sum calculation that has shaped US policy toward Moscow since the Cold War: Any loss for Russia is an American victory, and anything positive that happens to, for, or in Russia is bad for the United States. This is an approach that intensifies confrontation, rather than soothing it.

(Stephen Kinzer)

The Terror Diaspora

The U.S. Military and The Unraveling Of Africa 

By Nick Turse

The Gulf of Guinea. He said it without a hint of irony or embarrassment. This was one of U.S. Africa Command’s big success stories. The Gulf... of Guinea.   

Never mind that most Americans couldn’t find it on a map and haven’t heard of the nations on its shores like Gabon, Benin, and Togo. Never mind that just five days before I talked with AFRICOM’s chief spokesman, the Economist had asked if the Gulf of Guinea was on the verge of becoming “another Somalia,” because piracy there had jumped 41% from 2011 to 2012 and was on track to be even worse in 2013. 

The Gulf of Guinea was one of the primary areas in Africa where “stability,” the command spokesman assured me, had “improved significantly,” and the U.S. military had played a major role in bringing it about. But what did that say about so many other areas of the continent that, since AFRICOM was set up, had been wracked by coups, insurgencies, violence, and volatility? 

A careful examination of the security situation in Africa suggests that it is in the process of becoming Ground Zero for a veritable terror diaspora set in motion in the wake of 9/11 that has only accelerated in the Obama years.  Recent history indicates that as U.S. “stability” operations in Africa have increased, militancy has spread, insurgent groups have proliferated, allies have faltered or committed abuses, terrorism has increased, the number of failed states has risen, and the continent has become more unsettled. 

The signal event in this tsunami of blowback was the U.S. participation in a war to fell Libyan autocrat Muammar Qaddafi that helped send neighboring Mali, a U.S.-supported bulwark against regional terrorism, into a downward spiral, prompting the intervention of the French military with U.S. backing.  The situation could still worsen as the U.S. armed forces grow ever more involved.  They are already expanding air operations across the continent, engaging in spy missions for the French military, and utilizing other previously undisclosed sites in Africa. 

The Terror Diaspora

In 2000, a report prepared under the auspices of the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute examined the “African security environment.”  While it touched on “internal separatist or rebel movements” in “weak states,” as well as non-state actors like militias and “warlord armies,” it made no mention of Islamic extremism or major transnational terrorist threats.  In fact, prior to 2001, the United States did not recognizeany terrorist organizations in sub-Saharan Africa. 

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, a senior Pentagon official claimed that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan might drive “terrorists” out of that country and into African nations.  “Terrorists associated with al Qaeda and indigenous terrorist groups have been and continue to be a presence in this region," he said. "These terrorists will, of course, threaten U.S. personnel and facilities.” 

When pressed about actual transnational dangers, the official pointed to Somali militants but eventually admitted that even the most extreme Islamists there “really have not engaged in acts of terrorism outside Somalia.”  Similarly, when questioned about connections between Osama bin Laden’s core al-Qaeda group and African extremists, he offered only the most tenuous links, like bin Laden’s “salute” to Somali militants who killed U.S. troops during the infamous 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident.

Despite this, the U.S. dispatched personnel to Africa as part of Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) in 2002.  The next year, CJTF-HOA took up residence at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, where it resides to this day on the only officially avowed U.S. base in Africa.

As CJTF-HOA was starting up, the State Department launched a multi-million-dollar counterterrorism program, known as the Pan-Sahel Initiative, to bolster the militaries of Mali, Niger, Chad, and Mauritania.  In 2004, for example, Special Forces training teams were sent to Mali as part of the effort.  In 2005, the program expanded to include Nigeria, Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia and was renamed the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Partnership. 

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Nicholas Schmidle noted that the program saw year-round deployments of Special Forces personnel “to train local armies at battling insurgencies and rebellions and to prevent bin Laden and his allies from expanding into the region.”  The Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Partnership and its Defense Department companion program, then known as Operation Enduring Freedom-Trans-Sahara, were, in turn, folded into U.S. Africa Command when it took over military responsibility for the continent in 2008. 

As Schmidle noted, the effects of U.S. efforts in the region seemed at odds with AFRICOM’s stated goals.  “Al Qaeda established sanctuaries in the Sahel, and in 2006 it acquired a North African franchise [Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb],” he wrote. “Terrorist attacks in the region increased in both number and lethality.” 

In fact, a look at the official State Department list of terrorist organizations indicates a steady increase in Islamic radical groups in Africa alongside the growth of U.S. counterterrorism efforts there -- with the addition of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in 2004, Somalia’s al-Shabaab in 2008, and Mali’s Ansar al-Dine in 2013.  In 2012, General Carter Ham, then AFRICOM’s chief, added the Islamist militants of Boko Haram in Nigeria to his own list of extremist threats. 

The overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya by an interventionist coalition including the U.S., France, and Britain similarly empowered a host of new militant Islamist groups such as the Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades, which have since carried out multiple attacks on Western interests, and the al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia, whose fighters assaulted U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, killing Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.  In fact, just prior to that attack, according to the New York Times, the CIA was tracking “an array of armed militant groups in and around” that one city alone.

According to Frederic Wehrey, a senior policy analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on Libya, that country is now “fertile ground” for militants arriving from the Arabian Peninsula and other places in the Middle East as well as elsewhere in Africa to recruit fighters, receive training, and recuperate.  “It’s really become a new hub,” he told me.

Obama’s Scramble For Africa 

The U.S.-backed war in Libya and the CIA’s efforts in its aftermath are just two of the many operations that have proliferated across the continent under President Obama.  These include a multi-pronged military and CIA campaign against militants in Somalia, consisting of intelligence operations, a secret prison, helicopter attacks, drone strikes, and U.S. commando raids; a special ops expeditionary force (bolstered by State Departmentexperts) dispatched to help capture or kill Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony and his top commanders in the jungles of the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo; a massive influx of funding for counterterrorism operations across East Africa; and, in just the last four years, hundreds of millions of dollars spent arming and training West African troops to serve as American proxies on the continent.  From 2010-2012, AFRICOM itself burned through $836 million as it expanded its reach across the region, primarily via programs to mentor, advise, and tutor African militaries. 

In recent years, the U.S. has trained and outfitted soldiers from Uganda, Burundi, and Kenya, among other nations, for missions like the hunt for Kony.  They have also served as a proxy force for the U.S. in Somalia, part of the African Union Mission (AMISOM) protecting the U.S.-supported government in that country’s capital, Mogadishu.  Since 2007, the State Department has anted up about $650 million in logistics support, equipment, and training for AMISOM troops.  The Pentagon has kicked in an extra $100 million since 2011.

The U.S. also continues funding African armies through the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership and its Pentagon analog, now known as Operation Juniper Shield, with increased support flowing to Mauritania and Niger in the wake of Mali’s collapse.  In 2012, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development poured approximately $52 million into the programs, while the Pentagon chipped in another $46 million.

In the Obama years, U.S. Africa Command has also built a sophisticated logistics system officially known as the AFRICOM Surface Distribution Network, but colloquially referred to as the “new spice route.” Its central nodes are in Manda Bay, Garissa, and Mombasa in Kenya; Kampala and Entebbe in Uganda; Bangui and Djema in Central African Republic; Nzara in South Sudan; Dire Dawa in Ethiopia; and the Pentagon’s showpiece African base, Camp Lemonnier.

In addition, the Pentagon has run a regional air campaign using drones and manned aircraft out of airports and bases across the continent including Camp Lemonnier, Arba Minch airport in Ethiopia, Niamey in Niger, and the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, while private contractor-operated surveillance aircraft have flown missions out ofEntebbe, Uganda.  Recently, Foreign Policy reported on the existence of a possible drone base in Lamu, Kenya.

Another critical location is Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, home to a Joint Special Operations Air Detachment and the Trans-Sahara Short Take-Off and Landing Airlift Support initiative that, according to military documents, supports “high risk activities” carried out by elite forces from Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahara.  Lieutenant Colonel Scott Rawlinson, a spokesman for Special Operations Command Africa, told me that the initiative provides “emergency casualty evacuation support to small team engagements with partner nations throughout the Sahel,” although official documents note that such actions have historically accounted for just 10% of monthly flight hours. 

While Rawlinson demurred from discussing the scope of the program, citing operational security concerns, military documents indicate that it is expanding rapidly.  Between March and December of last year, for example, the Trans-Sahara Short Take-Off and Landing Airlift Support initiative flew 233 sorties.  In just the first three months of this year, it carried out 193.

AFRICOM spokesman Benjamin Benson has confirmed to TomDispatch that U.S. air operations conducted from Base Aerienne 101 in Niamey, the capital of Niger, were providing “support for intelligence collection with French forces conducting operations in Mali and with other partners in the region.”  Refusing to go into detail about mission specifics for reasons of “operational security,” he added that, “in partnership with Niger and other countries in the region, we are committed to supporting our allies… this decision allows for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations within the region.”

Benson also confirmed that the U.S. military has used Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport in Senegal for refueling stops as well as the “transportation of teams participating in security cooperation activities” like training missions.  He confirmed a similar deal for the use of Addis Ababa Bole International Airport in Ethiopia.  All told, the U.S. military now has agreements to use 29 international airports in Africa as refueling centers.

Benson was more tight-lipped about air operations from Nzara Landing Zone in the Republic of South Sudan, the site of one of several shadowy forward operating posts (including another in Djema in the Central Africa Republic and a third in Dungu in the Democratic Republic of Congo) that have been used by U.S. Special Operations forces.  “We don’t want Kony and his folks to know… what kind of planes to look out for,” he said.  It’s no secret, however, that U.S. air assets over Africa and its coastal waters include Predator, Global Hawk and Scan Eagle drones, MQ-8 unmanned helicopters, EP-3 Orion aircraft, Pilatus planes, and E-8 Joint Stars aircraft.

Last year, in its ever-expanding operations, AFRICOM planned 14 major joint-training exercises on the continent, including in Morocco, Uganda, Botswana, Lesotho, Senegal, and Nigeria.  One of them, an annual event known as Atlas Accord, saw members of the U.S. Special Forces travel to Mali to conduct training with local forces. “The participants were very attentive, and we were able to show them our tactics and see theirs as well,” said Captain Bob Luther, a team leader with the 19th Special Forces Group.

The Collapse Of Mali

As the U.S.-backed war in Libya was taking down Qaddafi, nomadic Tuareg fighters in his service looted the regime’s extensive weapons caches, crossed the border into their native Mali, and began to take over the northern part of that country.  Anger within the country’s armed forces over the democratically elected government’s ineffective response to the rebellion resulted in a military coup.  It was led by Amadou Sanogo, an officer who hadreceived extensive training in the U.S. between 2004 and 2010 as part of the Pan-Sahel Initiative.  Having overthrown Malian democracy, he and his fellow officers proved even less effective in dealing with events in the north. 

With the country in turmoil, the Tuareg fighters declared an independent state.  Soon, however, heavily-armed Islamist rebels from homegrown Ansar al-Dine as well as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Libya’s Ansar al-Sharia, and Nigeria’s Boko Haram, among others, pushed out the Tuaregs, took over much of the north, instituted a harsh brand of Shariah law, and created a humanitarian crisis that caused widespread suffering, sending refugees streaming from their homes. 

These developments raised serious questions about the efficacy of U.S. counterterrorism efforts.  “This spectacular failure reveals that the U.S. probably underestimated the complex socio-cultural peculiarities of the region, and misread the realities of the terrain,” Berny Sèbe, an expert on North and West Africa at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, told me.  “This led them to being grossly manipulated by local interests over which they had, in the end, very limited control.”

Following a further series of Islamist victories and widespread atrocities, the French military intervened at the head of a coalition of Chadian, Nigerian, and other African troops, with support from the U.S. and the British. The foreign-led forces beat back the Islamists, who then shifted from conventional to guerrilla tactics, including suicide bombings. 

In April, after such an attack killed three Chadian soldiers, that country’s president announced that his forces, long supported by the U.S. through the Pan-Sahel Initiative, would withdraw from Mali.  “Chad’s army has no ability to face the kind of guerrilla fighting that is emerging," he said.  In the meantime, the remnants of the U.S.-backed Malian military fighting alongside the French were cited for gross human rights violations in their bid to retake control of their country.

After the French intervention in January, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said, “There is no consideration of putting any American boots on the ground at this time.”  Not long after, 10 U.S. military personnel were deployed to assist French and African forces, while 12 others were assigned to the embassy in the Malian capital, Bamako. 

While he’s quick to point out that Mali’s downward spiral had much to do with its corrupt government, weak military, and rising levels of ethnic discontent, the Carnegie Endowment’s Wehrey notes that the war in Libya was “a seismic event for the Sahel and the Sahara.”  Just back from a fact-finding trip to Libya, he added that the effects of the revolution are already rippling far beyond the porous borders of Mali. 

Wehrey cited recent findings by the United Nations Security Council's Group of Experts, which monitors an arms embargo imposed on Libya in 2011.  “In the past 12 months,” the panel reported, “the proliferation of weapons from Libya has continued at a worrying rate and has spread into new territory: West Africa, the Levant [the Eastern Mediterranean region], and potentially even the Horn of Africa.  Illicit flows [of arms] from the country are fueling existing conflicts in Africa and the Levant and enriching the arsenals of a range of non-state actors, including terrorist groups.”

Growing Instability

The collapse of Mali after a coup by an American-trained officer and Chad’s flight from the fight in that country are just two indicators of how post-9/11 U.S. military efforts in Africa have fared.  “In two of the three other Sahelian states involved in the Pentagon’s pan-Sahelian initiative, Mauritania and Niger, armies trained by the U.S., have also taken power in the past eight years,” observed journalist William Wallis in the Financial Times.  “In the third, Chad, they came close in a 2006 attempt.”  Still another coup plot involving members of the Chadian military was reportedly uncovered earlier this spring. 

In March, Major General Patrick Donahue, the commander of U.S. Army Africa, told interviewer Gail McCabe that northwestern Africa was now becoming increasingly “problematic.”  Al-Qaeda, he said, was at work destabilizing Algeria and Tunisia.  Last September, in fact, hundreds of Islamist protesters attacked the U.S. embassy compound in Tunisia, setting it on fire.  More recently, Camille Tawil in the CTC Sentinel, the official publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point,wrote that in Tunisia “jihadis are openly recruiting young militants and sending them to training camps in the mountains, especially along Algeria’s borders.” 

The U.S.-backed French intervention in Mali also led to a January revenge terror attack on the Amenas gas plant in Algeria.  Carried out by the al-Mulathameen brigade, one of various new al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb-linked militant groups emerging in the region, it led to the deaths of close to 40 hostages, including three Americans.  Planned by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a veteran of the U.S.-backed war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, it was only the first in a series of blowback responses to U.S. and Western interventions in Northern Africa that may have far-reaching implications. 

Last month, Belmokhtar’s forces also teamed up with fighters from the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa -- yet another Islamist militant group of recent vintage -- to carry out coordinated attacks on a French-run uranium mine and a nearby military base in Agadez, Niger, that killed at least 25 people.  A recent attack on the French embassy in Libya by local militants is also seen as a reprisal for the French war in Mali. 

According to the Carnegie Endowment’s Wehrey, the French military’s push there has had the additional effect of reversing the flow of militants, sending many back into Libya to recuperate and seek additional training.  Nigerian Islamist fighters driven from Mali havereturned to their native land with fresh training and innovative tactics as well as heavy weapons from Libya.  Increasingly battle-hardened, extremist Islamist insurgents from two Nigerian groups, Boko Haram and the newer, even more radical Ansaru, have escalated a long simmering conflict in that West African oil giant.

For years, Nigerian forces have been trained and supported by the U.S. through the Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance program.  The country has also been a beneficiary of U.S. Foreign Military Financing, which provides grants and loans to purchase U.S.-produced weaponry and equipment and funds military training.  In recent years, however, brutal responses by Nigerian forces to what had been a fringe Islamist sect have transformed Boko Haram into a regional terrorist force. 

The situation has grown so serious that President Goodluck Jonathan recently declared a state of emergency in northern Nigeria.  Last month, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke out about “credible allegations that Nigerian security forces are committing gross human rights violations, which, in turn, only escalate the violence and fuel extremism.”  After a Boko Haram militant killed a soldier in the town of Baga, for example, Nigerian troopsattacked the town, destroying more than 2,000 homes and killing an estimated 183 people.             

Similarly, according to a recent United Nations report, the Congolese army’s 391st Commando Battalion, formed with U.S. support and trained for eight months by U.S. Special Operations forces, later took part in mass rapes and other atrocities.  Fleeing the advance of a recently formed, brutal (non-Islamic) rebel group known as M23, its troopsjoined with other Congolese soldiers in raping close to 100 women and more than 30 girls in November 2012. 

“This magnificent battalion will set a new mark in this nation's continuing transformation of an army dedicated and committed to professionalism, accountability, sustainability, and meaningful security," said Brigadier General Christopher Haas, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command Africa at the time of the battalion’s graduation from training in 2010. 

Earlier this year, incoming AFRICOM commander General David Rodriguez told the Senate Armed Services Committee that a review of the unit found its “officers and enlisted soldiers appear motivated, organized, and trained in small unit maneuver and tactics” even if there were “limited metrics to measure the battalion’s combat effectiveness and performance in protecting civilians.”  The U.N. report tells a different story.  For example, it describes “a 14 year old boy… shot dead on 25 November 2012 in the village of Kalungu, Kalehe territory, by a soldier of the 391 Battalion. The boy was returning from the fields when two soldiers tried to steal his goat. As he tried to resist and flee, one of the soldiers shot him.”

Despite years of U.S. military aid to the Democratic Republic of Congo, M23 has dealt its army heavy blows and, according to AFRICOM’s Rodriguez, is now destabilizing the region.  But they haven’t done it alone. According to Rodriguez, M23 “would not be the threat it is today without external support including evidence of support from the Rwandan government.” 

For years, the U.S. aided Rwanda through various programs, including the International Military Education and Training initiative and Foreign Military Financing.   Last year, the U.S. cut $200,000 in military assistance to Rwanda -- a signal of its disapproval of that government’s support for M23.  Still, as AFRICOM’s Rodriguez admitted to the Senate earlier this year, the U.S. continues to “support Rwanda’s participation in United Nations peacekeeping missions in Africa.”

After years of U.S. assistance, including support from Special Operations forces advisors, the Central African Republic’s military was recently defeated and the country’s president ousted by another newly formed (non-Islamist) rebel group known as Seleka.  In short order, that country’s army chiefs pledged their allegiance to the leader of the coup, while hostility on the part of the rebels forced the U.S. and its allies to suspend their hunt for Joseph Kony.

A strategic partner and bulwark of U.S. counterterrorism efforts, Kenya receives around $1 billion in U.S. aid annually and elements of its military have been trained by U.S. Special Operations forces.  But last September, Foreign Policy’s Jonathan Horowitz reported on allegations of “Kenyan counterterrorism death squads... killing and disappearing people.”  Later, Human Rights Watch drew attention to the Kenyan military’s response to a November attack by an unknown gunman that killed three soldiers in the northern town of Garissa.  The “Kenyan army surrounded the town, preventing anyone from leaving or entering, and started attacking residents and traders,” the group reported. “The witnesses said that the military shot at people, raped women, and assaulted anyone in sight.” 

Another longtime recipient of U.S. support, the Ethiopian military, was also involved in abuses last year, following an attack by gunmen on a commercial farm.  In response,according to Human Rights Watch, members of Ethiopia’s army raped, arbitrarily arrested, and assaulted local villagers. 

The Ugandan military has been the primary U.S. proxy when it comes to policing Somalia.  Its members were, however, implicated in the beating and even killing of citizens during domestic unrest in 2011.  Burundi has also received significant U.S. military support and high-ranking officers in its army have recently been linked to the illegal mineral trade,according to a report by the environmental watchdog group Global Witness.  Despite years of cooperation with the U.S. military, Senegal now appears more vulnerable to extremism and increasingly unstable, according to a report by the Institute of Security Studies. 

And so it goes across the continent.

Success Stories

In addition to the Gulf of Guinea, AFRICOM’s chief spokesman pointed to Somalia as another major U.S. success story on the continent.  And it’s true that Somalia is more stablenow than it has been in years, even if a weakened al-Shabaab continues to carry outattacks.  The spokesman even pointed to a recent CNN report about a trickle of tourists entering the war-torn country and the construction of a luxury beach resort in the capital, Mogadishu. 

I asked for other AFRICOM success stories, but only those two came to his mind -- and no one should be surprised by that. 

After all, in 2006, before AFRICOM came into existence, 11 African nations were amongthe top 20 in the Fund for Peace’s annual Failed States Index.  Last year, that number hadrisen to 15 (or 16 if you count the new nation of South Sudan).

In 2001, according to the Global Terrorism Database from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, there were119 terrorist incidents in sub-Saharan Africa.  By 2011, the last year for which numbers are available, there were close to 500.  A recent report from the International Center for Terrorism Studies at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies counted 21 terrorist attacks in the Maghreb and Sahel regions of northern Africa in 2001.  During the Obama years, the figures have fluctuated between 144 and 204 annually.

Similarly, an analysis of 65,000 individual incidents of political violence in Africa from 1997 to 2012, assembled by researchers affiliated with the International Peace Research Institute,found that “violent Islamist activity has increased significantly in the past 15 years, with a particular[ly] sharp increase witnessed from 2010 onwards.”  Additionally, according to researcher Caitriona Dowd, “there is also evidence for the geographic spread of violent Islamist activity both south- and east-ward on the continent.”

In fact, the trends appear stark and eerily mirror statements from AFRICOM’s leaders.

In March 2009, after years of training indigenous forces and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on counterterrorism activities, General William Ward, the first leader of U.S. Africa Command, gave its inaugural status report to the Senate Armed Services Committee.  It was bleak.  “Al-Qaeda,” he said, “increased its influence dramatically across north and east Africa over the past three years with the growth of East Africa Al-Qaeda, al Shabaab, and al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).”

This February, after four more years of military engagement, security assistance, training of indigenous armies, and hundreds of millions of dollars more in funding, AFRICOM’s incoming commander General David Rodriguez explained the current situation to the Senate in more ominous terms.  “The command’s number one priority is East Africa with particular focus on al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda networks. This is followed by violent extremist [movements] and al-Qaeda in North and West Africa and the Islamic Maghreb. AFRICOM’s third priority is Counter-LRA [Lord’s Resistance Army] operations.”

Rodriguez warned that, “with the increasing threat of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, I see a greater risk of regional instability if we do not engage aggressively.”  In addition to that group, he declared al-Shabaab and Boko Haram major menaces.  He also mentioned the problems posed by the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa and Ansar al-Dine.  Libya, he told them, was threatened by “hundreds of disparate militias,” while M23 was “destabilizing the entire Great Lakes region [of Central Africa].” 

In West Africa, he admitted, there was also a major narcotics trafficking problem.  Similarly, East Africa was “experiencing an increase in heroin trafficking across the Indian Ocean from Afghanistan and Pakistan.”  In addition, “in the Sahel region of North Africa, cocaine and hashish trafficking is being facilitated by, and directly benefitting, organizations like al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb leading to increased regional instability.”

In other words, 10 years after Washington began pouring taxpayer dollars into counterterrorism and stability efforts across Africa and its forces first began operating from Camp Lemonnier, the continent has experienced profound changes, just not those the U.S. sought.  The University of Birmingham’s Berny Sèbe ticks off post-revolutionary Libya, the collapse of Mali, the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria, the coup in the Central African Republic, and violence in Africa’s Great Lakes region as evidence of increasing volatility. “The continent is certainly more unstable today than it was in the early 2000s, when the U.S. started to intervene more directly,” he told me. 

As the war in Afghanistan -- a conflict born of blowback -- winds down, there will be greater incentive and opportunity to project U.S. military power in Africa.  However, even a cursory reading of recent history suggests that this impulse is unlikely to achieve U.S. goals.  While correlation doesn’t equal causation, there is ample evidence to suggest the United States has facilitated a terror diaspora, imperiling nations and endangering peoples across Africa.  In the wake of 9/11, Pentagon officials were hard-pressed to show evidence of a major African terror threat.  Today, the continent is thick with militant groups that are increasingly crossing borders, sowing insecurity, and throwing the limits of U.S. power into broad relief.  After 10 years of U.S. operations to promote stability by military means, the results have been the opposite.  Africa has become blowback central. 

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute.  An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times,the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author most recently of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books).  You can catch his conversation with Bill Moyers about that book by clicking here.  His website is NickTurse.com.  You can follow him on Tumblr and on Facebook.