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Next week, President Bush, accompanied by his wife,
Laura, will embark on a five-country tour across the
African continent, with stops planned in Benin,
Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, and Liberia. While cynics
will undoubtedly dismiss the visit as another case
of a lame duck president using forays abroad to
escape troubles at home, the fact is that the United
States’ (US) current engagement with Africa will
likely go down as one of the most significant, if
largely unheralded, legacies of the Bush presidency.
And, rather ironically, it was never supposed to be
that way.
As I perhaps rather indelicately recalled six months
ago during my testimony before the House
Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health, while
campaigning for the Republican presidential
nomination in 2000, George W. Bush responded
negatively to a question from PBS’s Jim Lehrer about
whether Africa fit into his definition of the
strategic interests of the US:
“At some point in time the President’s got to
clearly define what the national strategic interests
are, and while Africa may be important, it does not
fit into the national strategic interests, as far as
I can see them.”
One year ago, almost seven years to the day after
that NewsHour interview, it was announced that
President Bush had decided to establish a new
unified combatant command, Africa Command (AFRICOM),
directing the Department of Defense to stand up the
new structure by October 2008. According to the
February 6, 2007 White House press release,
AFRICOM’s mission would be to “enhance our efforts
to bring peace and security to the people of Africa
and promote our common goals of development, health,
education, democracy, and economic growth in Africa”
by strengthening bilateral and multilateral security
cooperation with African states and creating new
opportunities to bolster their capabilities.
One the most distinguished Africanists in the US
foreign policy establishment, Ambassador Princeton
N. Lyman, who served as US envoy to South Africa and
to Nigeria as well as Assistant Secretary of State
for International Organisations, observed, while
Bush’s 2000 put-down of Africa may have been
disappointing, it nonetheless reflected “what had in
fact been the approach of both Democratic and
Republican administrations for decades.”
Historically, with the exception of Cold War period
when concerns about Soviet attempts to secure a
foothold on the continent drove US policymakers to
pay greater attention to the continent, America
generally perceived Africa as secondary to its
foreign policy and other strategic objectives. Thus,
more often than not, American perspectives on Africa
were framed almost exclusively in terms of
preoccupation over the humanitarian consequences of
poverty, war, and natural disaster. Alas, as noble
as these moral impulses have been, they lacked the
“staying power” needed to sustain a long-term
commitment.
The achievement of the Bush administration is that,
despite the understandably subdued expectations of
Africanists when it entered office, it has actually
reset US relations with Africa on a solid strategic
basis, charting the course for even greater
engagement by whoever is inaugurated next January as
the 44th President of the US.
Broadly conceived, there are four areas in which
Africa’s significance for America – or at least the
public acknowledgment thereof – has been amplified
in recent years.
The first is the continent’s role in the “Global War
on Terror” and the potential, as I noted in my broad
assessment of the theatre at the beginning of this
year, of Africa’s poorly governed spaces to provide
facilitating environments, recruits, and eventual
targets for Islamist terrorists who threaten Western
interests in general and those of the United States
in particular. In fact, in some regions like the
Horn of Africa and Sahel, this has already become
reality.
The second important consideration is Africa’s
abundant natural resources, particularly those in
its burgeoning energy sector, the importance of
which to the international community in general and
the US in particular has increased considerably in
the past few year and whose vulnerabilities, as I
argued last year, represent a major threat to
American national security.
The third area motivating the reappraisal of
Africa’s strategic significance is the recognition
of the role that the continent is playing in China’s
rapid rise to great power status and, as I noted
just last week, Beijing’s role in enabling rogue
regimes in Africa.
The fourth impulse is the humanitarian concern for
the devastating toll which conflict, poverty, and
disease, especially HIV/Aids, continue to exact in
Africa.
While the Bush administration’s 2003 National
Strategy for Combating Terrorism correctly argued
that terrorist organisations have little in common
with the poor and destitute, it also acknowledged
that terrorists can exploit these socio-economic
conditions to their advantage.
In his 2005 address on the occasion of the United
Nations’ (UN) 60th anniversary, President Bush went
on to note:
“We must defeat the terrorists on the battlefield,
and we must also defeat them in the battle of ideas.
We must change the conditions that allow terrorists
to flourish and recruit, by spreading the hope of
freedom to millions who have never known it. We must
help raise up the failing states and stagnant
societies that provide fertile ground for the
terrorists. We must defend and extend a vision of
human dignity, and opportunity, and prosperity – a
vision far stronger than the dark appeal of
resentment and murder. To spread a vision of hope,
the US is determined to help nations that are
struggling with poverty.”
The Bush administration has made combating HIV/Aids
on the continent a priority with twelve of the
fifteen focus countries in the President’s Emergency
Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) being in Africa,
including Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Kenya,
Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa,
Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
With a five-year, 15 billion dollar price tag,
PEPFAR, announced in 2003, has been largest
commitment ever by any nation for an international
health initiative dedicated to a single disease.
Through the programme, so far more than 1.4 million
people have received antiretroviral treatment, with
a special emphasis on the preventing infant
infections by reaching privileging pregnant women.
In his final State of the Union address, one of the
few concrete foreign policy proposals made by the
president was an appeal for PEPFAR: “We can bring
healing and hope to many more. So I ask you to
maintain the principles that have changed behaviour
and made this program a success. And I call on you
to double our initial commitment to fighting
HIV/Aids by approving an additional 30 billion
dollars over the next five years.”
The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC),
established in 2004, is perhaps the Bush
administration’s most innovative contribution with
regard to foreign aid. MCC’s Millennium Challenge
Account provides assistance to qualifying countries
for “compact agreements” to fund specific programs
targeted at reducing poverty and stimulating
economic growth as well as “threshold programmes” to
improve performance with an eye toward achieving
“compact” status.
A full half of the 40 countries worldwide currently
eligible for some MCC funding, either through the
“Threshold Programme” or “Compact Assistance,” are
in Africa, including four of the five countries on
next week’s presidential trip (Benin, Tanzania,
Rwanda, and Ghana).
One of the key advantages of the MCC approach is the
recognition that generous grants of development aid
are for naught if the recipients lacked a democratic
polity and basic capacity for good governance. It
should be recalled that until fairly recently, while
most African states were characterised by some form
authoritarian rule, with only two out of the 53
members of the African Union (AU), Botswana and
Mauritius, able to boast of uninterrupted democratic
politics since independence.
By linking eligibility for MCC assistance to
demonstrated commitment to policies that promote
political and economic freedom, investments in
education and health, control of corruption, and
respect for civil liberties and the rule of law by
performing well on seventeen different policy
indicators, the administration put into practice
what Nobel Laureate-economist Amartya Sen had long
argued, “Developing and strengthening a democratic
system is an essential component of the process of
development.”
Not surprisingly, President Bush drew bipartisan
applause during the State of Union address both for
his assertion that “we have also changed the way we
deliver aid by launching the Millennium Challenge
Account” and for his call to Congress to fully fund
this programme that “strengthens democracy,
transparency, and the rule of law in developing
nations.”
Over the long term, trade offers an opportunity for
Africa to experience sustained economic growth by
leveraging its comparative advantage of low labour
costs as a step toward integrating into the global
marketplace. The Bush administration, working with
Congress, has consolidated the comprehensive trade
and investment policy for Africa introduced by its
predecessor in the African Growth and Opportunity
Act (AGOA) of 2000, which substantially lowered
commercial barriers with the US and allowed
Sub-Saharan African countries to qualify for trade
benefits such as having goods from their nascent
manufacturing sectors imported into the US
tariff-free.
As a direct result of AGOA, for example, since 2001
Africa’s garment exports to America have increased
sevenfold. Furthermore, the Overseas Private
Investment Corporation (OPIC), an independent US
government agency, has provided debt financing
through its “Africa Capital Markets Fund” in an
effort mobilised the private sector in support of up
to 800 million dollars in new additional investment
on the continent.
Of course, there is a strong element of
self-interest in all this. As the most recent
iteration of the National Security Strategy of the
US, a document which identified the international
counterterrorism effort as the country’s top
national security priority, affirmed, “Africa holds
growing geo-strategic importance and is a high
priority of this Administration.”
However, the 2006 document also went out of its way
to state that “our security depends on partnering
with Africans.” AFRICOM’s establishment is not only
America’s response to the more strategic view of
Africa in terms of US national interests which
policymakers and analysts have come around to
adopting, it also represents an acknowledgement
that, independent of the interests and actions of
external powers like the US, Africans themselves
have increasingly expressed the desire and, more
importantly, demonstrated the political will, to
tackle the continent’s myriad challenges of disease,
poverty, ethnic tension, religious extremism, bad
governance and overall lack of security, although
they still need outside assistance to do so.
As senior Pentagon officials like Principal Deputy
Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Ryan Henry
have repeatedly emphasised, that “the goal is for
AFRICOM not be a US leadership role on the continent
but rather to be supporting the indigenous
leadership efforts that are currently going on…[to]
support the leadership from different nations and
that of the AU and the regional economic communities
that are there and the security capabilities that
they provide…to complement rather that compete with
any leadership efforts currently going on.” Implicit
in this is the recognition of the nexus which exists
between security and development.
As Sean McFate, a policy analyst who previously
served as an officer with the 82nd Airborne
Division, notes in an essay for the current issue of
Military Review, while “AFRICOM’s mission
should not be development, the failure of
development may well drive AFRICOM’s mission.”
It is the recognition that a deep commonality exists
between America’s strategic interests and the
interests of Africans in enhanced security,
stability, and development and a holistic approach
is needed to achieve both objectives.
Republican presidential candidate Senator John
McCain is right on when, in a recent essay for
Foreign Affairs subtitled “Securing America’s
Future,” he pledged to build upon the strategic
engagements with Africa begun under the Bush
Administration:
“Africa’s problems – poverty, corruption, disease,
and instability – are well known. Less discussed is
the promise offered by many countries on that
continent. My administration will seek to engage on
a political, economic, and security level with
friendly governments across Africa. Many African
nations will not reach their true potential without
external assistance to combat the entrenched
problems, such as HIV/AIDS, that afflict Africans
disproportionately. I will establish the goal of
eradicating malaria – the number one killer of
African children under the age of five – on the
continent. In addition to saving millions of lives
in the world’s poorest regions, such a campaign
would do much to add lustre to America’s image in
the world. These and other efforts, including
enhancing trade and investment, would assist
Africans in sparking a renaissance that would enable
the continent’s people to achieve their potential.”
Thus it is quite appropriate that President Bush
should begin his last 12 months in office with a
journey across the African continent where a new
framework for relations with the US is being built,
a structure whose very existence – however unlikely
it would have seemed at the beginning – his
presidency has done a great deal to bring about. As
a result of this commitment, as I told Congress last
year:
We have a historical opportunity to partner with the
region in a meaningful way – if we get the terms of
the engagement right. However, it is already evident
that the challenges Americans and Africans face
together neither lend themselves to quick fixes nor
promise all that many immediate results. Rather,
they demand for a steady approach and sustained
commitment to the pursuit of long-term strategic
objectives which will secure legitimate US national
interests as well as advance the interests of
African partners – irrespective of transitions in
administration, shifts of economic indicators, or
changes to international or national perceptions of
priorities.
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