Violence Has Spiked in Africa Since the Military Founded AFRICOM, Pentagon Study Finds

Nick Turse

The Intercept

 

Since U.S. Africa Command began operations in 2008, the number of U.S. military personnel on the African continent has jumped 170 percent, from 2,600 to 7,000. The number of military missions, activities, programs, and exercises there has risen 1,900 percent, from 172 to 3,500. Drone strikes have soared and the number of commandos deployed has increased exponentially along with the size and scope of AFRICOM’s constellation of bases.

 

The U.S. military has recently conducted 36 named operations and activities in Africa, more than any other region of the world, including the Greater Middle East. Troops scattered across Africa regularly advise, train, and partner with local forces; gather intelligence; conduct surveillance; and carry out airstrikes and ground raids focused on “countering violent extremists on the African continent.”

AFRICOM “disrupts and neutralizes transnational threats” in order to “promote regional security, stability and prosperity,” according to its mission statement. But since AFRICOM began, key indicators of security and stability in Africa have plummeted according to the Defense Department’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. “Overall, militant Islamist group activity in Africa has doubled since 2012,” according to a recent analysis by the Africa Center.

There are now roughly 24 “active militant Islamist groups” operating on the continent, up from just five in 2010, the analysis found. Today, 13 African countries face attacks from these groups — a 160 percent increase over that same time span. In fact, the number of “violent events” across the continent has jumped 960 percent, from 288 in 2009 to 3,050 in 2018, according to the Africa Center’s analysis.

While a variety of factors have likely contributed to the rise in violence, some experts say that the overlap between the command’s existence and growing unrest is not a coincidence.

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Obama’s Africa Leaders’ Summit: A Corporate and Military Love Fest

Wayne Madsen
Strategic-Culture.org

President Barack Obama’s much-heralded “Africa Leaders’ Summit,” held in Washington, DC amid an epidemic of the deadly Ebola virus in West Africa, was a grandiose photo opportunity for African leaders and corporate tycoons eager to further the exploitation of the African continent. Although Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma canceled their trips to Washington in order to deal with the Ebola epidemic ravaging their nations, other African leaders were happy to rub shoulders with American billionaire businessmen and senior officers of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM)

AFRICOM has become the corporate centurions for U.S. oil and mining companies and other natural resource exploiters to ensure that Africa’s vast reserves of oil, diamonds, platinum, gold, uranium, and columbite-tantalite (col-tan) remain in Western, particularly American and Israeli, hands.

American plans to dominate Africa’s oil and precious metals markets is the reason why Hunter Biden, the son of Vice President Joe Biden, was present at the White House state dinner for the African leaders. The younger Biden is a member of the board of Ukrainian-Israeli business mogul’s Burisma Holdings, Ltd., which is not only involved in oil drilling and natural gas “fracking” in Ukraine but has its sights set on lucrative natural gas and oil fields in Africa. It also helps that another Burisma board member, Devon Archer, is a close personal friend and Yale roommate of Christopher Heinz, the stepson of Secretary of State John Kerry.

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MAP: AFRICOM currently has boots on the ground in these African countries

Phantom Report

 

 Satellite Image: osimint

Editor’s Note: U.S. Predator Drone Team likely to be deployed to an established French Air Base operating from  N’Djamena International Airport , Chad.

Source: Washington Post

President Obama’s announcement that United States has deployed 80 troops to Chad came as a surprise to many. But as my colleague Craig Whitlock points out, the United States already has boots on the ground in a surprising number of African countries.

This map shows what sub-Saharan nations currently have a U.S. military presence.

It should be noted that in most of these countries, there is a pretty small number of troops. 

But it is a clear sign of the U.S. Africa Command’s increasingly broad position on the continent in what could be described as a growing shadow war against al-Qaeda affiliates and other militant groups. It also shows an increasingly blurred line between U.S. military operations and the CIA in Africa.

More details of the troops deployed are below.

Burkina Faso

The United States has a base in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, since 2007. The base acts as a hub of a U.S spying network in the region, with spy planes departing form the base to fly over Mali, Mauritania and the Sahara, where they search for fighters from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

Congo

The United States has troops in Congo assisting the nation in the search for Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

Central African Republic

In April 2013, the United States had around 40 troops in Central African Republic assisting the search for the LRA.

Chad

On Wednesday, Washington announced that it would be sending 80 troops to Chad to help with the search for Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by militant Islamist group Boko Haram.

Djibouti

The U.S. military has a major base in Djibouti, Camp Lemonnier. There are around 4,000 troops there, including lots of aircraft and drones.

Ethiopia

The United States has had a military drone base at Arba Minch since 2011. The base is used to fly Reaper drones over East Africa.

Read more at Washington Post

Kidnapped Girls Become Tools of U.S. Imperial Policy in Africa

Black Agenda Report

The “humanitarian” U.S. military occupation of Africa has been very successful, thus far. “The Chibok abductions have served the same U.S. foreign policy purposes as Joseph Kony sightings in central Africa.” Imagine: the superpower that financed the genocide of six million in Congo, claims to be a defender of teenage girls and human rights on the continent. If you believe that, then you are probably a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. 

A chorus of outraged public opinion demands that the “international community” and the Nigerian military “Do something!” about the abduction by Boko Haram of 280 teenage girls. It is difficult to fault the average U.S. consumer of packaged “news” products for knowing next to nothing about what the Nigerian army has actually been “doing” to suppress the Muslim fundamentalist rebels since, as senior columnist Margaret Kimberley pointed out in these pages, last week, the three U.S. broadcast networks carried “not a single television news story about Boko Haram” in all of 2013. (Nor did the misinformation corporations provide a nanosecond of coverage of the bloodshed in the Central African Republic, where thousands died and a million were made homeless by communal fighting over the past year.) But, that doesn’t mean the Nigerian army hasn’t been bombing, strafing, and indiscriminately slaughtering thousands of, mainly, young men in the country’s mostly Muslim north.

The newly aware U.S. public may or may not be screaming for blood, but rivers of blood have already flowed in the region. Those Americans who read – which, presumably, includes First Lady Michelle Obama, who took her husband’s place on radio last weekend to pledge U.S. help in the hunt for the girls – would have learned in the New York Times of the army’s savage offensive near the Niger border, last May and June. In the town of Bosso, the Nigerian army killed hundreds of young men in traditional Muslim garb “Without Asking Who They Are,” according to the NYT headline. “They don’t ask any questions,” said a witness who later fled for his life, like thousands of others. “When they see young men in traditional robes, they shoot them on the spot,” said a student. “They catch many of the others and take them away, and we don’t hear from them again.”

The Times’ Adam Nossiter interviewed many refugees from the army’s “all-out land and air campaign to crush the Boko Haram insurgency.” He reported:

“All spoke of a climate of terror that had pushed them, in the thousands, to flee for miles through the harsh and baking semidesert, sometimes on foot, to Niger. A few blamed Boko Haram — a shadowy, rarely glimpsed presence for most residents — for the violence. But the overwhelming majority blamed the military, saying they had fled their country because of it.”

In just one village, 200 people were killed by the military.

In March of this year, fighters who were assumed to be from Boko Haram attacked a barracks and jail in the northern city of Maiduguri. Hundreds of prisoners fled, but 200 youths were rounded up and made to lie on the ground. A witness told the Times: “The soldiers made some calls and a few minutes later they started shooting the people on the ground. I counted 198 people killed at that checkpoint.”

All told, according to Amnesty International, more than 600 people were extrajudicially murdered, “most of them unarmed, escaped detainees, around Maiduguri.” An additional 950 prisoners were killed in the first half of 2013 in detention facilities run by Nigeria’s military Joint Task Force, many at the same barracks in Maiduguri. Amnesty International quotes a senior officer in the Nigerian Army, speaking anonymously: “Hundreds have been killed in detention either by shooting them or by suffocation,” he said. “There are times when people are brought out on a daily basis and killed. About five people, on average, are killed nearly on a daily basis.”

Chibok, where the teenage girls were abducted, is 80 miles from Maiduguri, capital of Borno State.
In 2009, when the Boko Haram had not yet been transformed into a fully armed opposition, the military summarily executed their handcuffed leader and killed at least 1,000 accused members in the states of Borno, Yobe, Kano and Bauchi, many of them apparently simply youths from suspect neighborhoods. A gruesome video shows the military at work. “In the video, a number of unarmed men are seen being made to lie down in the road outside a building before they are shot,” Al Jazeera reports in text accompanying the video. “As one man is brought out to face death, one of the officers can be heard urging his colleague to ‘shoot him in the chest not the head – I want his hat.’”

These are only snapshots of the army’s response to Boko Haram – atrocities that are part of the context of Boko Haram’s ghastly behavior. The military has refused the group’s offer to exchange the kidnapped girls for imprisoned Boko Haram members. (We should not assume that everyone detained as Boko Haram is actually a member – only that all detainees face imminent and arbitrary execution.)

None of the above is meant to tell Boko Haram’s “side” in this grisly story (fundamentalist religious jihadists find no favor at BAR), but to emphasize the Nigerian military’s culpability in the group’s mad trajectory – the same military that many newly-minted “Save Our Girls” activists demand take more decisive action in Borno.

The bush to which the Boko Haram retreated with their captives was already a free-fire zone, where anything that moves is subject to obliteration by government aircraft. Nigerian air forces have now been joined by U.S. surveillance planesoperating out of the new U.S. drone base in neighboring Niger, further entrenching AFRICOM/CIA in the continental landscape. Last week it was announced that, for the first time, AFRICOM troops will train a Nigerian ranger battalion in counterinsurgency warfare.

The Chibok abductions have served the same U.S. foreign policy purposes as Joseph Kony sightings in central Africa, which were conjured-up to justify the permanent stationing of U.S Special Forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, the Central African Republic and South Sudan, in 2011, on humanitarian interventionist grounds. (This past March, the U.S. sent150 more Special Ops troops to the region, claiming to have again spotted Kony, who is said to be deathly ill, holed up with a small band of followers somewhere in the Central African Republic.) The United States (and France and Britain, plus the rest of NATO, if need be) must maintain a deepening and permanent presence in Africa to defend the continent from…Africans.

When the crowd yells that America “Do something!” somewhere in Africa, the U.S. military is likely to already be there.

Barack Obama certainly needs no encouragement to intervention; his presidency is roughly coterminous with AFRICOM’s founding and explosive expansion. Obama broadened the war against Somalia that was launched by George Bush in partnership with the genocidal Ethiopian regime, in 2006 (an invasion that led directly to what the United Nations called “the worst humanitarian crisis is Africa”). He built on Bill Clinton and George Bush’s legacies in the Congo, where U.S. client states Uganda and Rwanda caused the slaughter of 6 million people since 1996 – the greatest genocide of the post War World II era. He welcomed South Sudan as the world’s newest nation – the culmination of a decades-long project of the U.S., Britain and Israel to dismember Africa’s largest country, but which has now fallen into a bloody chaos, as does everything the U.S. touches, these days.

Most relevant to the plight of Chibok’s young women, Obama led “from behind” NATO’s regime change in Libya, removing the anti-jihadist bulwark Muamar Gaddafi (“We came, we saw, he died,” said Hillary Clinton) and destabilizing the whole Sahelian tier of the continent, all the way down to northern Nigeria. As BAR editor and columnist Ajamu Baraka writes in the current issue, “Boko Haram benefited from the destabilization of various countries across the Sahel following the Libya conflict.” The once-“shadowy” group now sported new weapons and vehicles and was clearly better trained and disciplined. In short, the Boko Haram, like other jihadists, had become more dangerous in a post-Gaddafi Africa – thus justifying a larger military presence for the same Americans and (mainly French) Europeans who had brought these convulsions to the region.

If Obama has his way, it will be a very long war – the better to grow AFRICOM – with some very unsavory allies (from both the Nigerian and American perspectives).

Whatever Obama does to deepen the U.S. presence in Nigeria and the rest of the continent, he can count on the Congressional Black Caucus, including its most “progressive” member, Barbara Lee (D-CA), the only member of the U.S. Congress to vote against the invasion of Afghanistan, in 2001. Lee, along with Reps. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) and fellow Californian Karen Bass, who is the ranking member on the House Subcommittee on African, gave cart blanch to Obama to “Do something!” in Nigeria. “And so our first command and demand is to use all resources to bring the terrorist thugs to justice,” they said.

A year and a half ago, when then UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s prospects for promotion to top U.S. diplomat were being torpedoed by the Benghazi controversy, a dozen Black congresspersons scurried to her defense. “We will not allow a brilliant public servant’s record to be mugged to cut off her consideration to be secretary of state,” said Washington, DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.

As persons who are presumed to read, Black Caucus members were certainly aware of the messy diplomatic scandal around Rice’s role in suppressing United Nation’s reports on U.S. allies’ Rwanda and Uganda’s genocidal acts against the Congolese people. Of all the high profile politicians from both the corporate parties, Rice – the rabid interventionist – is most intimately implicated in the Congo holocaust, dating back to the policy’s formulation under Clinton. Apparently, that’s not the part of Rice’s record that counts to Delegate Norton and the rest of the Black Caucus. Genocide against Africans does not move them one bit.

So, why are we to believe that they are really so concerned about the girls of Chibok?


BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted atGlen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

The Pentagon’s mystery missions in Africa

 

Tom Dispatch
Nick Turse - Dispatches from America

The numbers tell the story: 10 exercises, 55 operations, 481 security cooperation activities.

For years, the US military has publicly insisted that its efforts in Africa are small scale. Its public affairs personnel and commanders have repeatedly claimed no more than a “light footprint” on that continent, including a remarkably modest presence when it comes to military personnel. They have, however, balked at specifying just what that light footprint actually consists of. During an interview, for instance, a US Africa Command (AFRICOM) spokesman once expressed worry that tabulating the command’s deployments would offer a “skewed image” of US efforts there.
 
It turns out that the numbers do just the opposite.

Last year, according to AFRICOM commander General David Rodriguez, the US military carried out a total of 546 “activities” on the continent - a catch-all term for everything the military does in Africa.  In other words, it averages about one-and-a-half missions a day.  This represents a 217% increase in operations, programs, and exercises since the command was established in 2008.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month, Rodriguez noted that the 10 exercises, 55 operations, and 481 security cooperation activities made AFRICOM “an extremely active geographic command.”  But exactly what the command is “active” in doing is often far from clear.

AFRICOM releases information about only a fraction of its activities.  It offers no breakdown on the nature of its operations.  And it allows only a handful of cherry-picked reporters the chance to observe a few select missions.  The command refuses even to offer a count of the countries in which it is “active,” preferring to keep most information about what it’s doing -- and when and where -- secret.

While Rodriguez’s testimony offers but a glimpse of the scale of AFRICOM’s activities, a cache of previously undisclosed military briefing documents obtained by TomDispatch sheds additional light on the types of missions being carried out and their locations all across the continent.  These briefings prepared for top commanders and civilian officials in 2013 demonstrate a substantial increase in deployments in recent years and reveal U.S. military operations to be more extensive than previously reported.  They also indicate that the pace of operations in Africa will remain robust in 2014, with U.S. forces expected again to average far more than a mission each day on the continent.

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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).

Used with permission TomDispatch

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The new Great (Threat) Game in Eurasia

Pepe Escobar 
Asia Times

Pallin' around with neo-Nazis. Lawd, aint Murkah great?

In Ukraine, the West supported an unconstitutional putsch against an elected government perpetrated, among others, by fascist/neo-nazi storm troopers (Svoboda, Right Sector) instrumentalized by US intelligence. After a Russian counterpunch, US President Barack Obama proclaimed that any referendum in Crimea would "violate the Ukrainian constitution and violate international law."

This is just the latest instance in the serial rape of "international law". The rap sheet is humongous, including; NATO bombing Serbia for 78 days in 1999 to allow Kosovo to secede; the 2003 US invasion and subsequent trillion-dollar occupation and civil war creation in Iraq; NATO/AFRICOM bombing Libya in 2011 invoking R2P ("responsibility to protect") as a cover to provoking regime change; US investment in the secession of oil-wealthy South Sudan, so China has to deal with an extra geopolitical headache; and US investment in perennial civil war in Syria.

Yet Moscow still (foolishly?) believes international law should be respected - presenting to the UN Security Council classified information on all Western intel/psy-ops moves leading to the coup in Kiev, including "training" provided by Poland and Lithuania, not to mention Turkish intelligence involvement in setting up a second coup in Crimea. Russian diplomats called for an unbiased international investigation. That will never happen; Washington's narrative would be completely debunked. Thus a US veto at the UN.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also called for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to objectively investigate those snipers shooting everyone on sight in Kiev, as revealed by Estonia's foreign minister to EU foreign policy supremo Catherine "I love Yats" Ashton. According to Russia's ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin, "a completely different picture would be drawn compared to what is being depicted by American media and, unfortunately, by some American and European politicians." Needless to say, there will be no investigation. 

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How the United States was midwife to the mass slaughter in South Sudan

Stop the War Coalition
Peter Van Buren 
23 December 2013

History is just one of those hard things to ignore, especially in South Sudan.

In 2011, the US midwifed the creation of a new nation, South Sudan. Though at the time Obama invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King speaking about Ghana (“I knew about all of the struggles, and all of the pain, and all of the agony that these people had gone through for this moment”) in officially recognizing the country, many were more focused on the underlying US motives, isolating the rest of Sudan as part of the war on terror, and securing the oil reserves in the south for the US

The State Department rushed to open an embassy in South Sudan, and US money poured in to pay for the new government.

Like his counterparts from Iraq and Afghanistan when the US was still in charge of those places, the new South Sudan president was brought to the White House for photos, all blithely pushed out to the world via the Voice of America. The two leaders were said to have discussed “the importance of maintaining transparency and the rule of law.”

In 2012 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the nation as part of an extended effort at creating B-roll footage for her 2016 campaign, and Obama publicly applauded a deal brokered between Sudan and South Sudan on oil pipeline fees that the White House claimed would “help stem the ongoing violence in the region.”

However, like in Iraq, Afghanistan and so many other places that fell apart while being democratized and stabilized by the US (one also thinks of Libya, itself part of the African continent), the rush to mediagenic proclamations without addressing the underlying fundamentals led only to catastrophe. 

A scant few years later, South Sudan is at the brink of civil war and societal collapse, the US is evacuating another embassy and indeed one variety or another of “rebels” are shooting at US military aircraft arriving in their country in violation of their national sovereignty. Those who believe that the US efforts in South Sudan do not involve special forces on the ground and drones overhead no doubt will have a nice Christmas waiting up to catch a glimpse of Santa.

Obama, apparently unwilling to remember how he stood aside while an elected government recently fell apart in Egypt, went on to double-down on hypocrisy by stating in regards to South Sudan, “Any effort to seize power through the use of military force will result in the end of long-standing support from the United States and the international community.”

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Somalis Under Relentless Drone Attack as U.S. Tightens Military Grip on Continent

Uruknet

Africa, under President Obama, is an expanding theater of war for the United States. There are few points on the African map where the U.S. military does not operate, independently, through proxies, or by agreement with local governments and militaries. AFRICOM has penetrated the armed forces of the continent to a degree no single European power could have ever aspired. Indeed, "the U.S. has so thoroughly infiltrated African armies, many, if not most, would be of no use for national defense against the Americans."

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How the US controls "civil society" throughout Africa

ICH

Enemy-sponsored organisations threaten nation

The "great democracies" of the West have been the most consistent and most persistent enemy of the African: during slavery, during the scramble for Africa after the Berlin Conference, during colonialism, during apartheid and now during the current effort to recolonise Africa, which we see in Libya and Cote d'Ivoire and the current illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe.

-Americans, the British and their European cousins have discouraged and even outlawed as dangerous to their own people are the very same qualities and habits they seek to impose, promote, fund and otherwise reward among our children and within our societies in Africa.

-"We tend to look to (those we think are) the experts, the well-educated, thoroughly trained and richly resourced Western journalists for a lead.  When they dismiss African leadership with a few worn-out clichés, we follow suit. In the process we reduce our own politics, economics and situation in history into the juvenile language of (Western) tabloids."

-Running parallel to the "civil society" network or superstructure is the series of military and intelligence co-operation programmes which Africom is supposed to consolidate. Once Africom is in place, the recolonisation process will have been completed. [...]