The Next Frontier

The so-called long war—and particularly the work of AFRICOM—will be relentless and low-key. Small-scale elite ground units composed largely of junior and noncommissioned officers, working with local armies, assisted by air and sea platforms, will hunt down select individuals. And unlike U.S. operations in Iraq, AFRICOM will deny any point of concentration for the media. Strikes earlier this year on suspected al-Qaeda targets in Somalia are a case in point.  When an AC-130 gunship takes off from a base in Djibouti, or attack helicopters and surveillance planes take off from warships in the Indian Ocean, there is nothing to film, no way of embedding, and no way of knowing the result until the military tells you.

Such operations by AFRICOM will not  need an exit strategy, since the military will not be present in high numbers in the first place. Southern Command in the drug war in Colombia, and Pacific Command in the war against Islamic insurgents in the southern Philippines, work like this. The creation of AFRICOM signifies the adoption of that paradigm on a grander scale.

AFRICOM will also help the United States to keep pace with the Chinese, who are offering Africans across the continent an attractive development model: massive loans and infrastructure modernization—in the form of factories, roads, and railways—that spare recipients the subtle humiliation of that comes with accepting help from the formerly colonial West. Because many Africans rank stability as more important than democracy, China’s lack of concern for the moral improvement of regimes may, in some cases, carry an additional benefit.

Still, human rights count, especially in such oppressive places as Sudan and Zimbabwe. So the United States will try to compete with China by coupling aid with tools to build a liberal democratic future. This program cannot succeed without bilateral military relationships, since stable democracies require well-trained, reform-minded militaries that behave themselves by staying clear of politics.

The only long-term solution to crises like Darfur are pan-African intervention forces with airlift capabilities, which is what the American military has started to build with its train-and-equip missions. The U.S. military is not the solution to Africa’s development problems, but without it there is simply no credible Western model to compete with China’s.

China will be a tough competitor. It is already sending over teams of area experts with capitalist instincts. AFRICOM should not think of the Chinese in Africa as in any way similar to the Soviets in Africa during the Cold War. The Chinese are more sophisticated, with a formidable ability to learn from experience.

AFRICOM should be a catalyst for greater military cooperation with civilian relief agencies and other nongovernmental organizations. Like it or not, because humanitarian operations are about logistics, quick access, and the establishment of security perimeters, they encompass a strong military element. The boards of directors of some NGOs understand this; it is their young and idealistic volunteers who must get over their inherent distrust of the American military. Indeed, through a combination of small-scale military strikes that do not generate bad publicity and constant involvement on the soft, humanitarian side of military operations, AFRICOM could rebuild the post-Iraq image of the American soldier in the global commons.