Armed Humanitarians

by Nathan Hodge

  Part of the problem, Frazer said, was that the military was trying to design a command on Africa based on lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. “If you don’t know the African environment, you’re prepared to impose any old structure on it, thinking, this’ll work,” Frazer said. “From my point of view, this sexy new design was Peace Corps on steroids. And we didn’t need Peace Corps on steroids, what we needed was professional military doing the professional military engagement we had had, but more of it. Not something new and sexy and different. Give us something Africans already know.”

  The military tried to reach out to another key constituency, the foreign aid community. In May 2007, Rear Admiral Robert Moeller, director of the AFRICOM transition team, attended USAID’s Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid; he was there to present the concept to nongovernmental organizations and humanitarian relief groups. Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Ryan Henry, who also attended the meeting, tried to reassure members of the USAID committee that AFRICOM would not be a typical military command, noting that it would draw as much as one quarter of its staff from civilian agencies of the U.S. government. Henry and Moeller also floated the idea of a “distributed” AFRICOM headquarters. Instead of a single AFRICOM headquarters on the continent, the new command would have several smaller regional hubs.

  Lawmakers were skeptical. In an August 2007 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Dick Lugar (R) of Indiana worried that the creation of AFRICOM would place a “disproportionately military emphasis” on Africa. AFRICOM also sent mixed messages about U.S. aims. In theory, U.S. military assistance to foreign nations was supposed to help reinforce principles such as civilian control of the military, but when men and women in uniform were the ones delivering humanitarian assistance and overseeing development projects, it sent a signal that the U.S. military, not its civilian agencies, called the shots in U.S. foreign policy. In fact, one southern African officer complained to Jane’s Defence Weekly, the professional military journal, “We are told to leave our military legacies behind us to become true democracies, yet the world’s biggest democracy is able to come into our sovereign territory with all of its military might; it is hypocritical and dangerous and not at all in Africa’s best interests.”9

  In September 2007, South African officials announced they would not host AFRICOM; the Southern African Development Community, an organization representing fifteen southern African nations, also made it clear that they did not want a permanent U.S. command headquarters on their territories.10 In fact, U.S.-led discussions about possible basing arrangements spurred speculation that the United States might have plans to overthrow unfriendly regimes or initiate regime change in dictatorships such as Zimbabwe.11 From a public-relations standpoint, the rollout of the new command was botched. Despite efforts to reach out to the humanitarian aid and development community with reassurances that AFRICOM would focus on “nonkinetic” missions such as disaster relief, humanitarian aid, or professionalizing African armed forces, suspicions lingered that a more interventionist military agenda was at work. It didn’t help that briefing papers circulated by the Defense Department said the command would “conduct limited operations” such as counterterrorism missions when necessary.

  Many observers wondered whether the real reason U.S. policymakers had cooked up AFRICOM was to serve as a counterweight to China, which had been quietly but steadily increasing its presence on the continent through ambitious state-backed development assistance and investment schemes. China’s expansion in Africa was remarkable. The Chinese invested in major infrastructure projects, building roads, bridges, and power plants in return for oil, mining, and other natural-resource concessions. Its activity in Africa was free of the poisonous legacy of colonialism that still lingered in relations between African states and former European colonizers. But human rights were not high on China’s list, and Beijing was also willing to turn a blind eye to authoritarian regimes in Sudan, Zimbabwe, and other countries.

  Marine Corps General James Jones helped pioneer the AFRICOM concept while he was a four-star combatant commander of U.S. European Command. Shortly after retiring, Jones gave a speech in Washington in which he outlined some of the thinking behind the new dual-mission command:

  There are competitors out there … that are out-cycling us at a fairly rapid rate because they can make their decisions on a far more rapid basis [than we can]. One example of that … is the influence of China in Africa, which is very, very impressive from a standpoint of a sovereign nation able to take decisions quite rapidly … the process they go through is probably a lot shorter than ours. But if you’re a unified commander and you’re trying to render assistance somewhere or start a program … just about anywhere in my neck of the woods the past four years, it’s a very frustrating and time-consuming proposition to get anything done, and to get anything done quickly.

  Jones suggested that the new civil-military command of AFRICOM could help streamline the cumbersome processes of U.S. government, which he said have a “paralyzing effect” on foreign policy. “As we get more competitors on the playing field that out there—and believe me, they are out there as the world changes—we have to look at our systems, we have to look at our laws, our policies, our manipulations, the inner workings of the interagency to try to free up the giant that is the United States, that too often is captured, is restricted from moving in ways that this giant could.”

  To reach Timbuktu in October 2007, I hitched a ride from Bamako with representatives of U.S. Special Operations Command Europe. Our plane was a CASA 212, a boxy, utilitarian twin turboprop that was ideally suited for operating from primitive airstrips. The plane would take us from the lush, green plains of the Niger River valley to the thick brush and scrub of the southern edge of the Sahara.

  The aircraft’s tail number, I noticed, ended in BW—it was a Blackwater plane, part of the fleet of the company’s Presidential Aviation airline. Blackwater provided contract aviation services to U.S. Special Operations Command, offering everything from airlift services in Africa to parachute training in the United States. The creation of AFRICOM and the military’s new focus on nation building in Africa was sure to create another lucrative market for defense contractors who were looking for new business opportunities beyond Iraq and Afghanistan.

  AFRICOM’s unique structure and its emphasis on peacekeeping, development, and stability operations created demand for everything from logistics support and security to training and intelligence. John Wrenn, Blackwater’s director of Global Stability Initiative and Corporate Communications, told me shortly before the full activation of AFRICOM in October 2008 that his company saw tremendous opportunities for a “strong partnership” between the new command and the private sector. Companies like Blackwater could provide everything from running medical clinics to overseeing civil engineering projects, military and law-enforcement training, and rule-of-law education. AFRICOM, said Wrenn, was “a lean organization, with a smaller command structure [than other military commands] to oversee the large area of operations. Since AFRICOM is a smaller organization, it will require a strong partnership with the private sector to effectively and efficiently direct and oversee U.S. engagement programs in Africa.”

  Erik Prince, Blackwater’s founder, even envisioned a more ambitious new role on the continent for the private sector: as peacekeepers. Speaking in February 2005 in Washington, he floated the idea of Blackwater as peacekeepers-for-hire to replace U.N. blue helmets in Africa:

  One of the areas we see ourselves covering up more is contract peacekeeping in areas where the UN is, or where there’s a lot of instability, sending a big, large-footprint conventional force is politically unpalatable. It’s expensive, diplomatically difficult as well. We can put together a multinational professional force, supply it, manage it, lead it, put it under UN or NATO or U.S. control, however best we can, we can help stabilize a situation. I encourage people to go see … Hotel Rwanda … It’s a great story—it’s a
sad story, it’s pathetic. The UN let many people get slaughtered in a country the size of Vermont over a four-month period. Mostly by machetes. And it wouldn’t have taken more than a couple hundred guys to stop it.

  In the unfolding crisis in Darfur, Prince suggested that Blackwater operatives could provide an armed “quick reaction force,” or QRF, to protect nongovernmental organizations, aid groups, and refugees from Sudan’s feared janjaweed militia. If there was an atrocity in progress and the janjaweed needed to be stopped, Blackwater could move in and stop them. It was a cheaper proposition than funding UN peacekeepers. “I just challenge you: Are you getting your money’s worth [from traditional UN peacekeeping]?” Prince said. “I think you can get a lot more done with a lot less.”

  In fact, Blackwater executives presented a plan for private-sector peacekeeping to the State and Defense departments and the National Security Council. The scheme, named the African Union Support program, was to create a ring of “persistent surveillance” around the camps for displaced Darfurians, using armed local or “third-country national” contractors and to provide Western supervisors and private logistics support. It was a swaggering, muscled-up vision of humanitarian aid—relief work as delivered by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Chris Taylor, the vice president of business development at Blackwater, presented the plan and spoke in broad terms about the proposal in industry forums. In an after-dinner speech at the 2006 annual meeting of the International Peace Operations Association, the main U.S. trade association for private security firms, Taylor argued for a private military role in humanitarian intervention. Once again Rwanda was the poster child: “Would the eight hundred thousand people killed in the Rwanda genocide have cared if their rescuers were from the private sector?” he said. But when Cofer Black, vice chairman of Blackwater, in 2006 raised the subject at an international military conference in Amman, Jordan, it created a wave of negative publicity. “We’re low-cost and fast,” Black was quoted as saying. “Who’s going to let us play on their team?” The concept seemed to cross the line into creating a mercenary army with an overt combat role.12

  Blackwater’s swaggering talk of humanitarian soldiers-for-hire showed a remarkable lack of insight into Africa’s recent history. In the 1960s and 1970s, white mercenaries such as “Mad” Mike Hoare and “Colonel” Bob Denard played a notorious role in postcolonial intrigues and coups. The market for armed force in Africa got another boost in the 1990s, when a controversial South African firm with the Bond-villain name of Executive Outcomes operated a private army for hire. It trained and later fought on behalf of the Angolan government against UNITA rebels and also helped rescue the government of Sierra Leone from a nihilistic militia known as the Revolutionary United Front. Executive Outcomes garnered some praise for its professionalism from Erik Prince, who noted admiringly that Executive Outcomes “had a good track record the first time they went into Sierra Leone.” The company drew key personnel from veterans of apartheid era military and police units of South Africa and South-West Africa and the predominately Angolan 32 Battalion of the South African Army. Antimercenary legislation passed by the South African government in 1999 called the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act effectively drove the company out of business.

  Quasi-mercenary schemes forwarded by Blackwater’s management may have seemed far-fetched, but U.S. private security firms in fact already had a significant foothold in Africa, largely through the African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) program, a State Department–funded effort to help cash-strapped African militaries build militaries capable of contributing to UN peacekeeping missions. ACOTA was part of a larger U.S. program called the Global Peace Operations Initiative, which had a goal of training seventy-five thousand new peacekeepers worldwide by the end of 2010, a force to be drawn largely from the developing world. The bulk of this work was outsourced to the private sector. As the Government Accountability Office reported in June 2008, contractors provided the “majority” of ACOTA training in Africa. From the program’s inception in 2004 to mid-2008, State Department–funded ACOTA contractors trained thousands of African peacekeepers, at a cost of around $98 million.13 Northrop Grumman Information Technology designed training materials and conducted computer-simulated peacekeeping exercises for participating countries; DynCorp raised security forces; MPRI operated simulation centers. Once again, a core function of the government, training foreign militaries, was being outsourced to the private sector. This sent an ambiguous message to the recipients of aid about American motives and priorities.

  Contractors also provided logistics support to the U.S. government in Africa through a State Department contract vehicle called AFRICAP (Africa Peacekeeping Program). Much like the Defense Department’s LOGCAP (Logistics Civil Augmentation Program), which provided base operation and logistics support to military units in the Middle East and Central Asia, AFRICAP was a quick, relatively low-profile way to support military intervention in Africa. For example, in the summer of 2003, during a small-scale U.S. intervention in Liberia to protect the U.S. embassy in Monrovia, contractors provided support on the ground while a U.S. amphibious task force sailed from the East Coast to West Africa.

  In a November 2003 after-dinner speech to the International Peace Operations Association, Theresa Whalen, deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, told an audience of private security contractors that employing contractors in African contingencies “means that the U.S. can be supportive in trying to ameliorate regional crises without necessarily having to put U.S. troops on the ground, which is often times a very difficult political decision.” Whalen said that in Liberia, contractors had helped speed up the U.S. response:

  If you look at the time between when the decision was made and when things got started on the ground in country, it was pretty darn short, a matter of weeks actually. And if you look at the time between when the Africans made the decision that they were going to send forces to Liberia at the end of July and then look at when we were actually getting the Africans on the ground, which was about the middle, or early August, again, very short. And in comparison if you look at the UN current deployment schedule, which is weeks behind, we were actually lightning fast. So there is a big advantage in being able to put the contractors on the ground and get things going fast.14

  DynCorp and Pacific Architects and Engineers (a construction firm that was acquired by Lockheed Martin in 2006 and renamed PAE Government Services) won the original AFRICAP contract in 2003. In early 2008 the State Department announced it would tender the contract again, which would be worth approximately one billion dollars over five years. The contract was divided among four firms: PAE Government Services, AECOM, DynCorp, and Protection Strategies Incorporated.15 But the U.S. government’s dependence on private contractors in Africa once again raised serious questions about oversight. Contractors seemed to be performing many essential U.S. government tasks in Africa: training and advising foreign militaries, providing military mentors, and demobilizing former combatants. In some cases, they even performed oversight of other contractors. In fact, the State Department’s ACOTA office was mostly staffed by contractors. According to the Government Accountability Office, the ACOTA staff comprised nine contractor employees and one federal employee. The GAO also raised serious questions about whether contractors were meeting targets for training peacekeepers, whether the State Department was properly able to assess the quality and effectiveness of the training, and whether trainees in U.S.-funded programs were being adequately screened for human rights abuses.16

  Once again, responsibility for doing the government’s job had been outsourced. Private profit, not smart foreign policy, seemed to be the guiding principle. And that did little to diminish suspicions in Africa as to American intentions.

  About a week after the exercise in Timbuktu, a Malian army unit became pinned down in a protracted engagement with Touareg rebels led by Ibrahim Ag Bahanga. As fighting raged near the northern border post of Tinzaouatene, on t
he border with Algeria, the Malian government put in an emergency request to the U.S. military to resupply its troops with food rations. The U.S. government agreed, and dispatched a C-130 cargo plane that happened to be in Mali for an airborne exercise associated with Flintlock. It was a fairly straightforward task: The Malians supplied the rations, and the U.S Air Force provided the cargo pallets and the parachutes. During the second of two air-drop missions, the aircraft came under fire; the aircraft returned safely but was struck by rifle rounds, an unhappy reminder that nonlethal military assistance under the rubric of “building partnership capacity” came with some risks.

  The rationale for U.S. support of the Malian military was counterterrorism: The mission was supposed to make Mali less vulnerable to transnational terrorist groups. It was not supposed to encourage the government in Bamako to resolve internal conflicts by force. In many respects the fighting in northern Mali was a domestic dispute between the Touareg minority and Mali’s Bambara-speaking majority. The U.S. military had become, briefly, directly involved in a low-level civil war.

  Adama Sacko, a former deputy in Mali’s legislature, told me the clashes in northern Mali were a domestic problem, not a terrorist threat. “The problem in the north is very simple,” he said. “It’s a problem of poverty and development; it’s not a problem of terrorism.” Yet the Malian government seemed eager to cast its opponents as “terrorists” or extremists” in order to secure more U.S. support.

  At the conclusion of the Flintlock exercise, I attended a press conference in Bamako hosted by the U.S. embassy and the Malian ministry of defense. It seemed a typically dull, stodgy event, as the U.S. ambassador, Terrence McCulley, issued a few platitudes about Mali’s hospitality and the importance of partnership between nations. Then Mamadou Clazie Cissouma, the Malian minister of defense, veered a bit off-script. After thanking the participants in the Flintlock exercise, he launched into an angry denunciation of the “armed bandits” who had attacked military convoys and sown mines in the north. The politically correct facade of the Flintlock exercise had slipped.