tomdispatch | Lion Forward Teams? Echo Casemate? Juniper Micron?
You could be forgiven if this jumble of words looks like nonsense to
you. It isn’t. It’s the language of the U.S. military’s simmering
African interventions; the patois that goes with a set of missions
carried out in countries most Americans couldn’t locate on a map;
the argot of conflicts now primarily fought by proxies and a former
colonial power on a continent that the U.S. military views as a hotbed
of instability and that hawkish pundits increasingly see as a growth area for future armed interventions.
Since 9/11, the U.S. military has been making inroads in Africa,
building alliances, facilities, and a sophisticated logistics network.
Despite repeated assurances by U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) that
military activities on the continent were minuscule, a 2013 investigation by
TomDispatch exposed surprisingly large and expanding U.S. operations --
including recent military involvement with no fewer than 49 of 54
nations on the continent. Washington’s goal continues to be building
these nations into stable partners with robust, capable militaries, as
well as creating regional bulwarks favorable to its strategic interests
in Africa. Yet over the last years, the results have often confounded
the planning -- with American operations serving as a catalyst for
blowback (to use a term of CIA tradecraft).
A U.S.-backed uprising in Libya, for instance, helped spawn
hundreds of militias that have increasingly caused chaos in that
country, leading to repeated attacks on Western interests and the
killing of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. Tunisia has become ever more destabilized, according to a top U.S. commander in the region. Kenya and Algeria were hit by spectacular, large-scale terrorist attacks that left Americans dead or wounded.
South Sudan, a fledgling nation Washington recently midwifed into
being that has been slipping into civil war, now has more than 870,000 displaced persons, is facing an imminent hunger crisis, and has recently been the site of mass atrocities, including rapes and killings. Meanwhile, the U.S.-backed military of Mali was repeatedly defeated by insurgent forces
after managing to overthrow the elected government, and the
U.S.-supported forces of the Central African Republic (CAR) failed to
stop a ragtag rebel group from ousting the president.
In an effort to staunch the bleeding in those two countries, the U.S.
has been developing a back-to-the-future military policy in Africa --
making common cause with one of the continent’s former European colonial
powers in a set of wars that seem to be spreading, not staunching
violence and instability in the region.
