Armed Humanitarians (36 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 the 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.

Although U.S. officials were careful to emphasize the “preventative” and “nonkinetic” nature of AFRICOM, it did open the door to more direct military involvement. General William Ward, previously the deputy head of U.S. European Command, was AFRICOM's first four-star commander. Ward had served as a brigade commander during the Somalia intervention and had made clear his views about the military's role in Africa: It was to be driven by a sort of enlightened armed humanitarianism. In a 2007 article written for
Joint Forces Quarterly
, Ward described the searing experience of peacekeeping in the Horn of Africa: “Seeing the victims of the famine gave me stark reminders of why we were deployed there: to provide security to allow the international relief efforts to happen.”
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The efforts to stabilize Somalia had ended in failure. In his article Ward suggested that in the future, the U.S. military would “have to be prepared to intervene early, with clear goals, authorities, and responsibilities understood by the parties to the conflict and among the international and interagency partners involved.”
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The conviction that the judicious application of military science and a willingness to intervene could somehow inoculate Africa from full-blown conflict seemed to be AFRICOM's guiding belief. This powerful new command could deliver aid to the continent in a way that no civilian relief agency could. It could draw upon the extraordinary logistics capabilities of the U.S. military to fly troops to a crisis in a hurry; it had a planning staff that could draw up sophisticated plans in an emergency; and it would have a sophisticated intelligence apparatus to anticipate conflict before it broke out. This vision of “smart power also pointed the way to future U.S. military intervention on the continent.

In May 2008, a few months before the full activation of AFRICOM, the Army hosted a war game at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, called Unified Quest 2008. There were around two hundred players: active-duty and retired military officers, Coast Guard personnel, NATO representatives, and a smattering of diplomats, intelligence officials, and other civilians. Unified Quest is an annual event whose purpose is to test the U.S. government's response to potential crises in the not-so-distant future. The focus of the 2008 game was conflict prevention. Participants tested scenarios that policymakers could face in an era of “persistent conflict” arising from the combined forces of globalization, competition for energy resources, population growth, and failing states.

Two of the scenarios took place in Africa. In one, Army Colonel Mark Forman played the role of the AFRICOM commander, responding to a hypothetical crisis in Nigeria sometime between 2013 and 2015. The Nigerian government is near collapse, and various factions are competing for power. In this scenario, AFRICOM operates as an “economy of force” headquarters; it has limited manpower and is only a small presence of the continent.

The second scenario was supposed to test how a fully configured AFRICOM could respond to a crisis in the Horn of Africa. James Embrey, a retired army colonel with the Army's Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, played the head of a multinational task force that deploys to Somalia in 2025 to prop up an embattled government and fight off insurgents. The scenario was premised on the assumption that AFRICOM would command the full range of diplomatic, military, and conflict prevention tools by that time. “The supposition that we are making here is that the whole-of-government interagency planning and framework has been cured, there have been the proper structures built in terms of a special coordinator for reconstruction and stability,” Embry explained. “And … the requisite civilian expertise in terms of Civilian Response Corps—additional subject matter experts that are almost like an interagency reserve force—have come online.”

Embrey was describing the military's vision of the future: The U.S. government will have created a functioning civilian nation-building reserve on standby. The State Department has a deployable reserve, the military is skilled at reconstruction and stability operations, and hybrid “civil-military” commands such as AFRICOM are capable of coordinating the whole effort. Despite the lip service being paid to the “interagency” and “civil-military integration,” it is clear that in this vision, the military is in charge. Brigadier General Barbara Fast, deputy director and chief of staff for the Army Capabilities Integration Center and deputy chief of staff for Army Training and Doctrine Command, told reporters quite explicitly that the Army wanted to communicate to civilian government agencies and foreign militaries to make the kind of investments and capabilities they will need in the future. “This is really a self-examination for us as an Army, and it's an introspective look that we hope to be able to offer the insights beyond the Army, both within the department and in the international arena writ large,” she said.

Unified Quest was a forum for evangelizing another principle: humanitarian intervention. One prominent player in Unified Quest 2008 was Sarah Sewall, the Harvard professor and human rights advocate who had been instrumental in shaping the military's emerging counterinsurgency doctrine. A few months after Unified Quest 2008, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government unveiled a new initiative led by Sewall: the Mass Atrocity Response Operations, or MARO, Project. Cosponsored by the Army's Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, the MARO Project was supposed to be a step-by-step guide for a military response to genocide or mass killings. According to Chris Taylor, a former private security executive who helped Sewall craft the document, it was written specifically as a blueprint for action for combatant commands such as AFRICOM to use the military as a “genocide prevention tool.”

The MARO Project was inspired by “responsibility to protect,” an emerging school of thought in international relations that calls for intervention by external actors if a state is unwilling, or unable, to stop genocide or mass killings. The guide even featured a hypothetical scenario on the African continent in Country X, a landlocked state in sub-Saharan Africa. Country X resembled Rwanda before the genocide. It was run by one ethnic group, Clan A, which was distributing weapons and broadcasting propaganda for a campaign of ethnic cleansing against another group, Clan B. The international community has limited time to act—weeks, perhaps days—before the mass killings begin. The MARO Project guide is supposed to spell out the options for intervening to halt the atrocities. Using this tool, the command could weigh the implications of sending in a rapid intervention force, understand the main operational tasks, and identify the desired end-state.

More important, the guide encourages civilian government agencies as well as allied nations to reorganize and become more closely involved in planning for such contingencies. The scenarios crafted by the MARO Project are hypothetical, but it is easy enough to spot real-world applications, especially after the creation of AFRICOM. In January 2009, the U.S. military became directly involved in planning and helping pay for a military offensive against the Lord's Resistance Army, a notorious rebel group in Uganda. It looked like a textbook case of “responsibility to protect”: The LRA's messianic leader, Joseph Kony, was under indictment by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity; his cultlike army employed child soldiers and used rape as a weapon of war; and the LRA's reign of terror extended beyond Uganda's borders: north to Sudan, and east to the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.