Obama’s Africa: The Invention of Cosmopolitan Realism

In a classic Clintonian example of cosmopolitan rhetoric, President Obama has called for “an international system where the universal rights of human beings are respected, and violations of those rights are opposed” (Obama, 2009e). Even though he has yet to fully embrace the cosmopolitan notion of military intervention for humanitarian purposes, he has often endorsed the use of sanctions to stop those who seek to foment trouble, and he has asked the international community to “help those who have suffered” human rights abuses and misrule (Obama, 2009a). His argument in Moscow that “a commitment to support global human rights must extend to those who resolve conflicts peacefully” is close to the cosmopolitan wish for international commitment to resolving conflicts anywhere and everywhere in the world (Obama, 2009e). President Obama’s speeches become even more Clintonian in style and cosmopolitan in spirit, if not in substance, when he talks about U.S.-Africa relations. For example, in a speech in Accra in July 2009 he claimed that “we are called to act by our conscience . . . , because when a child dies of a preventable disease in Accra, that diminishes us everywhere” (Obama, 2009b).

Like President Clinton, President Obama embeds his cosmopolitan rhetoric in the theme of enlightened self-interest by claiming that we are called to act by “our common interest. And when disease goes unchecked in any corner of the world, we know that it can spread across oceans and continents” (Obama, 2009b). The same mixture colored his answers to questions during a town hall style meeting with young African leaders on August 3, 2010, when Obama stated that the U.S. has a huge interest in African public health systems in part because a reduction of “HIV/AIDS transmissions in Africa . . . will have a positive effect on HIV rates internationally, because of the transmigration of diseases back and forth,” and in part because the U.S. could have spent the money it devoted to PEPFAR elsewhere (Obama, 2010).

Similarly, President Obama has made good use of Clinton’s interdependence narrative to frame U.S.-Africa relations. Echoes of Clinton could be heard loudly when Obama stated that “the boundaries between people are overwhelmed by our connections” and that Africa’s “prosperity can expand America’s prosperity, Africa’s health and security can contribute to the world’s health and security, and the strength of Africa’s democracy can help advance human rights for people everywhere” (Obama, 2009b). His claim that Africa’s democracy can help advance human rights for people everywhere is based on the cosmopolitan idea that human beings inhabit a moral community with equal rights and values that transcend states (Linklater, 1998).

The narrative of “nearest is dearest” or the global village that was expertly employed by President Clinton to frame U.S.-Africa relations has permeated Obama’s rhetoric on Africa as well. For Obama, Africa is closely connected with the rest of the world and has unbroken connections to the United States. As he put it:

I don’t see Africa as a world apart; I see Africa as a fundamental part of our interconnected world. Whether it’s creating jobs in a global economy or delivering education and health care, combating climate change, standing up to violent extremists who offer nothing but destruction, or promoting successful models of democracy and development—for all this we have to have a strong, self-reliant and prosperous Africa (Obama, 2010).

The Obama administration has, in other words, adopted Clinton’s new partnership rhetoric, and the theme of a new partnership has informed the messages of its senior members to African leaders. In her opening addresses to the eighth and ninth AGOA forums in 2009 and 2010, respectively, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly pointed out that the Obama White House is establishing a new U.S.-Africa relationship, one that is “rooted in partnership, not patronage” (Clinton, 2010). President Obama has used the new African partnership rhetoric in almost every public speech he has given to Africans, intimating at the young African leaders’ forum that he wanted their meeting “to be the beginning of a new partnership” (Obama, 2010). According to Obama, his administration is trying “to deepen that partnership every day,” and his senior administrators, including Hillary Clinton, went to great lengths to emphasize that the decision to host the forum in Washington, DC and not in an African city was primarily to give the young Africans the chance “to create networks that will promote opportunities for years to come.” For President Obama, a new partnership with Africa has to be built around young Africans, as the “older leaders get into old habits, and those old habits are hard to break,” while young leaders “may not assume that the old ways of doing business are the ways that Africa has to do business.” The “old ways,” including paying “too many bribes to just get the business started,” must give way to a new chapter: one written by younger Africans. The young African leaders’ forum was in part meant to begin the process of writing this new chapter.

The emphasis on African youth notwithstanding, the specific elements of the U.S. approach to Africa in the era of Obama are really just a recalibration of Clinton’s and Bush’s policies. The main points, as the Secretary of State outlined during her maiden address to Africans at the AGOA forum in Uganda, are:

• • Look for sustainable strategies that help nations build capacity and take responsibility;
• • [Give African] people the tools they need to help themselves and their communities;
• • Empower problem-solvers at the local and regional levels [in Africa], be they entrepreneurs, NGOs, or governments themselves;
• • [Integrate U.S.] trade and development strategies [in Africa], with greater emphasis on bottom-up, locally driven solutions;
• • Foster regional markets integration within Africa;
• • Boost trade and aid effectiveness;
• • Work with partner governments to promote structural reforms and gradual market liberalization (Clinton, 2010a).

The Obama administration sees liberal democracy and anti-corruption measures as the sustainable strategies that can help Africans build capacity and take responsibility. For them, democracy precedes development; it is the only ingredient that will enable Africa to develop. The President eloquently clarified the point during his first major address to Africans at the parliament of Ghana on July 11, 2009, when he argued that:

Development depends on good governance. That is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many places, for far too long. That’s the change that can unlock Africa’s potential. And that is a responsibility that can only be met by Africans.

He went on to stress that his administration will support African governments that fight corruption and govern justly. Like Clinton and Bush, he equates good governance with liberal democracy and, more precisely, with protection of political and civil rights. For him, liberal democratic ideas like political and civil rights are universal values, and he indicated that his administration will “stand up for these universal values” (Obama, 2009a). President Obama’s view that democracy and anti-corruption measures provide sustainable strategies for African development was echoed repeatedly by Secretary of State Clinton during her Africa trip in August 2009. In one of her Africa-related speeches, for instance, she simultaneously chastised the ruling elites of Nigeria and Kenya for being corrupt and anti-democratic while emphasizing her government’s position that development in Africa requires functioning democracies (Clinton, 2010c; Bouchet, 2010).

As part of its measures designed to persuade or compel Africans to take responsibility and help themselves and, at the same time, to affirm the continuity of U.S.-Africa relations as they have been since the Bush era, the Obama administration has adopted and broadened the focus of PEPFAR to include investments in health-care infrastructure. More significant, though, is that “the Obama administration is now trying to shift more of the cost of treating HIV/AIDS patients to African governments” (Lyman and Wittels, 2010). The “new” approach to health-related issues in Africa—now called the Global Health Initiative—as President Obama explained at the young Africans forum, is to improve public health infrastructure, institutionalize the culturally specific prevention programs that are working, and also to ensure that both U.S. and African governments think not only in terms of treatment but also in terms of preventing transmission (Obama, 2010b). The search for new funding sources is based on the realization that the U.S. government is “never going to have enough money to simply treat people who are constantly getting infected” (Obama, 2010).

The invitation to the young Africans to participate in the ninth AGOA forum held in Washington, DC and in Kansas City in the first week of August, 2010 was an effort by the Obama administration to build the capacity of problem-solvers at the local and regional levels in Africa. The inclusion of young Africans affirms Obama’s desire to encourage this age group to take control of African governance. As he indicated to them during a speech in the Ghanaian parliament in July 2009:

[Y]ou have the power to hold your leaders accountable, and to build institutions that serve the people. You can serve in your communities, and harness your energy and education to create new wealth and build new connections to the world. You can conquer disease, and end conflicts, and make change from the bottom up (Obama, 2009b).

The Obama administration has adopted Clinton’s AGOA as a policy instrument to integrate Africa further into the U.S. market, although its members know that “AGOA has achieved only modest results and has not lived up to the highest hopes of a decade ago”; and, moreover, that AGOA has failed to encourage diversification in the growth of exports between Africa and the U.S. (Clinton, 2010b). The strong faith President Obama has in AGOA is reflected in his strenuous efforts to promote it and to encourage African elites to internalize AGOA ideas. The Obama White House invited Africans who control media, particularly social media, to learn about the virtues of AGOA and the operation of capitalism in America during the ninth AGOA forum in August, 2010. They have been socializing with African business and political elites, hoping to persuade them to accept AGOA’s market-friendly principles, at events like the Presidential Entre-preneurship Summit and during official meetings such as the series held during the first week of August, 2010 between senior U.S. commerce officials and African ministers of trade, commerce, and agriculture. The Obama administration organized a two-week AGOA Women’s Entrepreneurship Program workshop for influential African women, which was officially meant to “provide tools to better integrate African women into the global economy” (The White House Office of Press Secretary, 2010). Unofficially, the workshop was meant to mobilize influential African women to put pressure on their governments to eliminate tariffs and subsidies in Africa, promote the free trade principles embedded in the AGOA regime, and to help create opportunities for American companies to gain access in African markets and to compete with Chinese businesses in Africa.

The wholesale adoption of Clinton’s and Bush’s Africa policies by the Obama administration has reinforced some of the deep-seated challenges of U.S.-Africa relations. The administration is still operating within a faulty construction of Africa and within an uncoordinated institutional configuration. As stated earlier, the inadequacy of the U.S. institutional structures dealing with African issues has already been documented by Nic van de Walle (2009). The ensuing discussion, therefore, deals only with the problems created by Washington’s social construction of Africa. The Washington policy establishment’s understanding of Africa is different from that of many Africans themselves, including the leadership of the AU. For United States policymakers, North Africa is not part of Africa, but rather part of the Arab world. President Obama demonstrated Washington’s belief that North Africa is part of the Middle East by speaking to the Arab world from Cairo on June 4, 2010. As a result of this faulty construction, the State Department assigned U.S. diplomatic relations with the North African states of Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia to the Middle East Bureau. The Africa Bureau, which manages U.S. diplomatic relations with the so-called sub-Saharan African states and maintains diplomatic relations with the AU, does not have the mandate to discuss issues that affect North African states. This has huge policy implications. It has created an enormous problem for the AU, the major foreign policy-coordinating institution for African states. Not only is it taboo to separate Africa into sub-Saharan Africa and Arab Africa; the AU cannot afford to consult with international actors without talking about North Africa. Doing so would undermine the Union’s very essence. Besides, it is unrealistic to expect AU officials to ignore the concerns of Algeria, Egypt and Libya—three of the five states that provide 75 percent of its regular budget—in any consultations with the U.S. Fearful of incurring the displeasure of North African states, AU officials have been reticent not only about which topics the AU discusses with officials in the Africa Bureau, but also about the way it talks to them. As a result, communication between the U.S. State Department and AU officials is not as good as it should be, given that the United States has had a permanent mission to the AU since 2007.

The situation at the Department of Defense (DoD) is no better, as the institutional arrangement at DoD constitutes a bureaucratic nightmare for most African governments and AU officials. They are often unsure about which unit within the DoD to consult on a particular issue. The situation was even more complicated until the establishment of AFRICOM in 2007. Before that, U.S. military relations with Africa were apportioned among EUCOM, CENTCOM, and PACOM. These commands were located outside of the African continent, and the limited interactions they had with Africans were bilateral in nature and mostly military- to-military. As General James Jones, the then Commander of EUCOM, testified before Congress in 2006, until 2003 EUCOM’s staff spent virtually no time on African issues.8

While African officials find institutions developed by the U.S. to manage African affairs too eclectic and too bureaucratic, successive U.S. governments have often failed—sometimes simply by not trying hard enough—to hold consultations with critical constituencies in Africa at the right time. The problem became more acute during the era of President Bush. His administration, for instance, angered AU officials by failing to consult them prior to the creation of military programs such as ACOTA, CJTF-HOA, JTFAS, Naval Operations in the Gulf of Guinea and the expansion of the African Coastal and Border Security Program. Indeed, Bush’s administration failed to hold substantive consultations with AU officials until the establishment of AFRICOM in 2007.

Instead of talking first to the AU leadership, which has the capacity to develop broad continental support for any major policy affecting Africa, the Bush administration engaged directly with individual African states, such as Djibouti, whose assistance they felt they needed. The U.S. diplomatic establishment and the leadership of U.S. military officials in East Africa, both of which had developed relatively good relationships with individual East African states, could have eased the tension by assuring AU officials that the U.S. intended to work with them. It remains a mystery why the assurance was not provided given that the DoD had at the time started exploratory work on a single African command, and given that the U.S. diplomatic establishment in East Africa knew that the AU’s support would be needed to secure the broad support of African states for any military presence on African soil.

The absence of such assurance fuelled suspicion that the U.S. had motives other than fighting terrorism for its actions. It gave critics of the U.S.’s Africa policy (of which there are many in the activist community) support for the view they were propagating that the U.S. was using terrorism as a pretext to establish a strong military foothold in Africa in order to exploit Africa’s natural resources (Nhamoyebonde, 2010) and dominate every aspect of African society. These activists see no difference between recent U.S. interest in Africa and that of the European merchants who went there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They claim U.S. policy in Africa is driven by the interests of the U.S. technological and military establishments in the huge oil deposit in the Niger Delta and in strategic minerals such as cobalt, manganese, chromium, and platinum. They believe that recent U.S. military programs are designed to “ensure ‘command’ of [African] land and resources that in the past was called just plain colonialism” (Kidane, 2008). The evocation of colonial imagery and imperialism gives activists a powerful platform from which to sow the seeds of recent African hostilities toward the U.S. military presence in Africa. The Obama administration has failed to capitalize on African euphoria following the 2008 election to correct these misperceptions and put in place mechanisms to assure timely consultation on critical African issues.

For observers of civil-military relations in Africa, it is disappointing that the Obama administration has made little effort to discourage the heavy investment in counter-terrorism operations that was forced on African governments by the Bush administration following the events of September 2001. America’s pressure on African governments to prioritize the fight against terrorism, together with America’s financial support for counter-terrorism, has encouraged African governments to increase their military spending to such an extent that the civil-military imbalance witnessed in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s has re-emerged. Studies suggest that 6 to 7 percent of African governments’ total expenditures go to counter-terrorism efforts (Chau, 2007; Mazrui, 2007). For example, as a result of pressure from the Bush administration, 9.6 percent of Botswana’s expenditures went to counter-terrorism, even though Botswana has not witnessed any major terrorism on its soil since independence (Mazrui, 2007). Compared to government expenditures on key social services such as secondary education and primary health care, the counter-terrorism expenditures seem excessive and perhaps misplaced.

The Obama administration has yet to review or change any of the security-related support to African states instituted under President Bush. If anything, the 2010–2011 military budget allocations to African states suggest his administration is increasing such support. The administration requested $38 million for the Foreign Military Financing Program to finance U.S. military programs in Djibouti ($2.5 million), Ethiopia ($2 million), the Democratic Republic of Congo ($1.5 million), Kenya ($1 million), Liberia ($9 million), Morocco ($9 million), Nigeria ($4 million), and Tunisia ($4.9 million). It also asked for $21 million for the International Military Education and Training Program to bring African military officers to the U.S. for military training. The beneficiary states are Algeria ($950,000), the Democratic Republic of Congo ($500,000), Ethiopia ($725,000), Ghana, ($825,000), Kenya ($1 million), Morocco ($1.9 million), Nigeria ($1 million), Rwanda ($500,000), Senegal ($1 million), Tunisia ($2.3 million), and Uganda ($600,000). The Obama administration specifically requested $24.4 million for Anti-terrorism Assistance Programs in Africa. African Regional Programs will get $14 million of the money, and the rest will go to Algeria ($400,000), Kenya ($8 million), Morocco ($800,000) and South Africa ($1million).

The various manifestations of military support have culminated in the creation of new security institutions in the already overdeveloped security structures of African states. The strengthening of security institutions in a continent with a notorious history of military dictatorships and adventurism may not be wise. The most troubling part is that the counter-terrorism investments have had the indirect effect of boosting the executive arm of government in newly democratic states, thereby undermining all efforts made since the 1990s to pull the army back from the daily lives and politics of Africans and to tame the overbearing arm of the executive. New security institutions have emerged, and some old institutions that had been dissolved as part of the process of consolidating democracies in African countries such as Ghana have been re-activated. For instance, in October 2001 the Ghana National Security Council established the Counter-Terrorism Operations Unit, with personnel drawn from various security and intelligence agencies to gather counter-terrorism intelligence as well as to conduct counter-terrorism operations. Three years later, the Ghana National Security Council activated and revitalized the Vetting Crime Intelligence Analysis Unit to coordinate intelligence gathering and management. It is feared that the Ghanaian security agencies will use these new powers to destabilize the Ghanaian state should the government become unpopular. For a country that has gone through four democratic experiments since independence in 1957, such a worry should not be dismissed.

Though the Obama administration cannot be held responsible for decisions made by sovereign states, U.S. aid to African states is at least partly responsible for the increase in civil-military imbalance in Africa. A review of United States support for Kenya since September 11, 2001 is quite revealing. Between 2001 and 2006, Kenya received over a million dollars from the U.S. Terrorist Interdiction Program (TIP) to improve immigration security, $175,000 from Export Control and Related Border Security Assistance (EXBS) to strengthen border security, $12.28 million from the United States Antiterrorism Assistance Program (ATA) to help establish a National Counter-Terrorism Centre, and over $10 million through the East Africa Counter Terrorism Initiative (EACTI) for a counter-terrorism training program (Chau, 2007). It is perhaps unsurprising that Kenya spent twice as much on terrorism as it did on secondary education and primary health care. The over 6 percent of total annual government expenditures that the government of Kenya spent on counter-terrorism during the period might have little impact on politics and governance in a well developed democracy, but the same cannot be said of a fragile and polarized democratic system like that of Kenya.

The Kenyan case is not unique. Rather, it represents a typical security investment made by the U.S. in fledgling democratic African states since September 11. Compared to investments in Djibouti and Ethiopia, the investment in Kenyan security institutions is small. Those two countries received nearly half of the security-related aid provided by the U.S. to the so-called sub-Saharan African states during the Bush administration, and President Obama has maintained this policy, as the 2009–2010 Department of Defense Foreign Military Financing (FMF) budget requested shows. More than half of the $12.55 million requested for Foreign Military Financing for sub-Saharan Africa was allocated to Djibouti and Ethiopia. Of course, Egypt is still the African state that receives the most aid from the U.S.. The Obama administration has not altered this, as the $1.3 billion in military assistance requested for Egypt in 2009–2010 amply demonstrates.

Since there is only so much money that the United States can give to Africa, it is often claimed that the increase in military spending has coincided with a decline in development-related assistance to Africa. Observers often cite the increase from about $40 million (1997 to 2001) to over $130 million in 2006 of U.S. military sales, financing, and training to the eight African countries considered particularly strategic in the “war on terror” without a corresponding increase in development related spending. The many new military related programs for Africa announced by the U.S. since September 11, 2001 and the few new development-related initiatives introduced during the same period suggest that the U.S. is spending more of its resources on military matters than on anything else. Besides the new military programs, such as AFRICOM, ACOTA, CJTF-HOA, JTFAS, and NOGG, the U.S. has expanded Africa’s share of military programs, such as JCET, ACBSP, and IMET since 2004. Another way of looking at the claim that the U.S. is spending far more money on military-related matters in Africa than on anything else is to compare the shrinking access to the civilian aid resources of USAID on the one hand with the corresponding increase in the percentage of foreign aid the Pentagon controls on the other. Available data show that USAID access to foreign aid has shrunk from 65 percent to 40 percent of total U.S. aid to Africa since 2001, while that of the Pentagon has increased from 3.5 percent to nearly 22 percent during the same period.

Some observers of African politics are frustrated by the fact that a Democratic-led administration did not at least review U.S. military-related support to African states. These observers expected that, at a minimum, Obama’s administration would review U.S. support with a view to determining whether current U.S. policies reflect African security priorities. A study by some of the most authoritative African security analysts has concluded that U.S. military spending in the name of counter-terrorism has in fact been “at the expense of Africa’s most urgent security and stability needs” (Malan, 2008). The study showed that much of the security spending under President Bush did not reflect African security interests. It is therefore disappointing that an African-American president, whom many experts in Africa expected to understand Africa somewhat better than his predecessors, is continuing the military-driven policy of the Bush administration.

Some of the military-related requests by the Obama administration are even more difficult to understand than the ones made under his predecessor. For instance, it is unclear why the DoD requested $49.65 million in the 2009–2010 budget to assist the Liberian Army, which defends 4 million people, and yet requested only $5.5 million to support the reform and restructuring of the Army of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has to defend around 65 million people and stop the most destructive war in the world since World War II; an estimated 5 million people have been killed here. Again, it remains a mystery why the DoD requested $825,000 for Ghana and $1 million for Senegal in the 2010–2011 budget to bring military officers from these two democratic African states, which have some of the most disciplined, most professional, and best trained armies on the African continent, to the U.S. for military training, and at the same time requested only $500,000 to bring officers from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is struggling against a brutal rebel group and certainly has one of the most undisciplined armies in Africa.

Many informed observers of African politics expected President Obama’s administration to change the policy of preferential treatment given to states in the Sahel and the Horn because the policy is grounded in mistaken assumptions and even appears to compromise American long-term security interests in Africa. On the surface, it makes perfect sense for the U.S. to prioritize states in the two sub-regions precisely because, as one commentator puts it, they provide a “tasty menu for potential terrorists” (Rotberg, 2005). Supporters of the policy argue that the two areas provide many direct routes to the Middle East, the homeland of Osama bin Laden and radical Islamic groups. Furthermore, this argument goes, many of the people in the two sub-regions are Muslims and have anti-Western ideas similar to those of terrorist groups, and they are popular sites for Islamic religious activities such as preaching, the building of mosques, and the creation of Islamic welfare services and organizations. Moreover, supporters of the policy contend that the Sahel sub-region has “limited government presence, a long history of smuggling, banditry, human trafficking, and violence [ . . . and] is clearly one of the poorest areas on earth” (Lyman, 2009). In this view, these factors have made the area fertile ground for the emergence of transnational terrorist groups. It is thus appropriate, the argument goes, for the U.S. to prioritize the two sub-regions in its counter-terrorism operations.

Yet a deeper look at the Sahel and the Horn will show that they are not ungoverned spaces, as U.S. policy seems to imply. The area is owned by kinship9 and pastoral groups who keep a vigilant eye on activities in their areas. Similar to elsewhere in Africa, every piece of land in the Horn and the Sahel is under the trusteeship of an indigenous governance structure, such as a clan authority or local chiefs. In Sahelian countries, such as Senegal, these groups own as much as 95 percent of the land under a complex land tenure system. The colonial adminis-tration and the post-colonial state tried unsuccessfully to impose a new governance structures on these spaces. As Faye (2008, 8) pointed out:

Rural populations resisted the colonial authorities’ efforts to impose a new regime on them, hanging on to traditional systems . . . The lands were accessed by community members according to their social and family status. Within lineage groups, family lands were managed by the eldest males through a complex system of overlapping use rights . . . The State can only withdraw certain lands from this regime if it is deemed to be in the public interest, in which case it will be directly responsible for managing them by registering them in its name and thus incorporating them into state lands. However, the concept of public interest is often seen as a means of granting undeserved favours to private interests at local people’s expense. It is an increasingly sensitive issue, given that rural communities do not have sufficient land reserves to compensate landholders for the plots that are withdrawn.

Because of the controversial nature of the concept of state lands in rural Africa, most governments in the Sahel have often left both rural lands and their governance in the hands of indigenous authorities. As a consequence, indigenous authorities, together with kinship groups, govern lands and the people on these lands. The noticeable absence of the Westphalian sovereign state does not mean that the area is without oversight or is ungoverned. There is little evidence to show that individuals in these areas who are likely to join terrorist groups are religious fanatics, as U.S. policymakers seem to think. Rather, as a study by the International Crisis Group concluded, those likely to join terrorist organizations are marginalized individuals—people discriminated against in society.

Another reason many people expected the Obama administration to change U.S. Africa policy is that the heavy investment in Westphalian security institutions in the Sahel does not get to the heart of the terrorism problem, as most of the terrorist cells in the Horn and the Sahel are not in the urban areas and towns, where the Westphalian security apparatus has a visible presence. The difficulty most of the Westphalian states in the Sahel and the Horn have had in fighting rebellious groups should have been a signal that investing in that security apparatus might not address the challenges of transnational terrorism. None of the states in the Sahel battling rebel groups has had any success because the rebel groups have developed strong relationships with kinship groups and indigenous governance authorities in the rural areas. This in large part explains the success of the Tuareg rebels in the Sahel for more than three decades. Most people with a good understanding of the area were expecting the Obama administration to redirect U.S. policy in the regions towards these indigenous governance institutions.

Instead, the emphasis on the state at the expense of community and kinship groups is denying the U.S. military the opportunity to get good, cheap human intelligence from local people who may be more reliable than state agents—who are mostly interested in looking for ways to exploit the U.S. to support their opulent lifestyles. The U.S. military is already paying the price, as two incidents demonstrate. On January 7, 2008, two U.S. AC-130 gunships struck a convoy of trucks moving through the Somali fishing village of Ras Kamboni, near the Kenyan border, believing that the convoy was transporting Abu Taha al-Sudani, al-Qaeda’s leader in East Africa, and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of two suspected operatives involved in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. None of the individuals killed by the attack was connected to al-Qaeda; instead those in the convoy were pastoralists transporting meat. Again, on March 3, 2008, a U.S. submarine launched two Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Somali town near the Kenyan border, where it was thought elements of East African al-Qaeda were hiding. The missiles ended up in civilian homes, killing three innocent women and three children, and wounding another 20 people. It is missteps like these that generate anti-American sentiment and provide recruitment tools for terrorist groups.

In addition, the current U.S. policy in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa entails its own hazards, as it has compelled the U.S. military to get involved in local African conflicts. In places like Uganda, U.S. forces are already deeply involved in local wars. For instance, they assisted the Ugandan army with equipment, intelligence, and money to attack the Lord’s Resistance Army in December, 2008. Similar joint efforts are under way in Mali, Senegal, and Ethiopia, among other places. The involvement in local conflicts will encourage rebels to join forces with terrorist groups. There is circumstantial evidence that this is happening in the Sahel; it was reported in 2006 that Tuareg rebels had invited the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) to relocate from Algeria into the areas their kinship groups control in Mali, Mauritania, and Niger (Lyman, 2009).

The U.S. is emphasizing building the capacity of African states because of the view, propagated by some political scientists and now widespread, that many states in Africa are either failed or failing. Failed states were linked by the U.S. under President George W. Bush to terrorism. The irony, though, is that the majority of states in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, particularly those states whose security apparatus the U.S. has been strengthening, are not really failed states. While most of the governments in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa are not the best governments in the world, they are certainly not failed states. Many of them have effective control over the use of coercive force, and some of them, such as Senegal, Mali, Kenya, and even Djibouti, where the U.S. has established military bases, are relatively well governed. The majority of citizens in these states do not consider their governments illegitimate. The countries whose security the U.S. has specifically strengthened are some of the most securitized states in Africa. Anyone who lives for at least three months in any city or town in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, or Uganda—the focus of the United States’ military capacity-building exercise in the Horn of Africa—will experience the intrusive nature of the government there. The capacities of governments in Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia is not in doubt. If anything, they should be considered as having overdeveloped security apparatuses. Strengthening the capacities of these states’ security institutions may not be in their best interests. The capacity-building exercises that will serve their interests better in the long term are those that focus on the other arms of government: the legislature and the judiciary. These two institutions, where good governance usually resides, have traditionally been underdeveloped in Africa. The colonial state and post-colonial military regimes had no interest in developing them, and they remain weak even in the most reasonably democratic African states, such as Mali and Tanzania.

It also appears that U.S. policymakers have not realized that the Westphalian sovereign states in Africa often take care primarily of spaces in cities and towns. The remaining areas are managed by kinship groups and indigenous authorities. This division of labor is well understood in Africa. Even in the most developed and democratic African states, such as South Africa and Botswana, kinship groups and local authorities govern over 60 percent of the population (Williams, 2004; Ntsebeza, 2006). Some observers of African politics often misconstrue and mischaracterize the governance of these areas. These writers often translate the absence of the sovereign state to mean the absence of governance—though governance in Africa has never been the exclusive preserve of states. Unable to understand the governance of these areas, U.S.-based writers have often resorted to imprecise terms such as “ungoverned spaces” or “weak states,” among others, to describe areas where kinship groups and indigenous authorities dominate the governance landscape. What they fail to realize is that governance in Africa exists in many different forms and resides in different structures, of which the sovereign state is just one. It is actually the “newest governance kid on the block.”

Human rights advocates have been eagerly, and perhaps fruitlessly, waiting for President Obama to shift the focus of U.S. African policy from counter-terrorism to human rights and democracy issues, as would be consistent with his rhetoric. More importantly, they have also been waiting for him to deal with the proclivity of African governments to use counter-terrorism measures to erode the civil liberties and political rights gained in the third wave of African democratization. There were widespread reports by human rights groups that government officials in Uganda, for example, were misusing the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2002 to deny political opponents access to private radio stations (Human Rights Watch, 2009). Radio stations were threatened with charges of aiding and abetting terrorism if they aired interviews with the opposition leader, Kizza Besigye. This was not an isolated incident; studies have documented a series of human rights abuses that East African governments have committed in the name of fighting terror (Kegoro, 2007). According to Kegoro, abuses have included arbitrary and unwarranted arrests of individuals, detention of suspects at undisclosed locations for lengthy periods of time, denial of legal representation, harassment, arbitrary searches and periodic arrests of suspects’ family members, lengthy and harsh interrogations without the presence of legal counsel, threats of torture, and allowing foreign security agents—particularly Israeli and American officers—to interrogate suspects in a manner and style inconsistent with international law (Kegoro, 2007).

Pan-Africanists were also hoping that President Obama would work with the AU to develop the counter-terrorism regime—developed following the assassination attempts on Hosni Mubarak in 1995—inherited from the Organization of African Unity (OAU) (Cilliers, 2002). They had further hoped that Obama would help the AU’s efforts to improve the OAU Convention on the Prevention and Combating of Terrorism (the Algiers Convention), which has major weaknesses including too broad a definition of terrorism. The AU has been courting U.S. support since the convention’s entry into force. African leaders’ eagerness to work with the U.S. on the issue is reflected in their decision to host an extraordinary ministerial meeting of the Central Organ of the AU in New York on November 11, 2001. The idea of hosting the meeting in New York was to overtly court the attention of U.S. policymakers and to communicate to them the AU’s willingness to partner with the U.S. in fighting terrorism. The issue of building partnership with the U.S. on counter-terrorism dominated a high-level Intergovernmental Meeting on the Prevention and Combating of Terrorism in Africa held in Algiers from September 11 to 14, 2002. The AU has since developed a plan of action on terrorism, a supplementary counter-terrorism protocol, a counter-terrorism research centre in Algeria, and a protocol on Peace and Security Council with provisions on terrorism, which have paved the way for the AU Commission and the Peace and Security Council to implement the OAU Convention on terrorism and to build international partnership to “combat international terrorism.”

The emphasis the AU placed on international terrorism was meant to encourage the possibility of the AU partnering with the U.S. to fight terrorism in Africa. Though the Bush administration showed no interest in doing so, many pan-Africanists thought a Democratic administration headed by an African-American would be more inclined to work with an institution built on ideas developed by African-Americans and West Indians in the early twentieth century. Yet the Obama White House has shown little genuine interest in partnering with the AU to solve some of the pressing African challenges. The indifference to the idea of building a real partnership with the AU—that is, one that goes beyond rhetorical niceties and consultations—is ironic, given that African governments themselves believe the AU—as opposed to individual states—is the best institutional option for solving contemporary African challenges. Furthermore, the AU has developed some of the best legal and institutional instruments on the continent to promote democracy, anti-corruption, economic integration, and counter-terrorism—the very things President Obama has publicly claimed he seeks to advance in Africa.