Africa Command

Fixer's post just below this one got me to thinking about the larger picture in the Horn Of Africa. It's not something we think about a lot, but maybe we should. The Somalian pirates finally fucked up bad enough to try and capture an American-flagged ship, at which they failed, but they did succeed in bagging the skipper, more or less at his own request, and the drama is such that the Sunday talking head shows are all atwitter about it today.

The Somalian pirates have made it to American TV big time. Their 15 minutes begins.

Breaking News: Captain Phillips is free and safe. Three of his captors are dead and the fourth is in custody. Shoulda stuck ta stealin' goats from the Ethiopians, assholes. But I digress...

I found this excellent, reasonably short article by Thomas P.M. Barnett in Esquire, dated 27 June '07.

A few years ago, with little fanfare, the United States opened a base in the horn of Africa to kill or capture Al Qaeda fighters. By 2012, the Pentagon will have two dozen such forts. The story of Africa Command, the American military's new frontier outpost.

Ethiopia's Meles regime, which American Central Command officers describe as "xenophobic to the core," was going into Somalia last December whether the Americans approved or not. The recently installed Somali Council of Islamic Courts, with its loose talk of getting back another star point in its flag (otherwise known as Ethiopia's Ogaden region), simply had to go. As it happened, the Americans, who had been quietly training the Ethiopian troops for years, did approve.

In fact, Centcom was very eager for the operation. Most press leaks made it sound like our main targets were a trio of Al Qaeda senior operatives responsible for bombing American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania a decade ago. But the real story is one of pure opportunism, according to a knowledgeable source within the headquarters: "There were three thousand foreign fighters in there. Honestly, nobody had any idea just how many there really were. But we wanted to get them all."

When the invading Ethiopians quickly enjoyed unexpected success, Centcom's plan became elegantly simple: Let the blitzkrieging Ethiopian army drive the CIC, along with its foreign fighters and Al Qaeda operatives, south out of Mogadishu and toward the Kenyan border, where Kenyan troops would help trap them on the coast. "We begged the Kenyans to get to the border as fast as possible," the Centcom source says, "because the targets were so confused, they were running around like chickens with their heads cut off."

"We could have solved all of East Africa in less than eight weeks," says the Centcom source, who was involved in the planning. Central Command was extremely wary of being portrayed in the media as Ethiopia's puppet master. In fact, its senior leaders wanted to keep America's participation entirely secret. The goal was for Ethiopia to get all the credit, further bolstering America's controversial but burgeoning military ties with Meles Zenawi's increasingly authoritarian regime. Proud Kenya, still visibly nervous from the 1998 embassy bombing, would have been happy with a very quiet thank-you.

It was a good plan. And it was leaked to the press almost as soon as it started.

Those involved in the Central Command operation suspected two sources: 1) somebody in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who couldn't wait to trumpet their success to bitter personal rivals in the State Department, or 2) a dime dropper from our embassy in Kenya who simply couldn't stand the notion that the Pentagon had once again suckered State into a secret war.

The quotes are all from page 1 of a 6 page article. A 'must read' primer if you're interested in what is going on in the last great untapped global battlefield.

One final quote. This is the sort of thing we're up against culturally:

He tells the story of a primary school deep in the Muslim village of Bargoni where all the girls would drop out once they hit puberty. In Africa, the impulse would be to think: AIDS, birth control, clerics bearing down. But it was something far more prosaic. When I had first arrived inside the wire at Camp Lemonier, I'd seen a portable toilet labeled "Muslim female." The girls at the school were forced to quit at puberty because strict Islamic practice says that males and females can't share the same bathroom once girls come of age. McKnight and his crew offered a simple fix: HOA would build the school a bathroom just for girls.

The impact was immediate. For the first time, girls stayed in school, parents were happy, mullahs were satisfied, local leaders immensely gratified. Word got around: "The Americans did this!" McKnight's eyes well up as he remembers.

Kinetics is what the military does. Iraq is a quagmire because kinetics is all we planned for. But in this new time, on this continent, the military also builds latrines for girls. That simple act might someday keep trigger pullers out of this village.

"I don't need to go back to Florida and my inner-city school," McKnight says. "I've got it all here. It feels just like home."

Please read it.