The Foreign Service Journal, February 2009

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 13 incoming national security adviser, re- tired General James Jones, the com- mander of EUCOM at the time, supported the move. Proponents also pointed out that the new command would be free to concentrate its efforts on assisting African governments strengthen civilian control over their armed forces. An unarticulated further reason the military supported it was the creation of a new four-star billet with all the in- frastructure that would require. A second pressure for the creation of AFRICOM, which I remember well frommy service in the Africa Bureau at State and as senior director for Africa on the NSC staff under President George H.W. Bush, was resentment within the Congressional Black Caucus that the U.S. “doesn’t care enough about Africa” to give it what every other region of the world has: a dedicated military command. Finally, a third impetus was the clearly decreasing ability of African governments to maintain law and order within their own borders, leading to growing anarchy and failed states, which could ultimately threaten U.S. vital national interests and those of its friends and allies. Problems in the Niger River delta, Darfur, the Horn of Africa, Central Africa and elsewhere fueled a growing consensus that Wash- ington needs to do more to strengthen African governance and development — and may ultimately have to use mil- itary force to protect its national or hu- manitarian interests on that continent. Meanwhile, the State Department failed to press Congress to consider better approaches for addressing the continent’s needs—e.g., strengthening the U.S. Agency for International De- velopment and providing it with ade- quate resources. Even with the huge drain on military resources in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one was willing to argue against creating the new com- mand. Thus, AFRICOMwas launched last year despite vociferous objections from many African countries, the much greater costs of using our military per- sonnel for nationbuilding operations, and the obvious political and psycho- logical drawbacks of tasking U.S. uni- formed personnel with what should be civilian development activities. Yes, there are enormous develop- ment needs in Africa; and yes, the U.S. has significantly neglected the conti- nent (notwithstanding Assistant Secre- tary Jendayi Frazer’s statements prais- ing President GeorgeW. Bush’s policies toward Africa). It is also true that our military can do almost anything and go almost anywhere. Nonetheless, the real question is whether such tasks should be done by U.S. military forces. Does Washington really want to project a military face toward a conti- nent that already suffers from a surfeit of them? Do we Americans believe economic development and internal se- curity structures (e.g., civilian and civil- ian-led police forces) should be built along military lines by armed forces? And is that what we want Africans to think we believe? If so, shame on us! We do not permit our military to train our own police and law enforcement personnel and do economic develop- ment work in the U.S. Why do we be- lieve this should be done by our military in Africa? Past as Prologue If one wants to see what AFRICOM could become, one has only to look at what SOUTHCOM has been. Merci- fully, a lot of lessons have been drawn from that experience, which, one hopes, is therefore unlikely to be re- peated. During the first four decades of its existence, SOUTHCOM supported our national interest in preventing So- viet-sponsored takeovers in the West- ern Hemisphere, such as occurred in Eastern Europe following the defeat of Hitler’s Germany. To be sure, the threat was real; we received a serious wake-up call inMay 1948 when Soviet- backed insurgents briefly seized control in Colombia. The coup was undone within days, but fueled the conviction that Washington needed to strengthen Latin American militaries. “And the rest is history,” as the saying goes. Over the next three decades, U.S.- supported military regimes toppled elected civilian governments in virtually every country in Latin America — Ar- gentina, Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, Bo- livia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Vene- zuela, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Hon- duras and Guatemala—excepting only Mexico and Costa Rica. And although U.S. policy began changing during the 1970s under Pres- ident Jimmy Carter, our economic de- velopment assistance for Latin America actually declined during the 1980s, 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. Instead, our military assis- tance grew, first under the guise of S P E A K I N G O U T The primary executive agency for development work should always be USAID, not DOD.