The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

quickly stated that Abuja’s talks with Pyongyang should not worry Washing- ton. “I’m sure that Nigeria is not dreaming of nuclear weapons at all, just missile technology,” he said. Nigeria and North Korea have cooper- ated in the defense sector for years. Nigeria, which provides 7 percent of America’s oil, is Africa’s most populous country and its military is the most powerful in West Africa. But, as former U.S. ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria Princeton Lyman points out in a critique of U.S. Africa policy in Foreign Affairs (January-February 2004), Nigeria is also a country on the verge of blowing apart, as a result of “a potent mix of communal tensions, radical Islamism, and anti-Americanism [that] has pro- duced a fertile breeding ground for militancy.” And Nigeria is just the “most troubling” of a number of cases from South Africa to countries in West and Central Africa that are becoming incubators for terrorism. In “The Terrorist Threat in Africa,” Lyman, now director of Africa Policy Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations ( www.cfr.org ), a nd co- author J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies ( www.csis.org ), ur ge a fundamental correction in U.S. Africa policy. The heart of the problem, the authors say, is the failure to appreciate the fact that U.S. interests in Africa are not only humanitarian but also fundamentally strategic in nature. Following the bombings in Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Mombasa, the Bush administration declared the greater Horn of Africa a front-line region in the global war on terror, and what could prove to be a ground- breaking settlement of the devastat- ing civil war in Sudan is still appar- ently on track. But Lyman and Morrison state that the administration has failed to recog- nize the other, less visible threats on the continent, and instead “reflexively defines conflicts and crises in Africa in narrow humanitarian terms — as it did with Liberia in the summer of 2003.” In addition, budgetary con- cerns have been allowed to “trump” vital support for multilateral peace operations and even antiterrorism programs, and place support for eco- nomic and social development in Africa in jeopardy. The authors also suggest that bureaucratic obstacles to a coherent Africa policy in Washington, such as the State Department’s separation of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, need to be addressed. C Y B E R N O T E S 12 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 4