Another "Year of Africa"
Despite the recent attention of rock stars and global summits, and the designation of 2005 as "the year of Africa," a report released today by ex-Clinton National Security Advisor Anthony Lake and former Governor Christie Todd Whitman asks whether the United States is getting Africa policy right. The short answer -- my words, not the report's -- is, "No." Or, at least, "Not yet."
US policy toward Africa is held hostage to misperceptions which are shaped by single issue NGOs, whose admirable efforts have the inadvertent effect of distorting the realities of Africa, which are both more prosaic and grimmer than the public thinks.
Africa, for example, is more democratic than many Americans imagine -- 40 percent of the states of sub-Saharan Africa are "electoral democracies" according to Freedom House. Africa is more assertive in settling its own conflicts - troops of the African Union deployed in Cote D'Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Eastern Congo before UN peacekeepers did. Yet, the benefits of globalization have largely bypassed the continent. Unflinching Task Force member, Nicholas Ebertsadt, said, "The economic tragedy that is post-colonial African history . . . arguably constitutes the twentieth century's single greatest development failure." Meanwhile, the African Union force in Darfur is too small and too unprepared to defend its own troops let alone stop mass killings. Deference to the pride of the AU, real and exaggerated, hardens international resistance to sending in UN or NATO reinforcements.
The report calls on Washington to look "beyond humanitarianism" in order to sustain a greater commitment to Africa, which is growing in international importance. The largest incremental increase in oil production over the next two to three years will be in Africa, according to the report. By the end of the decade, the United States may well import as much oil from Africa as from the Middle East. Meanwhile, 25 percent of the jihadists in Iraq are believed to have been trained in sub-Saharan Africa, with the risk, as Tony Lake said this morning, that they may "circle back," battle hardened, to Africa. Despite these wide ranging interests and concerns, Africa remains a "humanitarian backwater" at the State Department, according to Princeton Lyman, former US ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria, and project co-director.
Eberstadt puts the issues of Africa's future starkly in a partial dissent to the consensus report: "There is more than a slight chance that economic and social conditions in the sub-Sahara will continue to stagnate--or worsen--well into the coming century . . . Such an outcome should be morally unacceptable."
You can read the independent task force report on Africa, sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations (my day job), at www.cfr.org.
As I have mentioned before, we need to have a 'no-holds barred discussion' about Sudan specifically. There are gaps of knowledge about Sudan's history and culture which must be addressed. For some reason, I sense a deep reluctance toward to engage in this effort, in a depthful manner.
December 5, 2005 3:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
The "prosaic" issues facing Africa include the fact that Africa's "electoral democracies" are not heading towards liberalization or reform, but instead elites are consciously cultivating a form of semi-democracy. [A correction: the AU never deployed to Sierra Leone, ECOMOG did, spearheaded by the efforts of the great Nigerian democrat, Abacha, himself.] While it is certainly admirable that there is some endogenous peacekeeping activity in Africa, that action should not be an excuse for isolationism, but instead a call for a more constructive role of international actors. America and Europe have not yet figured out how to help Africa, while making sure that perverse incentives do not completely undermine their goodwill.
December 5, 2005 4:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
George Orwell wrote a book review once titled "Not Counting Niggers." The review itself was forgettable, but the title is something that automatically leaps to my mind whenever the subject of Africa and U.S. policy comes up. Nobody here knows much about Africa, nobody cares much, either. Rwanda happened, and people shrug it off -- if they even know about it in the first place. If a remotely similar thing happened anywhere else in the world, it would be on the front page of every paper in the country, on the evening news, on the radio, on the internet: you couldn't get away from it. Of course, something like Rwanda happening anywhere else is unthinkable -- because people do care about what happens everywhere else. Talking about outcomes that are "morally unacceptable" with regards to Africa is a waste of time, because nobody in this country gives a shit about it. Morality only applies to people with light skin.
December 5, 2005 4:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Link to the Lake/Whitman report?
December 5, 2005 4:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
What would you do in Dafur? If it involves the use of America's military how would you square that with many people's views on Iraq?
December 5, 2005 5:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, money might be a place to start. There are grossly underfunded AU troops there - not enough of them, and too poorly supplied to do much good. It seems to me that there could be logistical and strategic support that doesn't involve U.S. troops, since it seems unlikely that troops are going to happen.
Or something. What would you do?
December 5, 2005 5:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
I mean, really. How out of touch can we be.
We have a super technical extravaganza rock show to raise money for Africa. The cost is higher than the money raised but thank heavens they couldn't see it to see how vulgar it all was.
December 5, 2005 6:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
How are the events unfolding in Darfur, in any moral sense, different from the events that occurred in Rwanda? Is there some boundary of atrocity that must be crossed before the matter is worthy of our concern and concerted action? "Darfur is a Level II atrocity, but we can't act before the atrocities reach Level V"?
December 5, 2005 6:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Or something. What would you do?
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Do what in respect to what situation?
December 5, 2005 6:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jay,
I did notice the length of that 1 in your LONG moniker. LOL!
Seriously though, I didn't have a problem with having a musical concert.
December 5, 2005 6:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is with a heavy heart, and a muddled conscience, that I cede an economic argument to conservatives. But with respect to Africa, the Right is right, and Bono & company are so tragically and well-meaningly wrong: Development aid stifles development.
Double the aid money, double the "Dutch Disease". Western money should be used to keep people from starving, preventing genocide, and a handful of other quantifiable humanitarian ends. Otherwise, you're not just pissing that money down the drain, you're pissing on the seedlings of economic growth in Africa. Sorry about the crude metaphor, but it does convey the point pretty clearly.
December 5, 2005 7:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
To ameliorate things in Darfur, Daniel's question to you.
December 5, 2005 7:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Governor Christie Todd Whitman asks [as early as 1996] whether the United States is getting Africa policy right."
December 5, 2005 8:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: To ameliorate things in Darfur, Daniel's question to you.
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From what I gather, many recommendations to ameliorate things are being negotiated and implemented, despite the obstacles that have been posed. One other poster listed several UN and NGO actions that were being taken. So it's not as if there is little or nothing being done.
To cut to the chase, I get the sense that nothing less than regime change would satisfy some individuals and groups. If the Dems win in 2008, Sudan may constitute the next arena to host regime change: perhaps utilizing a coalition of democratic states or regional organizations. That is why I asked the questions that I did in the Future of Preemption thread. The case of Sudan came to mind as I posed those questions.
In any case, I would like to get as many key stakeholders to the Darfur question in one room, at least to get a systemitized understanding of the situation in Darfur.
Some of us have read whatever has been recommended to understand the situation in Sudan. But the informal discussions suggest that we are not all on the same page. Each of ushas access to different sources. In part, that is why we are stalled at different junctures.
December 5, 2005 9:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
I was told by a friend with military connections that the US will send one soldier for every 80,000 civilians dead. That's the calculus.
As far as Sudan goes, the best thing that can happen in that country is breakup. The north and south (a crude breakdown for a very diverse country, but it'll do here) have fundamentally different colonial experiences, individual and collective identities, and profoundly negative experiences of living together. Negotiators should work towards the orderly split of the country rather than trying to force a "peace" agreement from two sides who do not genuinely wish to be at peace.
The follow-on effects to this policy will also be ugly -- both the north and the south are highly factionalized -- but the primary conflict will be settled. If technical support (for institution-building and the like) was to continue for both sides after the split, it is at least possible that such factional conflict can be mitigated or avoided.
As to the aid topic: there are a lot of problems with giving aid, not least that money is fungible and that capacity for absorption is in many places limited. That is not an argument, however, for completely cutting off aid. It is an argument for better analyzing the political and economic situation of the recipient countries involved and targeting aid appropriately. If, for example, all the aid in country A is going toward paying interest payments on sovereign debt, a far better policy would be to look at canceling some of the debts. If country B is using its aid money to buy Lear jets for the President's cronies, a better policy would be to send aid through NGOs or other non-soveriegn actors. In all cases, investing (publicly and privately) in industry, a free media, and other non-state elements of development, is critical. But in no case, I believe, is there an economic or moral argument for cutting off all aid completely.
(Keep in mind, however, that the above analysis pays no attention to the fact that much aid is political in nature. Keeping African states loyal is often the genuine goal of sending aid. Viewed in this light, one can say that aid has generally been enormously successful.)
December 6, 2005 2:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know that I've heard anyone advocate regime change as an answer to this problem. It's true enough that the government has been supporting the janjawid, and that their human rights record wasn't great before or after the war. But who is pushing for putting them out? I think it's clear - even when you don't think of it through the Iraq prism - that this would make for greater instability in the medium-term, and limited international support at best in the short-term leading up to such action.
December 6, 2005 4:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
The regime change proposal surfaces when someone gets irritated with any question which attempts to penetrate the assumptions and sources for their views.
It entails myriads of assumptions/biases about identity, culture, religion, role of government, depending on the context and tenor of question proposed.
More fundamentally, I have been trying to get people out of the declarative and refine the interrogative. I find that this attempt leaves some folks unsettled. Heck even I am left unsettled. It is in the exploration of this unsettled space where I find the hope for a better result.
I don't want to sound as if I am proposing therapeutic mode of inquiry as the sole means. But it is one necessary avenue to evaluate the short and long term consequences of different proposals. That is how I see it, at this juncture. However, I don't foreclose other means. Rather I engage in other means simultaneously, so as to accelerate the process. It is a challenge because my understanding of acceleration does not suit other people's necessity to meet deadlines and by-lines.
December 6, 2005 7:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
Devon
I am not sure who it is more appropriate to respond to but as I read the situation in Dafur most of the crisis is caused by militias, especially those associated with the government, are terrorizing and murdering the people there. Kristof in particular seems to be saying that there is a need for some level of military intervention to protect the people there.
My question was meant to elicit a genuine answer but was also meant to be provacative. People at the Cafe, at least many are clear that military intervention in Iraq was wrong bordering on criminal. Yes many of the same people want to "do something" in Dafur, indeed demand it. If the Left's standard the weepy standard? If you feel bad it is alright to use the military?
December 6, 2005 12:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, can't the two be distinguished on other grounds that the tears in my eyes? Here's one criteria (off the top of my head):
The Iraq invasion was undertaken with the specific goal of regime change, or more broadly, of conflict with the Iraqi state and its armed forces, with no immediate humanitarian or (to my mind) strategic necessity.
Military intervention in Darfur would have the goal of destroying the capacity of a paramilitary group to continue an ongoing and increasingly destructive campaign of human rights abuses. As such, the goal would not be to depose the Sudanese government, or to enter into conflict with their armed forces, though the latter is likely to happen anyway, and the former is a possible outcome as well.
So, in other words, the criteria that make one justifiable and the other not would be that the one is responsive to a present crisis of extreme proportions, and is not directly an act of aggression against sovereign state (though it is an attack in another way on the sovereignty of that state, in the sense that it undermines it).
December 6, 2005 1:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
I painted with too broad a brush but think of the problem inherent with such efforts. Think of Somalia. The United States went there to help starving people. Unfortunately, the starvation was less a natural disaster than a political one. Then as the Republicans claimed, though it was always going to be a natural consequence of our being there in the first place, we got involved in "nation building." Then "blackhawk down."
We should all should have our eyes open and the ways both the Right and the Left are willing to use military force and the result will be American soldiers will die. It does not mean we should not do it, but it does mean we should all be honest with ourselves.
December 6, 2005 2:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree that they are problematic in the best of cases, disasterous in the worst, and to the extent that I am a fairly robust interventionist, I would hope that the international community would learn from mistakes and develop more effective models of intervention, especially non-military or minimally military ones.
For what it's worth, in terms of Darfur, I don't really think that U.S. military intervention is the way to go, not least because it's not logistically feasible at this time (and would probably contribute to the ongoing decimiation of our military that Iraq has caused). I think that, if I were in charge of the world, what I would do is coordinate financial and logistical help to make the AU intervention more effective, through better funding, better materiel, and more diplomatic support to help guarantee their safety. Since there are already AU troops on the ground, this would be the least politically difficult route to go, and it would allow us to build on existing efforts rather than recreate them. Mostly, though, it might lead to a more effective capacity for peacekeeping in Africa in the future, inasmuch as the result would be an international force that was better equipped, with better training and experience, and hopefully a record of success under its belt to build political goodwill behind it.
December 6, 2005 3:00 PM | Reply | Permalink