What Is AFRICOM?

"The whole purpose of AFRICOM is to help leaders deal with African problems," according to President Bush. That is a nebulous definition for a major defense policy change, but on General Ward's AFRICOM page, his explanation is equally obtuse.

In a round about way Ward says AFRICOM is about partnering, influencing, restructuring and supporting, but nothing really solid. Here is the tell tale sign though, "The command began initial operations in October 2007 and is still formulating mission, staffing and location options." There still isn't a mission for the command. You would think that there would be a mission need before there would be a command.

According to Jane's, Ward is still having a hard time defining what AFRICOM is. US struggles to explain AFRICOM vision.

Gen Ward argued that AFRICOM "recognises the essential relationship between security, stability, economic development, political advances, things that address the basic needs of the peoples of a region and, importantly, the requirement to do those efforts in as collaborative a way as possible - not to take over the work of others, but to ensure the work that is being done complements the work that others are doing in pursuit of those same endeavours".

Then Jane's goes on to point out that the US doesn't has at times supported corrupt leaders in Africa. Mobutu Sese Seko from 1965-97 in Zaire who had a poor human rights record and embezzled over $5B from the US. The US was also supported the corrupt Liberian government in the 1980s. These efforts were to stem the tide of communism during the height of the Cold War.

Africa does needs special attention though and the US does need to reorganize its military structure away from the Cold War. The days of T-72s exploding through the Fulda Gaps is in the past. Al Qaeda preying upon corrupt, weak and failing states is the fight for today.

Hopefully AFRICOM will be able to stem the tide of the well worn African tradition of one corrupt leader being overthrown for another leader just as corrupt.

More on Africa, oil and corruption. Most interesting is how US banks can accept dirty money if the crime was committed overseas.

To understand the next bit of radical surgery, consider this. It is not unlawful for a United States bank to receive funds derived from alien smuggling, fraud, racketeering, handling stolen property, contraband, environmental crimes, trafficking in women, transport for illegal sexual activity, slave trading—and many other evils.

More on the marketing of AFRICOM.

This is not like the other Combatant Commands (one DOD representative said they dropped "Combatant" from the title, but depending on where you look, all commands have that word or none of the commands include that adjective). Also unlike other commands, this is "focused on prevention and not containment or fighting wars."

This leads us to believe that AFRICOM is more of a big daddy US government agency than the military. The Department of Defense gets the lion's share of the foreign policy budget because the military industry has a lot of money to pour into lobbyists. The State Department on the other hand doesn't have any industry and therefore lacks the support of lobbyists with money that can buy elections for them. So in the end the DoD will have to honcho the efforts of all US agencies in Africa like State, CIA, USAID, Commerce, Treasury and Justice to name a few.