CounterPunch/Dissident Voice/Global Research
by Ben Schreiner
As “the peril of guerrilla war looms” for the French in Mali,
the United States prepares to step-up its intervention across Africa.
Speaking in Bamako
on Tuesday, U.S. Senator Christopher Coons, chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, stated that direct U.S. military support of the Malian
government is likely to resume after the country’s July elections.
“After there is a
full restoration of democracy,” Coons said, “I would think it is likely that we will renew our
direct support for the Malian military.”
(The U.S. suspended
direct military aid to Mali following a coup last year by a U.S.-trained Malian
officer.)
Coons went on to
deem al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) a “‘very real threat’ to Africa, the
United States and the wider world.”
According to U.S. intelligence
officials, however, AQIM “remains mainly a regional menace,”
with “no capacity” to launch attacks within the U.S. Even so, the
Pentagon continues to move closer to directly targeting AQIM targets.
As was first reported by the New York Times, the U.S. is
currently in the midst of establishing a drone base in Niger. The base
will reportedly host up to “300 United States military and contractor
personnel.”
“U.S. officials say
they envision flying only unarmed surveillance drones from the base,” the Times
reported, “though they have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at
some point if the threat worsens.”
But according to the
Wall Street Journal, “at some point” is a moment which fast
approaches, as senior U.S. officials are pressing to expand the U.S. "kill list" to include targets from northern Mali.
Meanwhile, in a prepared statement given to the U.S. Senate Armed Services
Committee last week, U.S. Army Gen. David Rodriquez, who is poised to become the
next commander of the U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), argued that
greater U.S. intervention into northwestern Africa is necessary for
“stability.”
“With the increasing
threat of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” Gen. Rodriquez wrote, “I see a
greater risk of regional instability if we do not engage aggressively. Our
long-term fight against al-Qaeda necessitates persistent engagement with our
critical partners.”
Likewise, Sebastian
Elischer in a recent Foreign Policy piece, titled "After Mali Comes Niger," argues that “If the
West wants to prevent the Sahel from falling hostage to Tuareg and Islamist
militants, longer-term military and financial engagement is urgently required.”
Of course, Pentagon
plans for Africa do indeed stretch well beyond northern Mali. A military
doctrine of global “power projection” and “full spectrum dominance” dictates
nothing less.
As part of his prepared
remarks given to the Armed Services Committee, Gen. Rodriquez called for
a
15-fold increase in U.S. intelligence-gathering missions in Africa.
This comes despite the fact that the U.S. has already established “about a dozen airbases” across Africa dedicated to "intelligence-gathering" just since 2007.
Even more
foreboding, though, Gen. Rodriquez went on to call for the U.S. to enhance its
Special Operations presence in a total of ten African states (Libya, Niger, Tunisia, Algeria, Mauritania,
Nigeria, Mali, Cameroon, South Sudan, and Kenya).
As an October report in the New York Times noted, the U.S. has already
allocated $8 million to train a Libyan force of up to 500 special commandos. Yet as Christopher Chivvis of the Pentagon-friendly
RAND Corp. writes, the U.S.
needs to “take the lead” and do more in Libya, lest one wishes to imperil NATO's hard won “stability.”
In addition to Libya,
late last year AFRICOM announced plans to send 4,000 U.S. troops to nearly
three dozen African states over the course of 2013 for the purpose of training
African militaries. The training is reportedly
aimed at helping “African troops beat back a growing terrorist threat posed by
al-Qaida.”
The targeting of Islamic
extremists and al-Qaeda, though, is but a pretext for the U.S. to contain Chinese interests in Africa. As Secretary of
State John Kerry warned in his confirmation hearing, “China is all over
Africa — I mean, all over Africa…And we got to get in.”
Indeed, for when
asked whether the U.S. “pivot” to Asia would hamper AFRICOM’s mission, Gen.
Rodriquez noted that, “The impact on the operations and activities of AFRICOM will
be minimal. In fact, based on the interconnectivity between Africa and the
Asia-Pacific region, AFRICOM’s activities may become more important.”
Of course, the U.S.
adamantly denies it is seeking any confrontation with China. As outgoing
AFRICOM Commander Gen. Carter Ham recently commented in a question and answer session at Howard
University, “Militarily, we are absolutely not in an adversarial relationship
at all with China in Africa. Economic competitors, I think absolutely.”
But the
contradictions of global capitalism – namely, the cleavage between a world
economy and a nation state system – threaten far more than peaceful
economic competition between the U.S. and China. For imperialist
economic competition begets military confrontation. As Lenin warned in
his pamphlet Imperialism, even “a general alliance embracing all the
imperialist powers... [is] inevitably nothing more than a 'truce' in
periods between wars.”
This reality has
already come to be recognized as a rising menace in East Asia by even the
staunchest apologists of global capitalism.
It’s clear, then,
that a renewed global race to secure markets and resources has begun in
earnest. And as Lenin asked: “is there under capitalism any means
of removing the disparity between the development of productive forces and the
accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and
‘spheres of influence’ for finance capital on the other side – other than by
resorting to war?”
The deepening U.S.
military intervention into Africa and “pivot” to Asia is evidence enough of the
reply from the American elite. It appears the bloody road of imperial
barbarism is not yet at its end.
Read at CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, and Global Research.
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