President Bush’s trip to Africa this week signals a recent strategic decision to increase America’s military presence to bolster what Washington now sees as two important national interests on the continent — the supply of oil and the struggle against terrorism.
On the eve of departure, General James Jones, the commander of the US European command with responsibility for African operations, said the US was trying to negotiate the long-term use of a ”family” of military bases across the continent.
This would include big installations for up to 5 000-strong brigades ”that could be robustly used for a significant military presence,” Gen Jones told the New York Times. It would also involve smaller, lightly equipped bases available in times of crisis to special forces or marines.
The bases would not only be established in north African states such as Algeria, where Islamic extremism is already a potent force, but also in sub-Saharan African nations such as Mali.
Gen Jones has also predicted a much bigger role for the navy and marines in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea.
”The carrier battle groups of the future may not spend six months in the Mediterranean sea, but I’ll bet they’ll spend half the time going down the west coast of Africa,” he told journalists.
The new bases are being described as temporary, but in reality, once built they are likely to become part of the African landscape. The US base in Djibouti, home to about 1,500 marines and special forces troops, has already emerged as one of the impoverished country’s biggest employers and it is still growing.
The Djibouti base is in striking distance of Sudan, Somalia and Yemen, all seen as possible havens for al-Qaeda. But bases in West Africa and an enhanced naval presence in the Gulf of Guinea would be primarily designed to safeguard an increasingly important source of oil.
The US is currently importing 1,5-million barrels a day from West Africa, about the same as imports from Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile the US has so far invested $10-billion in the West African oil fields this year. The US department of energy expects African oil imports to reach 770-million barrels a year, and US investment in the oil fields to exceed $10-billion a year.
At a meeting organised last month by the Corporate Council on Africa, a senior CIA official, David Gordon, predicted that over the next decade African oil would be potentially more important to the US than Russia or the Caucasus. According to other participants at the meeting, he went on to warn however that over the following decade the oil industry ran the risk of imploding as a result of the region’s inherent instability, unless the US did more to prop it up.
In a report to Congress last year, an advisory panel including Pentagon officials recommended greater military cooperation with oil states.
The panel, known as the African Oil Policy Initiative Group, said it considered ”the Gulf of Guinea oil basin of West Africa, with greater western and southern Africa and its attendant market of 250-million people located astride key sea lanes of communication, as a vital interest in US national security calculations”.
The report advised setting up a ”unified command” for Africa, which would play a similar oversight role to central command in the Middle East. – Guardian Unlimited Â