The divergent experiences of two United States military units in the first year of the invasion of Iraq hold lessons for countering terrorism in Africa.
In 2003, the northern city of Mosul had all the ingredients for a potential insurgency: it was home to the Iraqi Islamic Party as well as to more than 100 000 disbanded and unemployed former Iraqi army soldiers and sympathetic Kurdish militias.
But in the year following the toppling of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, Mosul remained remarkably peaceful — a condition largely attributable to the approach taken by the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army, which was based in the city and was responsible for maintaining security there.
The 101st focused on building dynamic relations with local leaders and religious elders and conducted security operations discreetly. Attacks against US and Iraqi troops averaged just five a day.
The situation further south in the Sunni-dominated triangle closer to Baghdad was markedly different. There, the US 4th Infantry Division took an aggressive approach to security. It conducted dragnet night-time sweeps, breaking down doors, violating family privacy and rounding up thousands of men indiscriminately. To date, the Sunni Triangle remains the violent heart of the insurgency.
Aggressive US military conduct is not the only cause of the insurgency in Iraq, but it is an important one nonetheless, and the opposite experiences of the 101st Airborne and 4th Infantry divisions highlight three rules that are as relevant to countering terrorism as they are to preventing an insurgency: engage the people with respect for their values and social structures, don’t create a problem where one does not exist and deliver.
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the US, international concerns about actual or potential terror-related activity in Africa have grown steadily. What and where is this threat, how is the international community responding to it, and are those responses alleviating or exacerbating the problems they are meant to solve?
There are several ways of approaching these questions, but none are comprehensive and all are problematic: first, by charting major attacks both before and since 9/11, second, by marking the presence of local and foreign Islamist or Jihadi groups, third, by assessing the influx of foreign Islamic charities and fourth, by following funding streams, money laundering, and the movement of cash and people into and out of Africa.
All of these factors lead to the identification of a number of African countries — such as Morocco, Mali, Niger, Mauritania, Algeria, Egypt, Somalia, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa — as well as to a host of potentially damaging false assumptions. Not all foreign Islamist charities working in Africa are conduits for transnational terrorist activity, and not all Islamist organisations or political parties pose a threat. Furthermore, financial support for terrorism is difficult to prove until specific funds have been used in specific attacks.
The US runs two broad programmes in Africa. The Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative involves North and West African states (Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Chad, Nigeria, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Ghana) and several US government agencies. The East Africa Counter-Terrorism Initiative involves the six states in the Horn of Africa — Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea and Tanzania.
Both programmes attempt to minimise the potential for terror-related activities through security training, enhanced border control, clampdowns on money laundering and smuggling, and enhanced education. Both programmes were, at least at the outset, disproportionately military in focus. In some cases, such as in rural outposts in Sahelian states like Niger and Mali, the posting of US soldiers to train local security forces in counterterrorism tactics has alienated villagers either because the foreign troops were too visible on the streets or isolated on bases.
US and international counterterrorism efforts in Somalia have also tended to alienate ordinary Somalis. Support for former Somali military and police personnel and receptive armed militias to counter Islamists has led to the arrest or killing of a handful of terrorist suspects, including one allegedly linked to al-Qaeda. However, this strategy has otherwise been costly. As the International Crisis Group observed: “Few Somalis believe there are terrorists in their country, and many regard the American-led war on terrorism as an assault on Islam. Unidentified surveillance flights, the abduction of innocent people for weeks at a time on suspicion of terrorist links, and cooperation with unpopular faction leaders all add to public cynicism and resentment.”
A number of European countries also have programmes in Africa to counter terrorism. Like the US initiative, these programmes focus on promoting good governance, enhanced border control and policing and national reconciliation. They emphasise understanding factors of radicalisation and extending the state’s reach to cover all of its sovereign territory.
All these are laudable goals. But effective engagement must be based more on African needs than on Western security fears. It must involve pushing existing governments to tolerate free political contestation, engaging Islamist political parties, becoming more sensitive to the customs, aspirations and perceptions of locals, and making good on promises.
Africa has many seams through which terror-related activity can slip. Whether those seams unravel depends in large part on what approach the international community uses to keep them tightly stitched.
Kurt Shillinger is a research fellow at the South African Institute of International Affairs