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Baghdad).
On the other hand, there’s that massive ground, air, and naval build-up in the Persian Gulf, the Obama administration’s widely publicised “pivot” to Asia (including troops and ships), those new drone bases in the eastern Indian Ocean region, some movement back into Latin America (including a new base in Chile), and don’t forget Africa, where less than a decade ago, the US had almost no military presence at all.
Now US special operations forces, regular troops, private contractors, and drones are spreading across the continent with remarkable (if little noticed) rapidity.
Putting together the pieces on Africa isn’t easy.
For instance, only the other day it was revealed that three US Army commandos in a Toyota Land Cruiser had skidded off a bridge in Mali in April.
They died, all three, along with three women identified as “Moroccan prostitutes.”
This is how we know that US special operations forces were operating in chaotic, previously democratic Mali after a coup by a US-trained captain accelerated the unraveling of the country, leading more recently to its virtual dismemberment by Tuareg rebels and Islamist insurgents.
This is a sample of the US military’s “scramble for Africa” in a seamy, secretive nutshell.
So here’s another question: Who decided in 2007 that a US Africa Command should be set up to begin a process of turning that continent into a web of US bases and other operations?
Who decided that every Islamist rebel group in Africa, no matter how local or locally focused, was a threat to the US, calling for a military response?
Certainly not the American people, who know nothing about this, who were never asked if expanding the US global military mission to Africa was something they favoured, who never heard the slightest debate, or even a single peep from Washington on the subject.
Secret Wars, Secret Bases, and the Pentagon’s “New Spice Route” in Africa
They call it the New Spice Route, a homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks.
Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment through a growing maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of supply depots, tiny camps, and airfields meant to service a fast-growing US military presence in Africa.
Few in the US know about this superhighway, or about the dozens of training missions and joint military exercises being carried out in nations that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map.
Even fewer have any idea that military officials are invoking the names of Marco Polo and the Queen of Sheba as they build a bigger military footprint in Africa. It’s all happening in the shadows of what in a previous imperial age was known as “the Dark Continent.”
In East African ports huge metal shipping containers arrive with the everyday necessities for a military on the make.
They’re then loaded onto trucks that set off down rutted roads toward dusty bases and distant outposts.
On the highway from Djibouti to Ethiopia, for example, one can see the bare outlines of this shadow war at the truck stops where local drivers take a break from their long-haul routes.
The same is true in other African countries. The nodes of the network tell part of the story: Manda Bay, Garissa, and Mombasa in Kenya; Kampala and Entebbe in Uganda; Bangui and Djema in the Central African Republic; Nzara in South Sudan; Dire Dawa in Ethiopia; and the Pentagon’s showpiece African base, Camp Lemonnier, in Djibouti on the coast of the Gulf of Aden, among others.
According to Pat Barnes, a spokesman for US Africa Command (Africom), Camp Lemonnier serves as the only official US base on the continent. “There are more than 2 000 US personnel stationed there,” he told TomDispatch recently by email.
“The primary Africom organisation at Camp Lemonnier is Combined Joint Task Force — Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA). CJTF-HOA’s efforts are focused in East Africa and they work with partner nations to assist them in strengthening their defence capabilities.”
Barnes also noted that Department of Defence personnel are assigned to US embassies across Africa, including 21 individual Offices of Security Co-operation responsible for facilitating military-to-military activities with “partner nations.”
He characterised the forces involved as small teams carrying out pinpoint missions. Barnes did admit that in “several locations in Africa, Africom has a small and temporary presence of personnel.
“In all cases, these military personnel are guests within host-nation facilities, and work alongside or co-ordinate with host-nation personnel.”
In 2003, when CJTF-HOA was first set up there, it was indeed true that the only major US outpost in Africa was Camp Lemonnier.
In the ensuing years, in quiet and largely unnoticed ways, the Pentagon and the CIA have been spreading their forces across the continent.
Today — official designations aside — the US maintains a surprising number of bases in Africa.
And “strengthening” African armies turns out to be a truly elastic rubric for what’s going on.
Under President Obama, in fact, operations in Africa have accelerated far beyond the more limited interventions of the Bush years: last year’s war in Libya; a regional drone campaign with missions run out of airports and bases in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Seychelles; a flotilla of 30 ships in that ocean supporting regional operations.
There is a multi-pronged military and CIA campaign against militants in Somalia, including intelligence operations, training for Somali agents, a secret prison, helicopter attacks, and US commando raids.
It includes a massive influx of cash for counter-terrorism operations across East Africa; a possible old-fashioned air war, carried out on the sly in the region using manned aircraft; tens of millions of dollars in arms for allied mercenaries and African troops.
There is also a special ops expeditionary force (bolstered by State Department experts) dispatched to help capture or kill Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and his senior commanders.
And this only begins to scratch the surface of Washington’s fast-expanding plans and activities in the region.
To support these mushrooming missions, near-constant training operations, and alliance-building joint exercises, outposts of all sorts are sprouting continent-wide, connected by a sprawling shadow logistics network.
Most American bases in Africa are still small and austere, but growing ever larger and more permanent in appearance.
For example, photographs from last year of Ethiopia’s Camp Gilbert, examined by TomDispatch, show a base filled with air-conditioned tents, metal shipping containers, and 55-gallon drums and other gear strapped to pallets, but also recreation facilities with TVs and videogames, and a well-appointed gym filled with stationary bikes, free weights, and other equipment.
After 9/11, the US military moved into three major regions in significant ways: South Asia (primarily Afghanistan), the Middle East (primarily Iraq), and the Horn of Africa.
Today, the US is drawing down in Afghanistan and has largely left Iraq. Africa, however, remains a growth opportunity for the Pentagon.
The US is now involved, directly and by proxy, in military and surveillance operations against an expanding list of regional enemies.
They include al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in North Africa; the Islamist movement Boko Haram in Nigeria; possible al-Qaeda-linked militants in post-Qaddafi Libya; Joseph Kony’s murderous Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the Central African Republic, Congo, and South Sudan; Mali’s Islamist Rebels of the Ansar Dine, al-Shabaab in Somalia; and guerrillas from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula across the Gulf of Aden in Yemen.
A recent investigation by the Washington Post revealed that contractor-operated surveillance aircraft based out of Entebbe, Uganda, are scouring the territory used by Kony’s LRA at the Pentagon’s behest, and that 100 to 200 US commandos share a base with the Kenyan military at Manda Bay.
Additionally, US drones are being flown out of Arba Minch airport in Ethiopia and from the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, while drones and F-15 fighter-bombers have been operating out of Camp Lemonnier as part of the shadow wars being waged by the US military and the CIA in Yemen and Somalia.
Surveillance planes used for spy missions over Mali, Mauritania, and the Sahara desert are also flying missions from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, and plans are reportedly in the works for a similar base in the newborn nation of South Sudan.
US special operations forces are stationed at a string of even more shadowy forward operating posts on the continent, including one in Djema in the Central Africa Republic and others in Nzara in South Sudan and Dungu in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The US also has had troops deployed in Mali, despite having officially suspended military relations with that country following a coup.
According to research by TomDispatch, the US Navy also has a forward operating location, manned mostly by Seabees, Civil Affairs personnel, and force-protection troops, known as Camp Gilbert in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia.
US military documents indicate that there may be other even lower-profile US facilities in the country.
In addition to Camp Lemonnier, the US military also maintains another hole-and-corner outpost in Djibouti — a Navy port facility that lacks even a name.
Africom did not respond to requests for further information on these posts before this article went to press. — GPF/ pakobeserver.net