Life Ain’t A Dream

While you were sleeping last week, the Kenyan military stormed into southern Somalia, replying to a spate of kidnappings on their shores, which have terrorized the local population and dented the all-vital flow of tourist dollars. It’s looking more and more like the Kenyan military isn’t acting alone; while the campaign against Shabab arose at their initiative, the accompanying drone strikes on southern Shabab enclaves don’t exactly look like the work of Nairobi.

The presumed American support marks an intensification of American involvement in African security affairs. The Obama administration’s greater involvement in Africa, if it continues as is, moreover, should be welcomed for three reasons–saving lives is the right thing to do, it is helping secure ungovernable regions that would otherwise be hotbeds for terrorism (if they aren’t already, like Somalia), and lastly, it comes at the expense of little blood and treasure.

Shababies in a Heavily-Armed Clown Car.

The light support of security in Somalia (where, by the way, Oxfam continues to estimate that 750,000 are in imminent danger of starving to death) is one of several recent examples of cost-effective security operations on the African continent. In mid-October, Obama sent about 100 special forces troops into Uganda to aid efforts to combat the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal group that has been terrorizing Uganda, Sudan, Congo, and the Central African Republic for years. And all this comes on top of aiding the Libyan toppling of Muammar Qadaffi.

This is exactly what the US military should be doing now that Obama is pulling troops out of the Iraqi boondoggle and scaling down operations in Afghanistan. For all the advances in Africa, many parts of the region struggle with security, such as South Sudan, where hundreds recently died in cattle raid massacres.

Furthermore, these kinds of operations are necessary to avoid the large spaces, devoid of institutions, which terrorist groups relish. Somalia is a fine example–after the US abandoned attempts to maintain security there following the Black Hawk Down fiasco, the country became a breeding ground for extremism and violence. Abandoning the area then was a mistake that the US is paying for today.

What Kids in Sierra Leone inherited from the Cold War.

 

Inexpensive (in terms of people and money) operations to save lives in Africa are not unprecedented. In 2000, the British Army stopped a massacre in Sierra Leone which put that country on the road to peace. French interventions, both in 2011 and prior, have prevented massacres in the Ivory Coast. Doubtless UN peacekeepers and US forces have helped maintain a fragile peace in Liberia, where massacres were the norm between 1989-2003.

This kind of peacekeeping, of course, requires careful treading. Officials, both in the military and state department, must use extreme caution not to meddle in the domestic political affairs of these countries excessively; another risk is propping up strongmen in the name of stability, as the US did for so many years in Zaire with Mobutu Sese Seko.

These risks, however, do not mean the US or other militaries should stand idly by and abnegate a moral duty out of fear of meddling or wasting money. Unfortunately, there’s no way to truly measure how many lives these operations save and how wisely the military is thus spending its money. But calculable numbers from places like Rwanda, Burundi, and Sudan all too tangibly remind us of the cost of inaction.

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Tags: african dream, burundi, central african republic, congo, ivory coast, kenya, liberia, libya, mobutu sese seko, operation palliser, predator drones, qadaffi, rwanda, shabab, somalia, south sudan, sudan, talib kweli, the lord's resistance army, uganda, zaire

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