AFRICOM: Flailing

The attitude of AFRICOM’s head, General William Ward, is emblematic of the problems with AFRICOM in general.  “We go where we’re asked to go” is simply not an acceptable answer if you’re not going to go where you NEED to go. That’s a passive, wait and see, whatever goes attitude that screams “we have no idea what we are doing right now”, but we can talk for days about what we could maybe do later on.


There are plenty of places AFRICOM needs to go (and won’t always be asked by the sort of entities it deals with) but can’t because there is no political will and not enough significant resources to go forth.

AFRICOM does not yet offer real solutions to Africa’s problems (it lacks the political will, the resources and the kind of quality leadership at the helm in multiple places that would foster solutions being implemented, not just talked about for years at conferences and meetings months after it was announced). It does not yet offer a vision for Africa (it does not have one yet) that would actually appeal to Africans and meet American interests in a way prior methods of policy making did.

Now it has suffered its first serious failure (though arguably the miserable disaster in Somalia by CTF-HOA, AFRICOM’s predecessor, is the more recent one on the minds of Africans) with few hints of success in the recent past and none foreseeable in the near future. At a time when Zimbabwe likely teeters toward collapse, when Sudan gears itself for war in 2011 when the South votes as it is expected to for independence and when chaos remains the order of the day in the Congo region, AFRICOM offers nothing but cheap conference talk and pass the buck attitudes.

Either it changes quickly or it will likely be left behind. The choice needs to be taken out of its current leaders’ hands.