Mother Jones
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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website and was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. Additional funding was provided through the generosity of Adelaide Gomer.
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania—Movie night in Mouloud, Djibouti. Skype lessons in Ethiopia. Veterinary training assistance in Garissa, Kenya. And in this country on the east coast of Africa, work on both primary and secondary schools and a cistern to provide clean water. These are all-American good works, but who is doing them—and why?
More coverage of the US military presence in Africa:
The US Averages More Than a Mission a Day in Africa
How the US Military Keeps Reporters in the Dark
“Africa Is the Battle of Tomorrow, Today”
MAP: The US Military Operations You Didn’t Know Existed
How the United States Continues to Make Matters Worse in Libya
As I sit in a room filled with scores of high-ranking military officers resplendent in their dress uniforms—Kenyans in their khakis, Burundians and Ugandans clad in olive, Tanzanians in deep forest green sporting like-colored berets and red epaulets with crossed rifles on their shoulders—chances are that the US military is carrying out some mission somewhere on this vast continent. It might be a kidnapping raid or a training exercise. It could be an airstrike or the construction of a drone base. Or, as I wait for the next speaker to approach the lectern at the “Land Forces East Africa” conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, it could be a humanitarian operation run not by civilians in the aid business, but by military troops with ulterior motives—part of a near-continent-wide campaign utilizing the core tenets of counterinsurgency strategy.
The US is trying to win a war for the hearts and minds of Africa. But a Pentagon investigation suggests that those mystery projects somewhere out there in Djibouti or Ethiopia or Kenya or here in Tanzania may well be orphaned, ill-planned, and undocumented failures-in-the-making. According to the Department of Defense’s watchdog agency, US military officials in Africa “did not adequately plan or execute” missions designed to win over Africans deemed vulnerable to the lures of violent extremism.
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