South Africa

Not everyone shares the general belief that president Bush deserves some credit for his Africa policies. Josh Kurlantznick is decidedly unimpressed with the President’s approach toward Africa, as he shows in this piece at The New Republic. Here is a sample:

Rather than supporting democratic institutions and criticizing a new generation of African authoritarians, the Bush administration has backed whatever African leader claims to be battling militant Islam. For example, the White House has developed a close relationship with Ethiopia’s thuggish leader Meles Zenawi, supposedly an ally in the war on terror and a partner in battling militancy in neighboring Somalia. The administration has provided military aid to Ethiopia with virtually no conditions on the assistance. It has also offered advisers to support Ethiopia’s invasion of neighboring Somalia, an invasion which only led to more chaos in that benighted nation. Meanwhile, in recent years Zenawi’s government has overseen a massive crackdown on opposition activists and a brutal offensive in the country’s Ogaden region; in 2005, after disputed elections, the Ethiopian government arrested over 30,000 of its own people.

 

As in Ethiopia, so too across the continent. In building a string of counterterrorism allies, the White House has strengthened its links with some of Africa’s most brutal regimes, from Algeria to Chad.

For me, again, the case for Bush’s Africa policy is a relative one. From an absolute standpoint, this administration’s policies toward Africa have been fairly marginal. But from a historical perspective, Bush’s engagement still warrants some praise. I would like to see a foreign policy toward Africa that takes into consideration African needs and interests and in which Africans are partners, in the truest sense of the term, rather than appendages. But relative both to other administrations and to president Bush’s policies elsewhere, his approach to Africa warrants, if not praise, at least some recognition.

The Council on Foreign Relations has a useful primer on American policies toward the five countries President Bush is visiting this week.

I am going to make a controversial assertion: Although President Bush has, by just about any measure, been a pretty bad president, he ranks among the upper echelons in terms of policy toward Africa. Now this is not much of an accomplishment, to be sure. American policy toward Africa has ranged from the loathsome to the negligent to the indifferent. And I’m not certain that the United States has ever had an administration with an even passably good foreign policy toward the continent. So Bush is among the best of a bad bunch, despite essentially countenancing genocide in Darfur, the lack of delivery on some grand promises, and some questions about intent with regard to AFRICOM. Still, both President Cinton and President Bush at least had Africa within the periphery of their vision, which is a far cry from the noxious “Constructive Engagement” that preceded them.

All this tells me is that Americans must demand more when it comes to United States policy toward Africa. If Bush is among the best we’ve had, we have a pretty shameful record.

Charles R. Stith, a former US ambassador to Tanzania and director of the African Presidential Archives and Research Center at Boston University, has an op-ed piece in today’s Boston Globe endorsing the Millennium Challenge Initiative as a way to help develop Africa. He argues that partisan squabbling over the amount of funding to provide the MCI is akin to an old proverb that asserts that when elephants fight it is the grass that suffers. It seems to me that it would be worth providing the full funding that President Bush wants if only to see if the program is viable.

For a couple of weeks it looked as if Kenyans has stepped back from the brink and that the worst was over. But such an assessment appears premature. Violence has escalated in recent days. On Tuesday a mob dragged Melitus Mugabe Were from his car and shot him dead. Were was a new member of Kenya’s parliament and many believed that he held out the promising of helping to bridge some of the country’s divides. Instead, mediation appears to have butted up against hard political and social realities, and some observers  see a country on the brink of collapse. Jendayi Frazer, the United States’ top envoy to Africa, believes that ethnic cleansing may be underway in Kenya, and worries about the consequences of the Kenya crisis for regional stability.

Meanwhile at The New Republic, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, who is not a specialist in African issues, argues that colonialism is not to blame for events in Kenya, under the apparent dual misconceptions  that anyone is positing such a reductionist monocausal explanation or that colonialism is not a factor among many in understanding Kenya’s, indeed Africa’s, contemporary straits. I’d simply refer Llosa (and everyone else) again to  Caroline Elkins’ fine recent piece on the historical antecedents to Kenya’s current crises and remind Llosa and all other observers that it is probably not all that useful to create straw persons for the sole purpose of heroically destroying them.

It almost certainly comes as a shock to absolutely no one that Robert Mugabe has acted in bad faith and announced unilaterally (even as he has been in the midst of negotiations with the factions of the Movement for Democratic Change) that elections will be held on March 2. Now the MDC is scrambling to figure out what to do. Their options are circumscribed: The opposition can choose to boycott the elections, guaranteeing another Mugabe victory, which the wily tyrant will depict as a mandate, or to participate in elections that are pretty certain to be a sham, in which Mugabe secures victory, thus claiming a mandate. This frustrating hobson’s choice encapsulates the frustration of politics in Robert Mugabe’s brutocracy.

Stephanie Hanson, news editor for the Council on Foreign Relations, recently interviewed Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC’s most visible leader. Tsvangirai gives thoughtful answers to questions on a host of issues, though at time the hopelessness of the opposition’s plight seems almost tangible in his words. He expressed his wish for the world’s response to the situation in Zimbabwe:  “The elections that are forthcoming in Zimbabwe must be raised to the same level like Darfur. There must be an international outcry.” But what has the west’s supposed outcry (which frankly seems rather muted and is by any measure ineffectual) accomplished in Darfur? About as much as it has in Zimbabwe.

Tyrants only know one language, and that is the universal lingua franca of power. Power does not have to mean force, though force is never far from power. Until Mugabe is forced to change, to relent, or to cede control, he will do none of those things. The same can be said for Omar al-Bashir and the thugs he empowers in Darfur. Hand wringing is not enough. It never is.

Tomorrow Kenyans go to the polls. In what is becoming an increasingly intense campaign (in what has almost certainly been the most open election in Kenya’s history) it appears that the opposition, led by 62-year-old Raila Odinga — a  businessman and former political prisoner, is pulling ahead of President Mwai Kibaki, who has held office since 2002, and may well win. Both men are vital figures in the history of post-independence Kenya, and Africa observers are watching closely, even as evidence of strong-armed machinations emerge, to see if the election goes smoothly, and if the loser and his supporters go down without fomenting violence. Certainly it appears that a new, more sophisticated, money-driven politics has emerged in Kenya. It remains to be seen if this has a deleterious effect on the country’s political culture.

There is a subtext to this election, and to the political situation in Kenya generally, which is that as with much of the region, Islam is playing an increasing role in politics. Not problematic in and of itself, the rise of Islam nonetheless has seen accompany it strains of radical Islam, which does warrant scrutiny. Thus the west, and especially the United States, will likely be paying increasing attention to events in Kenya and elsewhere.

The problem is that when the United States and the rest of the West intervenes in Africa out of self interest African interests almost always fall by the wayside. This is yet another reason why many of us wish the United States would develop a comprehensive policy toward Africa, and not one based merely on self-interest, temporal concerns, piecemeal approaches, and half-baked understandings. That is unlikely to happen, of course, and so one can imagine sloppy, divisive, detrimental US policy emerging in response to the perceived threat of Islam in Africa that will inevitably do more harm than good and that will do little to address legitimate dangers of radicalism.

I found the following chart (From the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Project via Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, and which accompanied this James Traub story) telling, though frankly I’m uncertain what it tells:

The five countries with the most favorable views of American ideas about democracy are Subsaharan African nations. None of the countries with the least favorable views are African. As someone who believes in the American ideals (and thus ideas) of democracy, broadly framed, but who also has serious qualms about gaps between ideals and practices, I think that what we might have here is a case in which Africans see the ideals and hope that the reality will follow while those with a negative view of the United States and its democratic ideals have had recent confrontations with the United States in which those ideals gave way to pragmatic realities that were not so nice. Most of those encounters, though not all, would be directly connected to current American policies in the Middle East. I cannot help but wonder (or perhaps hope) if the ideals don’t endure beyond the temporal manifestations of American policy.

I’d like to apologize for the paucity of posting. The Foreign Policy Association has been upgrading its blog server and there have been some glitches, but it looks like we’re back up and running. Thanks for your patience.

The Council on Foreign Relations has a feature on  how some think South Africa is underachieving in its role as a regional power. I’ve written that South Africa has to walk a tightrope in its role as a regional superpower. And it seems that much of the western consternation exists at least in part because South Africa taking a stronger role allows the west to abdicate a stronger role in the region. but it is nonetheless true that South Africa appears to have lost the plot with regard to its foreign affairs. Where once Mbeki preached a vibrant and engaging vision of Pan Africanism, now he appears content to traffic in platitudes and to operate out of narrow self interest. Of course there is a certain irony to the west complaining about South Africa placing self interest first in the queue, but that does not in and of itself mean that some of the criticisms going pretoria’s way are not warranted.

For my American readers, have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

At The Boston Globe Michael Gerson has a column on AIDS in the developing world, focuding on Africa. Embracing neither foolish optimism nor outsized pessimism Gerson argues that a cobination of approaches will be required to stanch a disease that is still spreading at a faster rate than it can be prevented:

Treatment and prevention, in the end, cannot be separated. And the goal of universal access to treatment seems morally unavoidable. However expensive this commitment might be, there is also a cost to letting 40 million people or more die - a cost the world should not be willing to pay. But we also need to be realistic about the nature of this commitment. Defeating AIDS will require major new efforts on prevention. And moving toward universal treatment, according to the United Nations, will require between $32 billion and $51 billion by 2010. America has done much - and still we face an ocean of need.

It’s easy to caricature calls for more money for Africa. But AIDS is one of those issues that shows how aid money really can and does make a difference. The continent needs more financial support to help it to attain very reachable goals. The discussion should never be only about giving money, but such aid should continue be in the equation in light of the West’s persistent underdevelopment of Africa.

Africom is now up and running. I still am ambivalent about the US African Command in theory and especially in practice. The idea seems ok — it gives America a presence on a continent it has so long overlooked, ignored, or mismanaged. And maybe there is the chance that the US presence will augment AU troops on the ground in cases where augmentation is needed. But I tend to wonder whether the United States will be capable of looking beyond its own interests and will be willing to subvert those interests to the desires and needs of Africans. I do not, for example, trust the current administration to conceptualize or implement such a commend, and I suspect that Africom could quickly devolve into a mechanism for administering US foreign policy at the barrel of a gun. Still, now that Africom is a reality it is important both for Americans with a role in the foreign policy and security apparatus and a legitimate interest in Africa to work with African leadership to try to counter the almost inevitable attempts to misuse Africom forces.