Rethinking US Foreign Assistance Blog

The US military’s recently signed Status-of-Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Niger for a planned surveillance drone base is only the latest development in the Pentagon and the CIA’s expanding presence on the continent. It also portends the increased use of drone strikes against terrorist targets in Africa.

What’s going to be President Obama’s legacy on Africa?  President Clinton championed AGOA, still the core of US-Africa trade relations. President Bush built PEPFAR and the MCC.  There’s an outside chance that Feed the Future could be Obama’s lasting contribution, but I think the jury’s still out.  So what kind of big impact-big splash effort could we hope for in the next four years, from either a second Obama term or a new Romney administration?

This blog was originally featured at AllAfrica.com.

In her recent Foreign Policy column, "The Pivot to Africa," Rosa Brooks made a plea for letting go of comfortable old assumptions about roles and missions between the civilian and non-civilian sides of the US government, particularly when it comes to US civil-military cooperation in Africa. My plea is for an evidence-based discussion of US development policy and its intersection with US national security.

US interests will be ill-served if we merely move from comfortable old (and false) assumptions about poverty and terrorism in Africa to comfortable new (and equally false) assumptions about "whole-of-government responses" to complex challenges. While the United States should of course think and work creatively, skepticism and, dare I say, opposition, from civilian agencies to AFRICOM taking on non-traditional military roles is not rooted in turf battles but in legitimate concerns about efficiency and results.

During a recent vacation in an African country (that shall remain nameless here), I found myself, entirely by accident, sharing a large bush camp dinner table with a delegation of local officials and the US ambassador to that country.  Hmm, what would they talk about?   Political intrigue? Business deals?  The Olympics?  Instead I cringed at the actual topic:  “So, how are you integrating youth outreach into your conservation programs?”