Africa,
Oil, & US Military
By Ritt Goldstein
02 April, 2004
Asia
Times Online
Africa's
Maghreb and Sahel regions recently exploded into world view with allegations
that the Madrid bombers were tied to those areas' "al Qaeda"
groups. And while United States concerns about terrorism in the region
have been increasingly voiced, critics of the administration of President
George W Bush say that the ongoing US pursuit of energy resources lies
behind them. As early as the fall of 2002, Britain's Economist magazine
charged that oil "is the only American interest in Africa".
In a fall 2003 interview
with Asia Times Online, noted US security analyst Michael Klare, author
of Resource Wars, had warned of America's potential African involvement.
When queried as to where the next oil flash point might be after Iraq,
Klare replied: "I've been looking at Africa. It's heating up over
there."
Illustrating the
basis for such statements, in 2001 Vice President Dick Cheney's report
on a US National Energy Policy declared Africa to be one of America's
"fastest-growing sources of oil and gas". By February 1, 2002,
the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Walter Kansteiner,
declared: "This [African oil] has become of national strategic
interest to us." And a December 2001 report by the US National
Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2015, forecast that by 2015 a full
quarter of US oil imports would come from Africa.
During this past
February, a handful of top US generals visited Africa in separate and
far from usual trips. They included the US's European commander, Marine
General James L Jones, as well as the European deputy commander, Air
Force, General Charles Wald. And excluding the region known as the Horn
of Africa, the US European Command oversees the US's African actions.
The trips occurred
against a widely reported backdrop of increasing pressures from US industry
and conservative policy groups to secure energy sources outside the
Middle East.
Over the past several
months, the US has been in the process of dispatching Special Forces
troops to the countries of Africa's Sahel - Mauritania, Chad, Mali and
Niger. The effort is part of a program dubbed the Pan Sahel Initiative,
designed to provide anti-terrorism training to the region's military.
Others have termed it a program to train regional armies.
Involved US Special
Forces groups are operating out of Germany, where an investigation of
the Madrid bombers is also ongoing. And military cooperation with Morocco,
Algeria and Tunisia has reportedly been increased as well. But it is
the fairly recent and substantial oil discoveries that are said to be
fueling this effort, and as the Washington Times declared in a headline
on February 26: "US eyes terrorism networks, oil in Africa."
In Colombia, similar
US undertakings to train local forces have been previously pursued to
secure that country's oil infrastructure, particularly its pipelines.
There, the leftist group known by the Spanish acronym FARC has long
waged a guerilla campaign, pipeline sabotage being a favored tactic.
Similarly, ongoing pipeline sabotage in Iraq is reported as substantial.
And in a surprising revelation of US Defense Department candor, a December
2003 report referred to the "open-ended imperial policing"
that Iraqi involvement now means.
Casting a new light
on the Madrid bombing on March 11, the primary group allegedly behind
the attack, Salafia Jihadia, was said to have singled out Spain in the
May 16, 2003, Morocco bombings. A private Spanish club, Casa de Espana,
was the most severely damaged among the five targets in Morocco. The
other targets included: the Israeli Alliance club and a Jewish cemetery,
the Belgian consulate (Belgium's business community has been very active
in Morocco), and a hotel for business people. The Moroccan economy is
in the throes of "structural reforms", and increasing privatization
is straining relations within the country.
The May bombing
followed a summer 2002 standoff between Spain and Morocco over a disputed
island, Spanish commandos eventually reclaiming it from Moroccan control.
A long-simmering dispute also exists between Spain and Morocco over
two remaining Spanish sovereignty enclaves in the country, Ceuta and
Melilla. Considerably more Spanish troops are said to garrison these
enclaves than were dispatched by Madrid to Iraq. And some speculate
that beyond Islamist objectives, the motivation behind Madrid's blasts
may have included some very traditional, anti-imperialist sentiment.
In a surprisingly
timely commentary on the agenda of Salafia Jihadia, just two days prior
to the Madrid attacks, the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA), George Tenet, testified before the Senate Committee on Armed
Services. He specifically cited Salafia, saying that it was among "small
local groups with limited domestic agendas". He added that these
groups "have autonomous leadership, they pick their own targets,
they plan their own attacks".
Yet according to
Agence France-Presse, the Madrid attacks are now said to have been planned
at a "rear base" of al-Qaeda, located where Morocco borders
Mali, Mauritania and Algeria. An Algerian group, the Salafist Group
for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), was also allegedly involved. And as
with every other major bombing over the past several months, Jordanian-Palestinian
militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is alleged to have been the "mastermind",
though some experts in the intelligence community have expressed doubts.
In the case of the
old anti-communist movement and mind set, all communists were once lumped
together, their many groups and factions considered essentially as one
led by the Soviet Union. A similar mind set is demonstrated by many
in the West regarding today's Islamic militants. Some analysts say this
as indeed the case, noting that while those who today are called "al-Qaeda"
share a certain commonality, the differences between groups is often
great. Notably, there existed such differences between communist groups
and nations that they occasionally led to armed confrontation, warfare
and splits, as in the case of China vs Vietnam and Sino-Soviet tensions
and split.
But in mid-March
the GSPC reportedly did fight a running battle with forces from Niger
and then Chad, with the US reported to have flown food, blankets and
medical supplies from Germany to aid Chad's forces. And with the basing
of US military efforts in Germany, one explanation for Germany's ongoing
terror investigations becomes apparent.
Subsequent to the
Niger and Chad GSPC battles, US concerns about the GSPC attempting to
topple the governments of Mauritania and Algeria were reported. But,
in the recent debate over so-called "intelligence failures",
a pattern of wildly "exaggerating" known threats has also
been reported. And it is now also widely accepted that such exaggerations
provided the basis for the US's military involvement in Iraq.
The GSPC has been
long fighting to topple the Algerian government and install an Islamic
state. But this resistance arose after the Algerian government canceled
the 1992 election in order to "keep an Islamic party from coming
to power", according to the Toronto Star. And while the pro-US
Mauritania government of Maaouyah Ould Sid Ahmed Taya fought off a June
2003 coup attempt, it was believed to have been launched by the country's
own military, not the GSPC.
Taya himself came
to power in a 1984 coup and elections in that country are broadly described
as "suspect". Mauritania is also widely acknowledged as a
country where slavery still exists, and the Washington Times reported
in July 2003 that "Mr Taya, like other pro-American leaders in
the Arab world, has cracked down on political and religious opposition".
Paradoxically, if
US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's so-called "democratic
wave" were to actually engulf the region, it appears that hardest
hit would be the bulk of US allies. But Mauritania and Algeria both
have oil.
In a perspective
of the oil industry shared by many in the non-governmental organization
community, in a January interview with Asia Times Online, Jim Paul,
executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, observed:
"The oil industry is all about super-profits. Since everyone is
pursuing this, and the marketplace doesn't effectively regulate it,
there's been war, bribery and corruption virtually wherever the oil
industry goes."
In 2002, Rice's
old firm, Chevron Texaco (she was a director), had said that while it
invested US$5 billion in Africa over the previous five years, it would
invest $20 billion over the next five.
Given such US energy
investment, it's no surprise that a 2002 edition of Alexander's Gas
& Oil Connections, a highly respected industry newsletter, said
in a headline: "US moves to protect interest in African oil."
And while several authorities were quoted as emphasizing that Africa's
oil supplies were free from any major threats, the piece added that
the Bush administration was determined to "ensure that they remain
so".
But a steady evolution
- and deterioration - of the African security environment has been reported
to the media by US officials. Whereas in 2002 the continent offered
apparently stable oil field conditions, that assessment was changed
almost simultaneously with the level of domestic US pressures to acquire
African oil; a substantive al-Qaeda threat materializing proportionate
to the need for oil. And some believe that Secretary of State Colin
Powell best illustrated a methodology that explained such circumstances
last summer.
At a July 10 press
conference in South Africa, Powell was asked how he would respond to
critics who charged that the US's new focus on Africa was really about
African oil. Powell replied that "we are not here for any other
purpose than to demonstrate our friendship, to demonstrate our commitment,
and to see if we can help people in need".
Recent questions
have been raised in the US Congress regarding the administration's apparent
pursuit of cynical ploys and misleading verbiage in its pronouncements.
As regards help
for those in need, the tiny West African island-state of Sao Tome has
been rumored since 2002 as the site for a potential US naval base. Sao
Tome's strategic position in the Gulf of Guinea, where recent deep-water
oil finds have been made, led to a meeting between Bush and Sao Tome's
then-president Fradique de Menezes in 2002.
The US allies in
the area have virtually no blue-water navy, and Sao Tome holds jointly
with Nigeria an area with a reported potential of 11 billion barrels
of oil. Many of the other newly discovered African reserves are located
offshore as well.
While a July 2003
military coup - which shortly followed Powell's African trip - ousted
president de Menezes, within the past two weeks (this March) said "US
experts" began training the island's security apparatus, voicing
concerns about al-Qaeda operating in the West African region.
As a US Defense
Department document this winter by Dr Jeffrey Record said: "The
contemporary language on terrorism has become, as Conor Gearty puts
it, 'the rhetorical servant of the established order'." It emphasized
that almost nothing matters "a jot against the contemporary power
of the terrorist label".
Ritt Goldstein is
an American investigative political journalist based in Stockholm. His
work has appeared in broad sheets such as Australia's Sydney Morning
Herald, Spain's El Mundo and Denmark's Politiken, as well as with the
Inter Press Service (IPS), a global news agency.