AFRICOM & BLM

October 2021 was the 13th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM). Accordingly, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) held an international month of action to highlight their “U.S. Out of Africa!: Shut Down AFRICOM” campaign. Tunde Osazua, BAP representative, explained that the month of action was meant “to raise the public’s awareness about the use of western military power to impose western control of African land, resources, and labor on behalf of the world’s corporate and financial elite, as well as the effort to build a popular movement for demilitarization and anti-imperialism on the African continent.”

The Black Alliance for Peace hopes to build a mass movement to shut down AFRICOM that resembles the Movement for Black Lives, and it likewise makes the connections between state violence in Africa and police violence here in America. One example of this is the federal 1033 program, which transfers U.S. military equipment and weaponry to local police departments. Chicagoans were made familiar with the destructive effects of this program last summer when the Chicago Police Department violently suppressed the racial justice protests against their violence with military equipment like tear gas, along with the Illinois National Guard. Further, many current and former Chicago police officers have previous military experience, such as Jon Burge, who brought his torture techniques that he learned in Vietnam back with him to Chicago’s police station lockups, said Jessica Katzenstein in an interview.

Katzenstein, a phD candidate at Brown University who wrote a paper on police militarization for Brown’s Costs of War Project, said that, “It is no surprise that one of the deepest connections shared by U.S. military and police violence is that it is most intensively and destructively leveled against people of color, particularly Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. This violence materializes in the form of bombing campaigns and drone warfare abroad (although see the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia), and home raids, stop-and-frisk tactics, and often consequence-free state violence both in the U.S. and abroad. These connections are partly a result of institutional exchange: for instance, Radley Balko traces how the creation of SWAT teams relied on expertise from U.S. military forces that were occupying Vietnam at the time. These connections are also of course a result of global white supremacy and anti-Blackness, and imperialist legacies and presents that continue to shape what countries are targets of U.S. bombs.”

AFRICOM was established by President George W. Bush in 2007–2008 as part of the “Global War on Terror.” Even though most Americans are generally not familiar with AFRICOM, it continues to be as central to the war on terror as CENTCOM, the US military command in the Middle East. Like CENTCOM, AFRICOM is ostensibly meant to promote security in the region, but in reality it only creates further destruction. As Andrew Bacevich, former Army colonel and president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft put it, CENTCOM’s “very existence has coincided with an almost staggering deterioration in regional security and stability throughout the Greater Middle East.”

In Africa, there were hardly any radical Islamist terrorist groups before a permanent American military presence was established, but they have since rapidly proliferated amongst the drone strikes, civilian deaths, night raids, coups, and the destabilization that follows. According to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, there has been a 500% increase in radical Islamist terrorist activity in Africa between 2011 and 2020. William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, said that “the sharp increase in terrorist incidents in Africa underscores the fact that the Pentagon’s overly militarized approach to the problem has been a dismal failure… If anything, attempting to eradicate terrorism by force may be exacerbating the problem, provoking a terrorist backlash and serving as a recruiting tool for extremist groups.”

The violence that comes with the American military, including violence from US-trained African proxy forces, combined with retaliatory terrorist attacks, has created an urgent humanitarian crisis in several African countries including Libya, Somalia, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. Stephanie Savell, co-founder of the Brown University Costs of War Project, has produced extensive research on the destructive effects of the US’s militarized approach to Africa, writing that “many [African] governments use the U.S. narrative of terrorism and counterterrorism, along with the accompanying financial, political, and institutional resources given them by the U.S., to repress minority groups, justify authoritarianism, and facilitate illicit profiteering, all while failing to address poverty and other structural problems that lead to widespread frustration with the state. Thus, in a vicious cycle, what the U.S. calls security assistance actually accomplishes the opposite.”

In total, there are US troops in 30 African countries, and with dozens of bases across the continent, the US has the power to take “kinetic action” essentially anywhere in Africa. Though this ability has arguably not created any greater security for Africans or for Americans. As Stephanie Savell writes, “this is not just a failure to truly recognize that a military-first approach is counterproductive, but it is also a failure to ask bigger questions. What is the magnitude of the so-called ‘terrorist’ threat to the U.S. from Africa? Arguably, it is minuscule compared to the threats to Americans posed by pandemic, climate change, or racially driven police violence. Does the use of force actually work to protect Americans and others around the world — or is it, itself, a major source of violence, death, and suffering? Finally, if military violence begets more violence, how does the U.S. truly put a stop to that cycle?”

One way to interrupt this vicious cycle would be to drastically reduce the American military footprint across the world. Consequently, just as Bacevich has called for the shuttering of CENTCOM, we should be joining the BAP’s call to dismantle AFRICOM. In Africa, the Middle East, and around the world, we should focus on diffusing conflicts instead of starting them, and abandoning militarized solutions to political and economic problems.

The Movement for Black Lives has joined the BAP’s call to shut down AFRICOM, along with a broader divestment from militarism with a corresponding reinvestment in peacemaking and community building; instead of our current system where “every year billions of dollars are funneled from US taxpayers to hundreds of arms corporations, who then wage lobbying campaigns pushing for even more foreign military aid,” fueling our cycle of endless war.

Scholar and author Adom Getachew writes, “The 2016 Vision for Black Lives platform… lays out an alternative path for U.S. foreign policy… It calls for cuts to the military budget of 50 percent and for resources to be shifted from ‘war-making institutions’ to institutions that sustain the well-being of communities, including healthcare, housing, and education. Following the model of Divest/Invest, the platform emphasizes redirecting resources toward building a green society, for instance, by retraining and deploying military personnel in the United States to ‘rebuild the country’s polluting and crumbling infrastructure.’” Combined with cuts to police budgets, the Vision for Black Lives provides a comprehensive plan to shift the nation’s priorities from violence and destruction to peace and stability.

When asked why people in Chicago should care about U.S. military violence abroad, Jessica Katzenstein said that “our military is destroying countless lives and communities in our name, from Somalia to Yemen, and these lives are often treated as disposable — so we should care about that violence and its brutal consequences on its own terms. Secondarily, we should care about the opportunity costs of military spending. The Costs of War Project found that the federal government has thus far directly spent $8 trillion on the post-9/11 wars, along with untold indirect costs. A significant portion of that spending has profited private corporations. The U.S. is the richest country in world history, yet some of its children attend school in unheated buildings and drink lead-poisoned water, its levels of student and medical debt have skyrocketed, and its poor Black and Brown neighborhoods are often abandoned by state services besides the police. Imagine what a tiny fraction of that $8 trillion, that 8 million million dollars, could have done if invested in healthcare, infrastructure, or education in a city like Chicago.”

To conclude, as Tunde Osazua of the Black Alliance for Peace did, “a mass movement must be forged to expose AFRICOM and its real purpose and make it inseparable with the concerns we have over the militarization of police in our communities in the United States. In the U.S. Out of Africa!: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign, we are clear that the brutality, violence and systematic degradation of Black life in the colonized zones of the United States against Black people by the domestic police is replicated in Africa by the U.S. global police represented by the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.”