Africa terror fight to suffer as China, Russia take US focus

Bloomberg

The US is set to scale back aid to African military units fighting terrorism as it realigns its defense strategy to compete with more traditional threats from China and Russia.
The shift comes despite a growing terror threat on the continent that has led to an increased American presence, resulting in attacks on US forces in Niger and Somalia that have left six US service members dead since early 2017. Militants last month even penetrated the headquarters of a military task force in Mali.
American counterterrorism aid to sub-Saharan Africa — a category that covers 46 countries — increased dramatically in recent years as the terror threat expanded on the continent, rising to $954 million in fiscal years 2015-2018 from $327 million in fiscal years 2011-14, according to Security Assistance Monitor, which analyses US security spending.
But under the Trump administration’s new defense strategy, that’s all likely to change.
“In accordance with the National Defense Strategy, we’re going to see a shift in resources from dealing with violent extremist organisations first and foremost to empowering our allies and partners to deal with some of the new ‘old’ threats,” Greg Pollock, the acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for security cooperation, said.
The most recent National
Defense Strategy report, unveiled in early 2018 by Secretary Jim Mattis, cautions about the return to an era of “great power” conflict with adversaries such as China and Russia.
Africa is mentioned only once in the unclassified summary of the strategy, in a section about strengthening alliances and attracting new partners.
The shift means America’s allies in Africa finds themselves in an all-too-familiar place.
“They had this brief period where some types of military assets were more available to them,” said Alice Hunt Friend, an Africa security specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But it’s not going to be unusual or unfamiliar to folks in the Africa-US security space to work with a reduction in resources because that’s just where Africa has fallen on the priority list.”
That’s not to say the anti-terror campaign in Africa is being abandoned. The American military has more than 7,000 personnel deployed across Africa, including 800 troops in Niger, where four US troops were killed in an ambush last year.
In central Niger, the US is spending more than $100 million on a drone base to help
target terrorists.
Separately, the Pentagon will also send more than $100 million in aid to seven countries in Africa as part of a programme to support the forces it sees as best able to combat a growing list of terror groups, according to a Pentagon document obtained by Bloomberg. The bulk of the support, about $70 million, will go to Uganda, with nations including Cameroon, Kenya, Mauritania and Nigeria getting the rest. The money will go towards training and materiel.
But to bring Washington’s military aid programmes in line with the vision spelled out in the national defense strategy, the Defense Department is preparing to increase aid to countries in Europe and in the domain of the newly re-christened Indo-Pacific command. Some of that will come by putting fewer resources into Africa.