I’ll post my talk up later today. Would be interested to hear your views.

I simply do not agree with parts of your assesment. I spent time in DC as AFRICOM was under development and nothing I saw or heard by way of briefings, assesments or programmes lead me to think that the Obama administration will want to terminate its security-related policies and programmes.

The programems will continue not because there are any dictators to prop up (though I would, as you would expect, object to your one-sided description of fifty years of US Africa policy), but because of terrorism concners and the belief that building effective and accountable security institutions is front and centre of the continent’s governance challenge. We know there are at least two international terrorist groups operating in West Africa: Hezbollah, which has long-standing, historic ties to the Lebanese diasporas centered in Abidjan, Ivory Coast and dominating trade throughout the region; and al Qaeda. A high-ranking former Labour minister event told me he thought Al Qaeda’s core would re-locate to Somalia in the next 2-3 years.

The terrorist threat in Africa is, of course, not uniform across the continent, but is notably more substantial in the northern half of the continent, where Islam is more present and state formation more problematic. No doubt a purely CT or security policy will not be enough. The US needs to focus more on the region’s own unique problems and need to emphasize state building and poverty reduction rather than military matters (though it should be remembered Bush oversaw the largest EVER expansion of US aid to Africa). But military matters will continue have a role, in part as a provider of security assistance to African states.

So bottom-line, the US is going to continue to have an African security policy. You may be right, AFRICOM could become part of what you call the “long-term historical narrative”. They clearly need your assistance and ideas to avoid such a trap.

What Africans think is fundamental to the success of the US’s Africa policy. If American involvement is not welcomed by people on the ground, its operations will fail, as we have seen in Iraq. If America is seen as a neo-imperialist power that continues to intrude in African affairs for its own ends, supporting nefarious governments as it did during the Cold War, it will turn young Africans against it (having joined in and perpetuated the devastating war in eastern Congo, Uganda’s Museveni is no saint).

Last week I gave a talk to the UK’s Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism, about the security situation in West Africa. In the discussion afterwards, they talked about the narratives Muslim extremists have used so effectively to recruit people to their cause. It is easy to envisage a scenario whereby continued US military interference in Africa becomes part of a long-term historical narrative of Western exploitation and abuse of the continent (taking in slavery, colonialism, the Cold War and AFRICOM). As demographic changes produce massive cohorts of young African adults with no jobs to go to and therefore in search of both outlets for their frustration and someone to blame, such a narrative will increase the supply of willing recruits to radical groups, and AFRICOM will have weakened rather than strengthened America’s security.