I beg the Subcommittee’s indulgence to observe that we as a nation have indeed all come a very long way in recent years in our perceptions of Africa—some of us perhaps more than others. With the anniversary on March 6 of this year of the independence of Ghana, we also mark the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the wave of national sovereignty that swept across Sub-Saharan Africa in the wake of the Second World War. At that time, however, no part of the region was included in any U.S. military command’s Area of Responsibility (AOR) except for several North African countries which five years earlier had been tacked onto the U.S. European Command (EUCOM). The rest of the continent was left unaccounted for the rest of the decade until 1960 when, following then-Vice President Richard Nixon’s extensive tour of the continent, President Dwight D. Eisenhower put then-Atlantic Command (LANTCOM) in charge of security planning for Sub-Saharan Africa just as he had previously created the Africa Bureau within the State Department to coordinate diplomatic initiatives. Two years later, President John F. Kennedy transferred Sub-Saharan Africa into the Strike Command (STRICOM) AOR. From that time until the present, responsibility for defense planning affecting the continent has shifted a number of times as administrations came and went and geopolitical perceptions evolved over the course of the Cold War and its aftermath.

Just three years ago, when writing on the subject of a possible regional command for Africa, I was still being counseled by one editor to make sure that I couched the whole proposal as a hypothetical in the conditional tense.[1] And going back a little farther to 2000, I can recall that a number of Africa’s friends—some of whom are in this room today—were quite disappointed when a certain Republican presidential candidate responded negatively to a question from PBS’s Jim Lehrer about whether Africa fit into his definition of the strategic interests of the United States: “At some point in time the president’s got to clearly define what the national strategic interests are, and while Africa may be important, it doesn’t fit into the national strategic interests, as far as I can see them.”[2]

Yet almost seven years to the day later, on February 6, 2007, President George W. Bush announced the establishment of a U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), directing the Department of Defense to stand it up by October 2008 and entrusting the new structure with the mission to “enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health, education, democracy, and economic growth in Africa” by strengthening bilateral and multilateral security cooperation with African states and creating new opportunities to bolster their capabilities.[3]

I rehearse this history in order to lend some perspective to just how extraordinary the decision to set up AFRICOM as America’s sixth regional command really is. As former Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations Princeton N. Lyman, who previously served as U.S. ambassador to South Africa and to Nigeria, has observed, the apparent strategic neglect of Africa nonetheless sadly reflects “what [has] in fact been the approach of both Democratic and Republican administrations for decades.”[4] Historically, with the exception of Cold War period when concerns about Soviet attempts to secure a foothold on the continent drove U.S. policy, America generally perceived Africa as secondary to its foreign policy and other strategic objectives. Thus, more often than not, American perspectives on Africa were framed almost exclusively in terms of preoccupation over the humanitarian consequences of poverty, war, and natural disaster. Alas, as noble as these moral impulses have been, they lacked the “staying power” needed to sustain a long-term commitment. Rightfully, many of our African friends viewed us as well-meaning, but unreliable.

I would argue, however, that three factors have providentially come together which cumulatively have the potential to significantly alter the course of the relationship between the United States and the African continent as a whole as well as with its individual sovereign states. First, in the wake of 9/11, analysts and policymakers have shifted to a more strategic view of Africa in terms of U.S. national interests. Second, independent of our interests and actions, Africans themselves have increasingly expressed the desire and, more importantly, demonstrated the political will, to tackle the continent’s myriad challenges of disease, poverty, ethnic tension, religious extremism, bad governance, lack of security, etc., although they still need outside assistance. Third, we have come to recognize a commonality between our strategic interests and the interests of Africans in enhanced security, stability, and development.