A feel-good mission stirs unease

October 27, 2006

Michael Smerconish

COULD THE HORN of Africa become the next al Qaeda breeding ground?

The U.S. military thinks so, which is why I found myself in Djibouti last week. It was the final stop in the military immersion project in which I participated, called the Joint Civilian Orientation Conference. By the time we flew to Djibouti, we'd seen the military command posts in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar.

Djibouti gets lumped with seven other African nations, and Iraq, Iran and Pakistan as being part of the military's CENTCOM region: 27 countries, 651 million people and 65 percent of the world's known oil supply.

Djibouti is located in the northeast corner of the continent - bordering the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, next to Somalia. It's about the size of Massachusetts and is 94 percent Muslim.

Until the late 1970s, it was a French colony. Now, Camp Lemonier, a former French Foreign Legion Post, is home to the American military, which is where I found myself being briefed in a makeshift movie theater by Rear Adm. Richard Hunt, the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force of the Horn of Africa. Also present was the U.S. ambassador to Djibouti, W. Stuart Symington.

They showed a short but impressive video about the problems of the Horn of Africa and the unique ways in which our military is addressing them.

"We do this so we don't get an Afghanistan," explained Adm. Hunt, regarding humanitarian efforts. He referred to the area as "phase zero" in the war on terror, and said that we need to "change the environment to prevent conflict."

The U.S. ambassador agreed.

"The conditions to support terrorism are ripe," said Ambassador Symington. He made reference to the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and the attack on the USS Cole while docked in Yemen in 2000.

The military is trying to "win the peace" and ensure that Djibouti and other Horn of Africa nations don't end up in the hands of Muslim extremists. The effort began in 2002 to prevent terrorists fleeing from Afghanistan from establishing a safe haven, according to Hunt.

I noticed that the presentation was devoid of any mention of the African leadership. So I asked what was being done to remedy corrupt government.

The ambassador made the point that there was nothing uniquely African about government corruption. "People need to push up from the bottom," he offered, before making reference to Cook County, Ill., as once having corruption issues of its own. I wanted to tell him that any corruption in Chicago came after running water.

Djibouti looks like something you'd see in Bono, or more recently, Madonna, footage.

Blazing heat. Impoverished conditions. Disease. A male life expectancy of 42 years. And a pervasive addiction to khat, a psychotropic shrub that folks there chew to get high. Khat is grown in Ethiopia, Kenya and Yemen. For longer than anyone can remember, Muslims have chewed the leaves as a more Koran-friendly means of getting stoned than alcohol. You can't buy khat in the U.S. or Europe, but it is openly sold in Djibouti.

After our briefing, we took a short helicopter ride to Tadjoura, a local village. There, some of the town fathers and a local doctor escorted us through a medical clinic that is being upgraded with U.S. military support.

Then we walked a short distance, past a burial ground where rings of stones form the perimeter of graves - and to my naked eye, too many looked the size of children - to a local school where Navy Seabees are building a dormitory so that young girls from distant villages can get an education.

The teacher-student ratio was 1:50, the classroom was rudimentary and the flies abundant. It was the kind of stuff you see on TV. It was heartbreaking.

The military is trying to do something about these conditions. In the Horn of Africa, we do not maintain a "direct action" force, we don't seek to engage enemy forces in combat. Our primary "maneuver elements" include military-to-military trainers, doctors, nurses, veterinarians, civil engineers and well drillers.

Seeing our humanitarian involvement, I felt good to be an American, and recognize that, far from home, other Americans were making economic contributions to the least fortunate.

But on the long flight home, I gave the matter more thought. I fear that the American hearts are in the right place, but I'm not sure about the mindset.

I'm not convinced that the American military should be helping villages in the Horn of Africa. It feels good. It looks good. It may do plenty good. But it doesn't seem to comport with their mission. Winning the peace? That would seem to be more of a State Department matter. Or a faith-based initiative. Or something for Bono and Bob Geldof.

There is another consideration. On a long flight from Djibouti to Washington, I had plenty of time to read. In my material was the Philadelphia Inquirer from the day of my departure, one week earlier. The front-page lead story was titled "Bury Your Mistakes," and it reported that between 2003 and 2005, at least 20 children died of abuse or neglect after coming to the attention of the city's Department of Human Services.

A follow-up this past Wednesday reported on the passing of Danieal Kelly, a bedridden and nearly paralyzed 14-year-old with cerebral palsy who wasted away to 46 pounds and died of neglect despite the fact that a private company was paid by the city to visit her home twice a week. Maggots were found in her wounds. This was right here, in Mantua, a neighborhood in West Philadelphia. The point being that one does not need to travel 16 hours and 8,000 miles to find folks in need. Isn't charity supposed to begin at home?

Moreover, can military humanitarian efforts really put a dent in the problem? My gut tells me that there are tens of thousands of villages like Tadjoura in Africa. A school here and a clinic there are a drop in the bucket. We can't fix them all. I can't imagine committing the funding or manpower to scratch the surface. And then there is the question of whether feel-good measures really address the underlying problem. Remembering the lack of discussion of corruption in the presentation I had received from the admiral and ambassador, I am not convinced that our current policy addresses the root cause.

Moelestsi Mbeki is the brother of South African president Thabo Mbeki and the author of analyses of the failure of African relief. He has written that "at the root of Africa's problems are ruling political elites that have squandered the continent's wealth and choked its productivity over the last 40 years. The list of abuses is long and impressive. African political elites have systematically exploited their positions in order to line their own pockets."

He goes on to say that "merely handing more aid money to African governments only reinforces the pattern of abuse."

And he is not a voice in the wilderness. Others who have studied the issue have come to similar conclusions.

William Easterly is a professor of economics at New York University and author of books on the failure of Western aid to Africa. Reflecting on 2005, a year that included the G8 doubling of foreign aid to Africa from $25 billion to $50 billion a year, and the Live 8 concert, he wrote: "Economic development in Africa will depend - as it has elsewhere and throughout the history of modern world - on the success of private-sector entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs and African political reformers. It will not depend on the activities of patronizing, bureaucratic, unaccountable and poorly informed outsiders."

He believes that the true saviors of Africa can only be the people of Africa.

Relative to terrorism, we clearly need a strategy for the Horn of Africa. Confirmation of that requirement came in the form of the cancellation of our planned side trip to Ethiopia due to increased terror risk. But I am concerned that while we are currently on a righteous path, we are not necessarily on the right path.