Responding to Terror: An Assessment of US Counter-Terrorism Strategies in Africa

Abstract

With the end of the Cold War, it seemed that Africa lost much of its strategic significance among Washington’s policy-makers. In 1994, the CIA aimed to shut down 15 of its stations in Africa.¹ A year later, a US Department of Defense document explicitly stated, ‘America’s security interests in Africa are very limited … [w]e see very little strategic interests in Africa.’² Washington’s strategic neglect of the African continent was to haunt it when, a few years later, its East African embassies were bombed, as alluded to in Chapter One. In November 2002, the simultaneous terrorist attacks on the Kenyan port town of Mombasa³ highlighted the vulnerabilities of the African continent to the terrorist scourge. Given the events of 9/11 and its after-effects, it is understandable that the US would actively work towards eradicating terrorist cells or bases anywhere in the world — including Africa. In this regard, US Major-General Jeffrey Kohler bluntly stated in 2003, ‘What we don’t want to see in Africa is another Afghanistan, a cancer growing in the middle of nowhere.’⁴