AFRICA: OIL, AL-QAEDA AND THE US MILITARY

Asia Times Online

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FC30Aa02.html

Africa’s Maghreb and Sahel regions recently exploded
into world view with allegations that the Madrid
bombers were tied to those areas’ "al Qaeda" groups.
And while United States concerns about terrorism in the
region have been increasingly voiced, critics of the
administration of President George W Bush say that the
ongoing US pursuit of energy resources lies behind
them. As early as the fall of 2002, Britain’s
*Economist* magazine charged that oil "is the only
American interest in Africa."

In a fall 2003 interview with Asia Times Online, noted
US security analyst Michael Klare, author of *Resource
Wars*, had warned of America’s potential African
involvement. When queried as to where the next oil
flash point might be after Iraq, Klare replied: "I’ve
been looking at Africa. It’s heating up over there."

Illustrating the basis for such statements, in 2001
Vice President Dick Cheney’s report on a US National
Energy Policy declared Africa to be one of America’s
"fastest-growing sources of oil and gas." By February
1, 2002, the assistant secretary of state for African
affairs, Walter Kansteiner, declared: "This [African
oil] has become of national strategic interest to us."
And a December 2001 report by the US National
Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2015, forecast that
by 2015 a full quarter of US oil imports would come
from Africa.

During this past February, a handful of top US generals
visited Africa in separate and far from usual trips.
They included the US’s European commander, Marine
General James L Jones, as well as the European deputy
commander, Air Force, General Charles Wald. And
excluding the region known as the Horn of Africa, the
US European Command oversees the US’s African actions.

The trips occurred against a widely reported backdrop
of increasing pressures from US industry and
conservative policy groups to secure energy sources
outside the Middle East.

Over the past several months, the US has been in the
process of dispatching Special Forces troops to the
countries of Africa’s Sahel — Mauritania, Chad, Mali
and Niger. The effort is part of a program dubbed the
Pan Sahel Initiative, designed to provide anti-
terrorism training to the region’s military. Others
have termed it a program to train regional armies.

Involved US Special Forces groups are operating out of
Germany, where an investigation of the Madrid bombers
is also ongoing. And military cooperation with
Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia has reportedly been
increased as well. But it is the fairly recent and
substantial oil discoveries that are said to be fueling
this effort, and as the Washington Times declared in a
headline on February 26: "US eyes terrorism networks,
oil in Africa."

In Colombia, similar US undertakings to train local
forces have been previously pursued to secure that
country’s oil infrastructure, particularly its
pipelines. There, the leftist group known by the
Spanish acronym FARC has long waged a guerilla
campaign, pipeline sabotage being a favored tactic.
Similarly, ongoing pipeline sabotage in Iraq is
reported as substantial. And in a surprising
revelation of US Defense Department candor, a December
2003 report referred to the "open-ended imperial
policing" that Iraqi involvement now means.

Casting a new light on the Madrid bombing on March 11,
the primary group allegedly behind the attack, Salafia
Jihadia, was said to have singled out Spain in the May
16, 2003, Morocco bombings. A private Spanish club,
Casa de Espana, was the most severely damaged among the
five targets in Morocco. The other targets included:
the Israeli Alliance club and a Jewish cemetery, the
Belgian consulate (Belgium’s business community has
been very active in Morocco), and a hotel for business
people. The Moroccan economy is in the throes of
"structural reforms," and increasing privatization is
straining relations within the country.

The May bombing followed a summer 2002 standoff between
Spain and Morocco over a disputed island, Spanish
commandos eventually reclaiming it from Moroccan
control. A long-simmering dispute also exists between
Spain and Morocco over two remaining Spanish
sovereignty enclaves in the country, Ceuta and Melilla.
Considerably more Spanish troops are said to garrison
these enclaves than were dispatched by Madrid to Iraq.
And some speculate that beyond Islamist objectives, the
motivation behind Madrid’s blasts may have included
some very traditional, anti-imperialist sentiment.

In a surprisingly timely commentary on the agenda of
Salafia Jihadia, just two days prior to the Madrid
attacks, the director of the US Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), George Tenet, testified before the Senate
Committee on Armed Services. He specifically cited
Salafia, saying that it was among "small local groups
with limited domestic agendas." He added that these
groups "have autonomous leadership, they pick their own
targets, they plan their own attacks."

Yet according to Agence France-Presse, the Madrid
attacks are now said to have been planned at a "rear
base" of al-Qaeda, located where Morocco borders Mali,
Mauritania and Algeria. An Algerian group, the
Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), was
also allegedly involved. And as with every other major
bombing over the past several months, Jordanian-
Palestinian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is alleged to
have been the "mastermind", though some experts in the
intelligence community have expressed doubts.

In the case of the old anti-communist movement and mind
set, all communists were once lumped together, their
many groups and factions considered essentially as one
led by the Soviet Union. A similar mind set is
demonstrated by many in the West regarding today’s
Islamic militants. Some analysts say this as indeed
the case, noting that while those who today are called
"al-Qaeda" share a certain commonality, the differences
between groups is often great. Notably, there existed
such differences between communist groups and nations
that they occasionally led to armed confrontation,
warfare and splits, as in the case of China vs Vietnam
and Sino-Soviet tensions and split.

But in mid-March the GSPC reportedly did fight a
running battle with forces from Niger and then Chad,
with the US reported to have flown food, blankets and
medical supplies from Germany to aid Chad’s forces.
And with the basing of US military efforts in Germany,
one explanation for Germany’s ongoing terror
investigations becomes apparent.

Subsequent to the Niger and Chad GSPC battles, US
concerns about the GSPC attempting to topple the
governments of Mauritania and Algeria were reported.
But, in the recent debate over so-called "intelligence
failures", a pattern of wildly "exaggerating" known
threats has also been reported. And it is now also
widely accepted that such exaggerations provided the
basis for the US’s military involvement in Iraq.

The GSPC has been long fighting to topple the Algerian
government and install an Islamic state. But this
resistance arose after the Algerian government canceled
the 1992 election in order to "keep an Islamic party
from coming to power", according to the Toronto Star.
And while the pro-US Mauritania government of Maaouyah
Ould Sid Ahmed Taya fought off a June 2003 coup
attempt, it was believed to have been launched by the
country’s own military, not the GSPC, as was widely
reported.

Taya himself came to power in a 1984 coup and elections
in that country are broadly described as "suspect."
Mauritania is also widely acknowledged as a country
where slavery still exists, and the Washington Times
reported in July 2003 that "Mr Taya, like other pro-
American leaders in the Arab world, has cracked down on
political and religious opposition."

Paradoxically, if US National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice’s so-called "democratic wave" were to
actually engulf the region, it appears that hardest hit
would be the bulk of US allies. But Mauritania and
Algeria both have oil.

In a perspective of the oil industry shared by many in
the non-governmental organization community, in a
January interview with Asia Times Online, Jim Paul,
executive director of the New York-based Global Policy
Forum, observed: "The oil industry is all about super-
profits. Since everyone is pursuing this, and the
marketplace doesn’t effectively regulate it, there’s
been war, bribery and corruption virtually wherever the
oil industry goes."

In 2002, Rice’s old firm, Chevron Texaco (she was a
director), had said that while it invested US$5 billion
in Africa over the previous five years, it would invest
$20 billion over the next five.

Given such US energy investment, it’s no surprise that
a 2002 edition of Alexander’s Gas & Oil Connections, a
highly respected industry newsletter, said in a
headline: "US moves to protect interest in African
oil." And while several authorities were quoted as
emphasizing that Africa’s oil supplies were free from
any major threats, the piece added that the Bush
administration was determined to "ensure that they
remain so."

But a steady evolution — and deterioration — of the
African security environment has been reported to the
media by US officials. Whereas in 2002 the continent
offered apparently stable oil field conditions, that
assessment was changed almost simultaneously with the
level of domestic US pressures to acquire African oil;
a substantive al-Qaeda threat materializing
proportionate to the need for oil. And some believe
that Secretary of State Colin Powell best illustrated a
methodology that explained such circumstances last
summer.

At a July 10 press conference in South Africa, Powell
was asked how he would respond to critics who charged
that the US’s new focus on Africa was really about
African oil. Powell replied that "we are not here for
any other purpose than to demonstrate our friendship,
to demonstrate our commitment, and to see if we can
help people in need."

Recent questions have been raised in the US Congress
regarding the administration’s apparent pursuit of
cynical ploys and misleading verbiage in its
pronouncements.

As regards help for those in need, the tiny West
African island-state of Sao Tome has been rumored since
2002 as the site for a potential US naval base. Sao
Tome’s strategic position in the Gulf of Guinea, where
recent deep-water oil finds have been made, led to a
meeting between Bush and Sao Tome’s then-president
Fradique de Menezes in 2002.

The US allies in the area have virtually no blue-water
navy, and Sao Tome holds jointly with Nigeria an area
with a reported potential of 11 billion barrels of oil.
Many of the other newly discovered African reserves are
located offshore as well.

While a July 2003 military coup — which shortly
followed Powell’s African trip — ousted president de
Menezes, within the past two weeks (this March) said
"US experts" began training the island’s security
apparatus, voicing concerns about al-Qaeda operating in
the West African region.

As a US Defense Department document this winter by Dr
Jeffrey Record said: "The contemporary language on
terrorism has become, as Conor Gearty puts it, ’the
rhetorical servant of the established order’." It
emphasized that almost nothing matters "a jot against
the contemporary power of the terrorist label".

[Ritt Goldstein is an American investigative political
journalist based in Stockholm. His work has appeared
in broad sheets such as Australia’s Sydney Morning
Herald, Spain’s El Mundo and Denmark’s Politiken, as
well as with the Inter Press Service (IPS), a global
news agency.]