Washington, DC — Africa has increasing strategic significance for the United States, an importance often overshadowed by a focus on humanitarian concerns, according to a report by a Task Force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.
A broader based policy is needed, taking into account the continent's importance as an energy source and as an arena of rising competition with China and a crucial battleground in fighting terror and combating HIV/Aids, the report concluded.
In an interview following release of the report this week, the Task Force two co-chairs outlined their group's chief findings and how it might influence the policymaking process. Anthony Lake, who currently teaches at Georgetown University, directed the National Security Council staff at the White house during the first Clinton administration. Christine Todd Whitman, a former governor of New Jersey, headed the Environmental Protection Agency during President George W. Bush's first term.
Now that you have issued this lengthy document, how do you expect it to impact on policymaking?
Lake: We are very concerned that we reach a broad audience and say: listen, pay attention, things are happening in Africa - the role of terrorism, competition with the Chinese, the extraordinary new importance of Africa when it comes to energy resources, a growing importance.
We need to pay attention, and it is hard to get that message out because so many Americans think of Africa as simply a basket case, a place where there are famines and wars. Not the kind of progress the report is trying to put out there. So we are working on how to get a broader American audience who can try to not only stir interest in policy prescriptions - , and there are many in this report - but to get across the idea that as Africans are more and more getting involved in their own peace-keeping, making economic process here and there, becoming more democratic in many parts of Africa, that there is a partner there that we can work with, not just in their interest but in ours.
As a former policymaker yourself, how do you hope to reach those who sit in the corridors of power?
Lake: I suppose there is a role for task forces like this and for meetings with policy makers, but I think it is more important to somehow to get it across to the American public that the image of Africa that they have is wrong.
Don't policymakers share these misperceptions?
Lake: Some policy makers certainly don't and some may, but we will be working on it.
There have been polls showing that Americans may be more willing to help Africa than their government is. Take the example of the Rwanda genocide in 1994. Wasn't the American public more inclined to get involved than the Clinton administration and Congress?
Lake: No, that was not the case. I have spoken many times on how deeply I wish we could do that over. I have talked a lot about my own failure to press the issue within the administration. The problem with Rwanda was not recognizing what was going on.
The heart of the matter was that we never had a senior meeting on deciding whether or not to intervene ourselves. We almost never- in fact, never got recommendations from NGOs to intervene. There were some editorials about how terrible the problem was, but essentially it has only been in retrospect that we have reached this consensus that we should have done far more than we did.
And as I say repeatedly, we only earn the right to be critical of ourselves and of others over what happened in Rwanda if we now concentrate on Darfur and Eastern Congo and HIV/Aids and famine and all the other humanitarian problems on the continent.
But Darfur is getting attention. There have been many pronouncements and denunciations.
Lake: And not nearly enough is being done. The African Union has seven thousand or so troops there with a very shaky mandate. They need probably twelve thousand or more and haven't been able to find them. They are short by a hundred million and more dollars in resources, and I think it is unconscionable that Congress and the administration and all of us have not done more to get all those resources. Which is why I believe that NATO should be intervening in some fashion to provide a bridge until more troops can arrive there from the AU and from the UN, because, the situation, again, is deteriorating.
And you are linking that failure to act to the pervasively negative perception of Africa?
Lake: Partly, yes. And as I have said before, I don't know whether it was worse not to have said very much about Rwanda and not to have done very much about Rwanda, or to say a lot about Darfur and not to do very much about Darfur. Take your pick. Both are very bad.
So the central take-away from the Task force report is that Africa is a lot more complex and significantly more strategic than is generally recognized?
Lake: And a lot more hopeful. And if we don't take a strategic view and be building African peace-keeping capabilities and competing more effectively for energy resources and working more on good governance and supporting the Africans who are working on that, then five or ten years from now, we can be saying to ourselves, looking back on this period, why didn't we take a more strategic view to try to head off the problems you can anticipate five or ten years from now.
As someone who has been involved in policymaking at the highest levels, what do you hope that a Task Force report can achieve in terms of changed approaches?
Whitman: Obviously, a lot of the responsibility for outreach will rest with us - getting it to the appropriate decision-makers in the House and Senate and getting it to the White House. We hope to have opportunities to testify. But the other thing we are trying to do is to engage other communities - the business community, pharmaceuticals, NGOs - and giving them a report like this with which to work. We hope it will help pique their interest, and they can put pressure on the policymakers as well.
One of the most difficult challenges we face is that there are so many committees on the Hill [i.e. the U.S. Congress], for instance, who have some part of some program that impacts Africa, so many parts of the federal government that have some program, some monies that go to Africa. It is this lack of cohesion and any one place where you can get that 30,000-foot overview of what is going on, what are we doing, what are we committing to. Are all of these programs what we really want to support? Are they all in our best interest?
So that is one of the purposes of this report?
Whitman: Right, to focus people.
But decision makers don't have or take the time to read a lengthy report.
Whitman: No, but their staff does. That is where you go. They have a lot of influence, and you spend time with staff, and you educate them. We have been doing that and, obviously, the Council on Foreign Relations is very good at that.
The report discusses widespread misperceptions of Africa. How many policymakers share these misperceptions?
Whitman: A lot of them. Many of them have never been to Africa, don't really understand the magnitude of the differences and the importance of culture, of local culture and local ways and folk ways and how that impacts on policy and the ability to implement policies, how you talk about certain issues.
It is a challenge in this country. I don't know what the statistics are today about the number of Representatives in the House and members of the Senate who do not have passports. But it used to be extraordinarily high in the past, and that is something that makes any kind of international discussion much more difficult from a truly substantive point of view.
You've said the Task Force was a learning experience. What did you find out about Africa that was new to you?
Whitman: Particularly the involvement of China in Africa and the strategic advantage that China sees in establishing relations with governments that I think has completely by-passed the United States. Not that China is an enemy, but they are certainly a major competitor and getting to be a bigger competitor everyday. And with the U.S balance of payments, we need to concerned, particularly with oil. No matter what we do on conservation and renewable resources here, and even with new explorations, we are still going to be looking for new fields of oil, and clearly Africa offers enormous potential.
Another thing was getting into even more depth and scope of the Aids pandemic/epidemic. One of the things that we heard is there are actual communities, even states for that matter, that are in danger of just disappearing from the face of the earth because of the toll of HIV/Aids. And the best recruitment center for terrorists is those communities where there is no hope, where you have enormous poverty and unemployment. We know that women are the best of the workforce. That has been proven time and again in many of the developing countries. You are not only losing that productivity. Kids are losing mothers, and very often they are the ones that hold the families together, so you have all these orphans. You are just creating a time bomb, and that is what you have to worry about with this, beyond the humanitarian part of this.
You mentioned your particular interest in the environmental connection between Africa and the United States. What are some specific actions that need to be taken?
Whitman: First of all, one of the things that the developed world - this not just the United States - needs to do more of is technology transfer. And we need to work with countries to help them find alternatives - first of all to use some of the new technology that we have and that we have learnt about, and something as simple as farming practices. If you look at the number of children and women, in particular, who die from water-borne diseases because of lack of access to clean drinking water, then you look at farming practices in the surrounding areas, you will find some very direct cause-and-effect links.
Those things need to be addressed because you are having an enormous impact on the economy, on the society, on everything. And you can, and it doesn't take much. You need to do it in a way that relates to what those farmers understand and need. But you can do it, and we need to be more focused on those kinds of issues.
Then, of course, land-use practices. There was a study funded by NASA some four years ago that said that over the last two hundred years, you would have had to double the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere to have the same impact on climate change as land-use policies during that time period had. That was during the industrial revolution. You are talking about development, farming practices and deforestation and you have deforestation, development and farming practice changes occurring throughout Africa. That is affecting the global climate as well.
What about the applicability of alternative energy sources in Africa.
Whitman: Oh yeah. The one that would leap to mind is photovoltaic, solar. They probably have a much better opportunity to get photovoltaic into base power, whereas in this country it is really just peak shaving. We can't store it well enough. It is not economic, in most places, to have it used as your ongoing reliable power source.
In many countries there, it is, and it should be looked at. One of the things we saw when I was over at the World Summit on Sustainable Development is that many of the power sources that are used in some of the poorest countries are burning dung, burning wood in homes without a lot of ventilation. So what you have lung diseases. You have people dying of bad air they are creating for themselves.
We need to emphasize different sources of energy within their scope, energy that they can use. Not some nuclear facility that will never get built and that they will never have access to, but rather, smaller sources of energy that represent real power options but also a much cleaner, healthier environment for Africa..
Task Force Members
Lael Brainard holds the New Century Chair in international economics at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Brainard served as Deputy Assistant to the President for International Economics, Deputy National Economic Adviser, and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council under President Bill Clinton.
J. Dennis Bonney served as Vice-Chairman of Chevron Corporation, with responsibility for worldwide oil and gas production, before becoming a business consultant. His thirty-five-year Chevron career was spent mainly in the international sector, including the company's operations in a number of countries in Africa.
Chester A. Crocker holds the James R. Schlesinger Chair in Strategic Studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. Dr. Crocker served for eight years as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under President Ronald Reagan.
Alex de Waal is a Fellow at the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University and Director of the London-based organization, Justice Africa. Dr. de Waal is the author of Islamism and Its Enemies in the Horn of Africaand Darfur: A Short History of a Long War.
Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. Dr. Eberstadt researches demographics, foreign aid, poverty, infant mortality, health disparities, and economic development.
Richard Furman is the Co-Founder of the World Medical Missions and heads the medical ministry of Samaritan's Purse. Samaritan's Purse supports medicine throughout the world by providing doctors, surgeons, internists, and supplies to areas without sufficient medical capabilities.
Helene D. Gayle is Director of the HIV, TB, and Reproductive Health Program for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. During her twenty-year career, prior to joining the Gates Foundation, Dr. Gayle served in a variety of positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and retired as Rear Admiral (Assistant Surgeon General) in the U.S. Public Health Service. She is on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Institute of Medicine, and President of the International AIDS Society.
Victoria K. Holt is a Senior Associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center and is the Co-Director of the Future of Peace Operations program. She coauthored a study of peacekeeping reforms at the UN, analyzing implementation of the recommendations for the 2000 Brahimi Report and offering option for further improving peace operations. Ms. Holt served as a Senior Policy Adviser at the Department of State under President Bill Clinton.
Gregory G. Johnson is a retired Navy Admiral. Admiral Johnson most recently served as Commander, Naval Forces Europe (and Africa), and Commander, Allied Forces Southern Europe. He also served in several high-level policy positions, including Executive Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1990-93, and Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense from 1997-2000.
Richard A. Joseph is the John Evans Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. Dr. Joseph has devoted his scholarly career to understanding political developments in Africa and directed the Africa Governance Program at the Carter Center between 1988 and 1994. Among his many publications is State, Conflict, and Democracy in Africa.
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Anthony Lake, Co-Chair of the Task Force, is a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Dr. Lake served as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs under President Bill Clinton. He is the author of several books, including Somoza Falling and The "Tar Baby" Option: American Policy toward Southern Rhodesia, and is coauthor of Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmasking of American Foreign Policy.
Nicholas P. Lapham is President of African Parks Foundation of America. Mr. Lapham was also Vice President for policy at Conservation International, Senior Program Officer for environment at the UN Foundation, and Senior Adviser to the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Clinton.
Rick A. Lazio is on the Executive Committee at J. P. Morgan where he directs government relations. Mr. Lazio served as a U.S. Representative (R-NY) for eight years. He was also the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Financial Services Forum, an organization aimed at ensuring the stability of global financial systems.
Princeton N. Lyman, Project Co-Director of the Task Force, is the Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow and Director of Africa Policy Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ambassador Lyman served as U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa and is the author of Partner to History: The U.S. Role in South Africa's Transition to Democracy.
J. Stephen Morrison, Project Co-Director of the Task Force, is Director of the CSIS Africa Program. From 1996 through early 2000, Dr. Morrison served on the Secretary of State's Policy Planning staff, where he was responsible for African affairs and global foreign assistance issues. At CSIS, he initiated the CSIS Task Force on HIV/AIDS in 2001, has directed a succession of major policy reviews, and has published widely on terrorism, energy, conflict, and HIV/AIDS challenges in Africa. Since 1994, he has been an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Raymond C. Offenheiser is President of Oxfam America. Mr. Offenheiser has been the Ford Foundation Representative in several countries and regions and has directed programs for the Inter-American Foundation in South America. He serves on several advisory boards, including the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Michael E. O'Hanlon is a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, specializing in U.S. defense strategy and budgeting, homeland security, and U.S. foreign policy. Dr. O'Hanlon is also a visiting lecturer at Princeton University and coauthor of The Future of Arms Control.
Samantha Power is a Professor of Human Rights Practice at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She is author of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner for general nonfiction, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide.
John H. Ricard serves as a Member of the Administrative Board of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and Chair of Catholic Relief Services. Before being installed as the Fourth Bishop of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee in 1997, Bishop Ricard was Chairman of the Domestic Policy Committee of the United States Conference on Catholic Bishops while Auxiliary Bishop of Baltimore.
Gayle Smith is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress where she continues her near twenty-year career in African affairs. Ms. Smith is an Adviser to the U.N. Commission on HIV/AIDS and Governance in Africa, and is a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution. She is co-author of The Other War: Global Poverty and the Millennium Challenge Account.
Christine Todd Whitman, Co-Chair of the Task Force, was appointed Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in 2000 and held the post until her retirement in 2003. She was Governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001 and is author of It's My Party, Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America.
