U.S. tries to win Africans in fight against terrorism
Aug 17, 2006 (MSATA, Tanzania) — The United States military looked at this tiny town in East Africa and saw something more than empty wells, a crumbling clinic and stretches of sun-baked dirt.
It saw an opportunity to fight terrorism — a scourge that the U.S. believes could fester unchecked in remote parts of this vast continent unless America makes friends, and fast.
“We feel the best way to counter terrorism is to go after conditions that foster terrorism,” U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Richard W. Hunt, commander of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, told reporters Thursday. “So we focus on medical care, education. We attack these causes right at the very root.”
In the past two weeks, the United States has helped refurbish a medical clinic here, upgrading the plumbing and painting the roof sea-foam green, and built another a few miles away. It provided medicine and did checkups for some 3,000 people, and performed similar humanitarian projects in rural areas of Uganda and neighboring Kenya.
The work comes at a time when America’s reputation in Africa is foundering. The U.S. State Department issued a travel warning last week to Americans in Kenya because of the risk of terrorism. Massive anti-U.S. demonstrations have taken place in Tanzania and Somalia to protest American support for Israel during the bloodshed in Lebanon. Some Somalis criticized the U.S. for supporting hated warlords who were recently ousted from the Somali capital by an Islamic group Washington has linked to al-Qaida. And the deadly 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are fresh memories here.
A conflict monitoring think tank, the International Crisis Group, has warned of the potential for terrorists to operate in Africa’s ungoverned regions, noting recently that chaotic Somalia is “the largest potential safe haven for al-Qaida in Africa.”
U.S Air Force Maj. David Westover, a task force spokesman, said, “We will continue to operate with a humanitarian focus” despite any rumblings of anti-U.S. sentiment in Africa. But, he noted, he had not experienced any such ill will during the project.
The Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa was formed in 2002, one year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., to “set conditions that are not conducive to extremist ideology,” according to a military statement.
Hunt acknowledged that extremist ideology is not readily apparent in Msata and the rest of Tanzania’s Bagamoyo District, a rural area home mainly to nomadic herdsmen and Maasai tribespeople, more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Dar es Salaam. But he said the task force wants to build conditions that never let such a dangerous ideology take hold.
“The terrorists will go after any area they think they can exploit,” Hunt said. “The trust and confidence developed between our two countries will yield great things in the future.”
Ali Zungo, walking out of the refurbished clinic in Masugulu carrying anti-bacterial soap and antibiotics, said the task force’s goals are admirable.
“I am very comfortable with the United States and I appreciate them very much,” he said, sniffling from a runny nose that’s been bothering him. “We are also against terrorism here, and we are trying our best to eradicate these people.”
But has he ever seen a terrorist out here in Masugulu, the next town over from Msata?
“No!” he said laughing. “Never.”
The projects in the Horn of Africa are led by more than 1,500 people from the U.S. military as well as doctors and soldiers from the host nations. The U.S. task force covers Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Seychelles, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
Brig. Gen. Salim Salim of the Tanzania People’s Defense Force sees one enormous benefit of working with the United States military.
“They come with beds, mattresses, tents. They can construct bridges. They come with trucks,” he said. “And they leave the trucks behind when they leave.”
(AP/ST)