{"id":10879,"date":"2012-07-17T11:35:22","date_gmt":"2012-07-17T18:35:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=10879"},"modified":"2012-07-17T11:35:22","modified_gmt":"2012-07-17T18:35:22","slug":"secret-wars-secret-bases-and-the-pentagons-new-spice-route-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=10879","title":{"rendered":"Secret Wars, Secret Bases, and the Pentagon\u2019s \u201cNew Spice Route\u201d in Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Secret Wars, Secret Bases, and the Pentagon\u2019s \u201cNew Spice Route\u201d in Africa<\/em><\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s Scramble for Africa<\/strong>
\nBy Nick Turse – Tom Dispatch – 12 July, 2012 <\/p>\n

They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today\u2019s \u201cspice road\u201d has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks. Instead, it\u2019s a superpower\u2019s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment through a growing maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of supply depots, tiny camps, and airfields meant to service a fast-growing U.S. military presence in Africa. <\/p>\n

Few in the U.S. know about this superhighway, or about the dozens of training missions and joint military exercises being carried out in nations that most Americans couldn\u2019t locate on a map. Even fewer have any idea that military officials are invoking the names of Marco Polo and the Queen of Sheba as they build a bigger military footprint in Africa. It\u2019s all happening in the shadows of what in a previous imperial age was known as \u201cthe Dark Continent.\u201d<\/p>\n

In East African ports, huge metal shipping containers arrive with the everyday necessities for a military on the make. They\u2019re then loaded onto trucks that set off down rutted roads toward dusty bases and distant outposts.<\/p>\n

On the highway from Djibouti to Ethiopia, for example, one can see the bare outlines of this shadow war at the truck stops where local drivers take a break from their long-haul routes. The same is true in other African countries. The nodes of the network tell part of the story: Manda Bay, Garissa, and Mombasa in Kenya; Kampala and Entebbe in Uganda; Bangui and Djema in the Central African Republic; Nzara in South Sudan; Dire Dawa in Ethiopia; and the Pentagon\u2019s showpiece African base, Camp Lemonnier, in Djibouti on the coast of the Gulf of Aden, among others.<\/p>\n

According to Pat Barnes, a spokesman for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), Camp Lemonnier serves as the only official U.S. base on the continent. \u201cThere are more than 2,000 U.S. personnel stationed there,\u201d he told TomDispatch recently by email. \u201cThe primary AFRICOM organization at Camp Lemonnier is Combined Joint Task Force — Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA). CJTF-HOA’s efforts are focused in East Africa and they work with partner nations to assist them in strengthening their defense capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barnes also noted that Department of Defense personnel are assigned to U.S. embassies across Africa, including 21 individual Offices of Security Cooperation responsible for facilitating military-to-military activities with \u201cpartner nations.\u201d He characterized the forces involved as small teams carrying out pinpoint missions. Barnes did admit that in \u201cseveral locations in Africa, AFRICOM has a small and temporary presence of personnel. In all cases, these military personnel are guests within host-nation facilities, and work alongside or coordinate with host-nation personnel.\u201d
\n
\n Shadow Wars<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2003, when CJTF-HOA was first set up there, it was indeed true that the only major U.S. outpost in Africa was Camp Lemonnier. In the ensuing years, in quiet and largely unnoticed ways, the Pentagon and the CIA have been spreading their forces across the continent. Today — official designations aside — the U.S. maintains a surprising number of bases in Africa. And \u201cstrengthening\u201d African armies turns out to be a truly elastic rubric for what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

Under President Obama, in fact, operations in Africa have accelerated far beyond the more limited interventions of the Bush years: last year\u2019s war in Libya; a regional drone campaign with missions run out of airports and bases in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Seychelles; a flotilla of 30 ships in that ocean supporting regional operations; a multi-pronged military and CIA campaign against militants in Somalia, including intelligence operations, training for Somali agents, a secret prison, helicopter attacks, and U.S. commando raids; a massive influx of cash for counterterrorism operations across East Africa; a possible old-fashioned air war, carried out on the sly in the region using manned aircraft; tens of millions of dollars in arms for allied mercenaries and African troops; and a special ops expeditionary force (bolstered by State Department experts) dispatched to help capture or kill Lord\u2019s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and his senior commanders. And this only begins to scratch the surface of Washington\u2019s fast-expanding plans and activities in the region. …more<\/a><\/p>\n

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Secret Wars, Secret Bases, and the Pentagon\u2019s \u201cNew Spice Route\u201d in Africa Obama\u2019s Scramble for Africa By Nick Turse – Tom Dispatch – 12 July, 2012 They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today\u2019s \u201cspice road\u201d has nothing to do more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[3206],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10879"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10879"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10881,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10879\/revisions\/10881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}