Backed
by tanks, armored vehicles and plenty of EU cash, thousands of African soldiers
took on an imaginary enemy in the arid heart of South Africa this week, the
last joint exercises before a homegrown continental strike force goes live.
Standing
on far-away hilltops, commanders peered through night vision goggles and issued
orders through helmet-mounted radios to the 5,400 troops simulating a dawn
assault on rebels in the fictitious city of Kalasi marked out in the bush.
The
orderly maneuvers and high-tech kit elicited purrs of approval from military
chiefs who tout the rapid-reaction battalion - a key part of a long-awaited
African Standby Force (ASF) - as the antidote to insurrections spiraling into
civil war or even genocide.
"This
is an important milestone in our endeavor to create a tool that will be at our
disposal should we require to intervene to quell violence," South African
Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula said at an opening parade.
But
analysts say the ASF, which attains "full operational capability" in
December, still faces two major challenges: funding, and forging the political
agreement among 54 countries to send in troops - if need be without being
invited.
"The
big elephant in the room here is political will - the will to deploy without
national consent, for instance," said Thomas Mandrup, an expert in African
security and governance at the Royal Danish Defence College.
Under
original African Union (AU) plans, each of the continent's five regions - north,
south, east, west and central - are meant to provide a brigade of 5,000 troops
to the force.
But in a
sign of potential divisions, North Africa sent only staff officers to this
month's exercises, not troops, a reflection of the domestic political turmoil
in the region.
Without
the likes of Egypt and Algeria, the ASF will lack much of the air-lift
capability crucial to any rapid deployment.
Instead,
ASF operations are likely to become a "coalition of the willing",
Mandrup said, much as South Africa, Tanzania and Kenya have done in United
Nations-backed peacekeeping and intervention missions across Africa.
Recent
security crises in Africa include coups in Guinea-Bissau, Mali and Burkina
Faso, offensives by Islamist militant groups in Mali, Nigeria and Somalia, and
conflict between rebels in eastern Congo and Central African Republic.
FOREIGN
FUNDING
The
polished nature of this week's war games stood in contrast to decades of
underinvestment that has left African armies poorly equipped and trained, blunting
the AU's ability to launch speedy responses to political or humanitarian
crises.
Nowhere
was this more evident than Mali in 2013 when former colonial power France,
rather than the AU, rushed in troops and planes to block the advance of
Islamist jihadists sweeping south from the Sahara.
Since
2004, the European Union has committed more than 1.3 billion euros to African
peace operations, including 225 million euros in 2014 for missions to Somalia,
the Central African Republic and Mali.
In all,
more than 90 percent of AU peace and security efforts are funded by the likes
of the EU and United States, although AU member states have pledged to provide
a quarter of the funding for operations by 2020.
However,
the concern remains that if Africa does control the purse-strings of the
military force, it cannot control the outcomes.
Underlining
the problem, the EU is even bankrolling this month's exercises, casting a
shadow over the "African solutions for African problems" mantra
espoused by politicians in national capitals and the AU headquarters in Addis
Ababa.
"The
external support for defense spending in Africa is, in my view, a major foreign
policy handicap," said David Anderson, professor of African history at
Britain's University of Warwick.
"African
states will truly own their defense and security when they pay for it
themselves," he added. "There is no greater marker of sovereignty and
independence than security and defense."
Source: Reuters
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