Is the time finally right for a pan-African security force?

Mali, CAR, Somalia, and DRC
Speaking at a press conference on Saturday, summit host, French President François Hollande stressed that, “Africa should be able to get together to intervene and react swiftly to crises. Therefore, a rapid reaction force should take place in the coming months.”

Many national leaders at the two-day Paris meeting repeated the phrase “African solutions to African problems,” but the situation on the ground is more complex.

The French military interventions in Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR) have highlighted the challenges confronting purely African solutions to the continent’s problems.

“Although we are very grateful to France [for its interventions] it was still a humiliation for Africa because fifty years after independence, we have not been able to solve our own problems,” said Guinean President Alpha Condé during a working session on Friday.

The situation is complex because if the French interventions in Mali and the CAR have exposed the weaknesses of security structures in Africa, African interventions in Somalia and Congo do show that at least in some cases, there are African solutions to African problems.

The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) has performing much better than expected in a country where U.S. and UN forces have failed.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, AU forces in partnership with UN troops and the Congolese army recently managed to defeat M23 rebels and force it to disarm.

Patrick Smith, editor of the Africa Report, told France24 that the combination of the recent AU peacekeeping successes in Somalia and Congo, and the lessons from Mali and the CAR, have lent a renewed urgency to the longstanding mission to create a pan-African standby force.

“I think it’s substantive,” said Smith, referring to new moves to get the ASF off the ground. “If you see what happened in the Congo for instance, I think that has emboldened governments in Africa to do more.”

Smith added, however, that “It’s very important to get political approval from African leaders about the structure and terms under which this force will operate.”

Missed deadlines
The current structure of the ASF was created at the 2002 African Union (AU) Durban summit. A year later a timetable was fashioned, which called for the ASF to be operational by 2010.

The deadline was missed, and the date of the beginning of operations was postponed to 2013, and has recently been pushed back by two more years, to 2015.

Philippe Hugon, a researcher at the Paris-based IRIS (Institut de Relations Internationales et Strategiques) told France24 that the 2015 target is achievable, but only as an organizational chart.”

The ASF’s organizational structure is divided into five regional zones — eastern, western, southern, central, and northern — with the headquarters in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.

The plan calls for each of the five regional standby forces to have brigades of about 3,000 troops, providing the continental ASF with a combined standby capacity of about 15,000 troops. The development of the five regional brigades has been uneven. The Nairobi-based Eastern African Standby Force (EASF), for example, has made considerable progress in establishing military and police components. Other regional standby forces exist only on the organizational chart.

There two reasons why four of the five regional standby forces have been slow to take shape.

The first is that leaders of states speaking at a summit may find it easy to talk about the ASF idea, but when they come back home they typically encounter an entrenched institutional resistance to the idea that in some cases national government and militaries would have to relinquish their national command authorities to a continental command structure.

It appears that in at least some cases, this particular objection could be dealt with by relying on already-existing regional frameworks and blocs — such as the West African ECOWAS and the Southern African SADC – to assuage anxieties about the loss of national control.

The bigger obstacle appears to be the reluctance of members of regional ASFs to be under the dominance of regional heavyweights. “In West Africa, Francophone [French-speaking] countries do not necessarily want to be under the control of a powerful [English-speaking] Nigeria,” noted Hugon.

Who will pay the bill, who will train the troops?
Unease about the influence of regional heavyweight is closely tied to the ASF’s critical funding challenge. “Bigger countries such as Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt are prepared to increase their funding. But the smaller countries are not happy with that because they think it will affect their influence,” said Smith.

At the Paris summit last week, EU President Herman Van Rompuy said the EU would provide €50 million to support the AU mission in the CAR, which is working in partnership with French troops on the ground. He also noted that Brussels has created a fund of nearly €1 billion to support African peacekeeping forces.

Western power, especially France, have been training African national armies and security forces for decades, with different levels of success.

France, for example, has pledged help in logistics and training, with Hollande announcing that Paris would be training 20,000 African soldiers over the next five years.

France, however, has trained the militaries of several African states, and these militaries, when challenged, fell woefully short. The most recent example is Mali, the military of which had been under French tutelage for a long time. Yet, following the fall of Col. Qaddafi in Libya in late fall 2011, when thousands of armed Touregs who served in pro-Qaddafi militias fled with their weapons back to Mali and joined an indigenous Islamist group to attack to Mali army in north Mali, the army folded rather than stand and fight.

The army which was trained to protect the Sahel against Islamist incursions proved a hollow structure.

In March 2012, a U.S.-trained Malian officer, Captain Amadou Sanogo, overthrew the country’s democratically elected president in a military, leading to the jihadists taking over northern Mali and declaring it the independent state of Azawad.

Sanogo did not reorganize the military and retrained it in order to go north to fight the jihadists and reunify the country. Instead, he sent soldiers to collect “protection” money from businesses and beat up journalists who criticized his corruption and incompetence.

It took a French expeditionary force of more than 4,000 troops to evict the Islamists from north Mali in February 2013, and reunify the country.

Still, France24 notes that notwithstanding the many failures of the past, and the many warning signs of the present, many African leaders and observers are optimistic that this time, the 50-year old dream of a pan-African military force may well be realized. Senegalese President Macky Sall noted at the Paris summit on Saturday, “I agree it didn’t work in the past. But there is a new perception that defense has become an urgent matter to create development. If there is no security, there’s no development.”