Tuesday Links 11.25.08

via Meg Rorison's photostream

Mauritanian Dictators Prefer Botnets (Strategy Page, 11/18)
http://tinyurl.com/6658r7
"Mauritanian generals apparently hired several botnets to smother the anti-dictatorship websites with DDOS attacks."

O3B Networks Introduces Bundled IP Trunking Solution for Telcos and ISP's (O3B, 11/18)
http://tinyurl.com/58cgzw
"O3b Networks Ltd. today introduced its first turn-key offering. 'Quick Start Africa' is a, Carrier Managed Service designed for Telcos and ISPs on the African continent who need a high capacity, ultra low latency, carrier class IP trunking solution."

Mobile Finance- Indigenous, Ingenious or Both? (Kiwanji, 11/21)
http://tinyurl.com/5qv8yk
"In Ghana it's popularly known as susu. In Cameroon, tontines or chilembe. And in South Africa, stokfel. Today you'd most likely call it plain-old microfinance, the nearest term we have for it. Age-old indigenous credit schemes have run perfectly well without much outside intervention for generations, although in our excitement to implement new technologies and 'solutions' we sometimes fail to recognise them."

Troop Deployment to DR Congo Good First Step; Immediate Action Still Needed (Refugees International, 11/20)
http://tinyurl.com/5qglk3
While the UN Security Council authorized 3,000 new peace keepers in DRC, "Refugees International continued to call for the European Union to immediately deploy a short-term rapid reaction force that can defend strategic towns until UN reinforcements arrive, and allow the UN peacekeeping mission to reorganize itself."

AFRICOM Moving Away From Development Assistance?

On Thursday, General William Ward, Commander of AFRICOM, testified on Capital Hill. According to J Stephen Morrison from CSIS, they takeaway seems to be that AFRICOM is moving away from the development and humanitarian assistance space, and focusing on the more traditional bilateral military partnerships and emergency relief matters where they have unique capacity.

This statement may placate much of the development community who worried about massive Pentagon budgets usurping their turf, but I'm still wondering where AFRICOM will fit into the US counter-terrorism policy that is explicitly about "capturing or killing terrorists and countering the conditions that breed violence and extremism."

Can AFRICOM be a force for good towards the latter goal? For those interested in seeing where the U.S. currently focuses most of its counter-terrorism efforts, check out Al-Qaida's (Mis)Adventures in the Horn of Africa. Spoiler: it's not Somalia.

AFRICOM, the American Military and Public Diplomacy in Africa

For those in DC tomorrow, my dear friend Vanessa is organizing the Annenberg Washington Series:

AFRICOM, the American Military and Public Diplomacy in Africa
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

In 2007, the U.S. established a new military command for the continent of Africa. According to the Department of Defense, AFRICOM recognizes "the emerging strategic importance of Africa, and recognizing that peace and stability on the continent impacts not only Africans, but the interests of the U.S. and international community as well." Led by USC Annenberg journalism and public diplomacy professor Philip Seib, author of the forthcoming The Al Jazeera Effect: How the New Global Media Are Reshaping World Politics, this program offers the first thorough, independent examination of AFRICOM, which promises not only to reshape America's strategic approach to Africa, but also will redefine the role of the military in public diplomacy. Areas for discussion include soft power and American strategy in Africa, the relationship between the military and foreign policy agencies, and African responses to this initiative. 4 p.m., University of Southern California Washington Office. 701 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C.

Researching AFRICOM

I spent much of last week thinking about the overlap between security and development at a conference called Countering Terrorism in Africa Through Human Security Solutions. Part of the purpose of the conference was to develop a research agenda. Here is a quick napkin sketch of what I see as one critical research need.

Starting from the big picture, U.S. counterterrorism policy is explicitly about "capturing or killing terrorists and countering the conditions that breed violence and extremism." However, the impetus for many recent conferences is that we aren't doing the second half of the equation very well.

In Africa, the experimental grounds for this two-pronged strategy are in two places: Combined Joint Task Force- Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) and the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership (TSCPTP). Put aside TSCPTP for a moment, CJTF-HOA aims to "enhance the long-term stability of the region." The research question then becomes:

(i) What is CJTF-HOA actually doing to seek this "long-term stability"?
How do they make decisions about what supports "long term security"?
Who are their partners?
What are the problems they face in attempting to implement this?
How would they measure success?

Then, if that doesn't fill up a research plate, one could add a normative component:

(ii) What could be a good framework for them to decide all of the above questions?

As a final note, I believe the AFRICOM question is interesting (vis a vis development) because of the reality that, as Colin Thomas-Jensen writes, "institutional changes within the U.S. government and a growing American constituency for Africa have coalesced to create a unique moment for Africa — an opportunity for Bush’s successor to take stock of past mistakes and aggressively pursue a coherent approach to Africa that furthers U.S. foreign policy objectives
and improve the lives of millions of Africans."