INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

C-SPAN’S “NEWSMAKERS”

Guest: Theresa Whalen, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs

Reporters: Matthew Lee, AP and Jim Michaels, USA Today

Moderator: C-SPAN

TAPE DATE: Friday, August 10, 2007

AIR DATE/TIME: SUNDAY, August 12, 2007 at 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. ET

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SUSAN SWAIN, HOST: Our guest on Newsmakers this week is Theresa Whelan, who is deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs. Thank you for being with us.

And our reporters asking questions this week, Matthew Lee, writer for the Associated Press, and Jim Michaels, military writer of “USA Today.”

Our major topic of interest is an update on the formation of AFRICOM, which is the first change in combatant command since the structure was announced 20 years ago.

So, Matt Lee, I’m going to turn it over to you for the first question.

MATTHEW LEE, WRITER, ASSOCIATED PRESS: OK. Thank you.

I guess the best place to start on this for an audience that perhaps doesn’t know that much about AFRICOM and why it’s being created, is just if you could explain to us a little bit about what the president had in mind by announcing this and by creating this new command.

And then get into a little bit of details about the struggle or the debate over where it should be, where a permanent presence – if there is to be one on the continent – is going to be.

THERESA WHELAN, DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR AFRICAN AFFAIRS: OK, sure.

Well, I think, you know, we have our – within the Defense Department we’re divided amongst different unified commands, both regional and also functional commands. And we established this system after World War II, and it’s evolved over time as the strategic circumstances have dictated.

The current configuration of the commands, which divides Africa amongst three – Central Command, European Command and Pacific Command – came into being in 1983. And it was really, I think, a factor of the Cold War and a factor of U.S. foreign policy at the time and the way in which we saw Africa as through Cold War eyes and as part of the global competition with the Soviet Union. So, dividing the command up made sense.

Africa was viewed at the time, not as an end in itself from a strategic standpoint, but as a means to an end.

But, of course, when the Wall fell, I think a lot of – we began to reevaluate where Africa fit within our strategic thinking, globally. And that’s evolved considerably over the past 15 years or so.

Throughout the 1990s, our experiences in Africa changed. We were in Somalia. We were in Rwanda. We did numerous noncombatant evacuation operations.

And then, of course, we come into the 21st century – 9/11. And I think one of the striking things about 9/11, from a strategic analysis standpoint, is that it showed us that it didn’t take a large nation or a powerful military nation to be able to pose a threat to the United States.

Essentially, you had these dozen or so, two dozen people operating out of a very undeveloped state, very far away from the United States, which we didn’t pay attention to, that did more damage in less time, essentially, than the entire Japanese imperial navy did in World War II.

So, that really has, I think, impacted in terms of how we calculated where we had to pay attention, the places we had to pay attention to in terms of potential threats to the United States. And that put Africa, I think, back on the map in a much more serious way.

And that’s, I think, what prompted much of the rethinking about how are we paying attention to Africa, and are we optimized in terms of our structure from a DOD standpoint to address the challenges on the continent?

LEE: So, there is an evolving threat – an al Qaeda threat as well as potentially other threats – in Africa.

Where exactly do you envision putting this, if there is to be a structure, if there is to be a base for it in Africa? I understand it’s going to be in Stuttgart. At least at the beginning, it will stay there.

But where do you look at putting this, since you have a problem in Somalia, you have a problem in the east, and you have a problem all the way through to the Sahel, the Maghreb, and instability in Nigeria in the west, on a coast?

WHELAN: Sure. One thing I think is important to clarify is that the command, and our reorganizing ourselves within the Defense Department to focus on Africa, is not focused on a specific threat emanating from Africa.

What we’ve recognized is that, in an age where the threat situation globally is fluid, where threats can come from anywhere and you can’t really sort of play the Russian roulette game of saying, “OK, we need to be prepared for a threat to come from this part of the world and that part of the world and we can ignore the others,” you almost have to pay attention to everywhere. That makes the equation very difficult.

The only way to do that successfully is to have partners and essentially do in security what has happened in the economy. You globalize it, and everybody sort of depends on everybody else to watch each other’s backs.

And so, the command, in terms of focusing on Africa, is focusing on Africa to help build African security partners, help the African countries actually take care of their own backyards and provide secure and stable environments for themselves, which in turn we believe will actually have a knock-on effect in making the world more secure and stable for us.

So, it’s not that we’re saying, “OK, there’s a specific threat in this corner of the continent or that corner,” and so, we have to be located to address that specific threat. What we’re trying to say is, we want to help build African security capacity in general.

And so, in that context – to answer your question specifically – we have been talking with the African states and with the African Union in particular. And they have a security structure that they have developed – the African Union has – that emphasizes the development of this African standby force and African standby brigades that would be located in each of Africa’s five major regions.

And so, because we have talked to the African Union about how we can support this, they have advised us that, if we have any presence on the continent, it would be helpful if we could put our presence, or be present, in places where we can best cooperate with these elements of the African Union standby brigade.

And so, those are the kinds of things that we’re looking at right now in terms of trying to determine where we would want to have staff officers present to help work with those entities.

SWAIN: Jim Michaels?

JIM MICHAELS, MILITARY WRITER, “USA TODAY”: One area that’s gotten some attention recently – Somalia, of course. And there was a very extreme form of government there, Islamic courts for a while, that the United States considered working against U.S. interests.

Could you update a little bit about what’s happened there since, how we have supported Ethiopia and its movement into Somalia, what more direct involvement there might be in regards to the U.S. military?

And in addition to that, a little bit about – there were some reports that we were also backing some warlords that were opposing the Islamic courts movement early on, even before the Ethiopian incursion.

WHELAN: Yes. I think, as far as the warlord issue goes, I think the U.S. interest in Somalia since, actually, the bombings of our embassy in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and then again, repeated attacks in Mombasa in 2002, has been to bring to justice the perpetrators of those bombings, which killed Americans as well as Africans. And the perpetrators actually spent quite a bit of time in Somalia.

And so, consequently, I don’t think it would a surprise to anyone that we would be interested in collecting information and providing incentives to people in Somalia to provide us information on the whereabouts of those individuals.

Now, that was not something that the Defense Department was involved in. That was a U.S. government effort. So, that essentially was the issue with the warlords, is that basically we were interested in collecting information.

As to support for Ethiopia, Ethiopia took a strategic decision based on its own strategic interests and its perceived threat – the perceived threat to Ethiopia – from the Council of Islamic Courts government and its expansive tendencies. And it moved against Somalia last December.

We did not assist Ethiopia militarily in that move. We certainly talked to Ethiopia on a regular basis. But they took that decision on their own, not at our behest. And we have not provided them any direct military assistance that enabled them to go into Somalia.

We do, and have had, a good military-to-military relationship with Ethiopia on a bilateral basis. We do with a number of countries in that area, Kenya as well.

And so, we had been providing Ethiopians, in the past, training to facilitate counterterrorism operations, border security, things of that nature. But we did not directly support the Somalia action.

That said, their actions in Somalia did drive out the Islamic courts and actually presented some opportunities to capture some individuals who had been involved in or associated with the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. And so, that actually worked to our advantage.

MICHAELS: Just to follow up, I guess a couple of questions.

One, are the key perpetrators of the bombings – have they been captured yet? And these individuals that we think may be suspects in those acts of terrorism, are they in U.S. custody? Or are they in Ethiopian custody?

WHELAN: On the latter part, I really can’t comment.

And on the first question, one of the individuals we believe has passed on from this world. And that was a result of the action in December. We believe that he may have been killed during an engagement with Ethiopian forces, actually.

So, two others are still at large, and we’re still interested in bringing them to justice, one way or another.

LEE: Are you saying that the U.S. air strikes that took place in Somalia did not take out any of these high-value targets?

WHELAN: The air strikes led to the capture of one, but they did not actually kill any of the high-value targets, the two.

LEE: Going along the lines that Jim talked about in terms of U.S. engagement with Ethiopia and the Ethiopian military – in terms of professionalizing it and making it an operation that is under civilian control, presumably – this is the kind of thing that you see AFRICOM doing around the continent?

WHELAN: Yes, actually. It’s not really much different from the things that we’re doing now in other places around the continent. We do have a number of capacity-building programs going on in Africa in different places.

The Africa Command would essentially pick up that ball from three different commands right now and run it as a single command with a single four-star.

LEE: Well, as you are, I’m sure, well aware, there are a lot of misperceptions out there. There are a lot of fears among Africans about what this actually means.

And if, in fact, the goal of it is to do what you just said it is, why should certain leaders in Africa, who are perhaps more authoritarian or totalitarian, as the case may be, why should they not see this, the evolution of this command, as a threat?

WHELAN: Well, I mean, I think in many cases, actually, there are a few African leaders that are still sort of the “old school,” I guess you might say. But I think there’s been a lot of evolution politically in Africa.

AFRICOM is not a threat in the context of supporting U.S. military intervention – or anybody else’s military intervention – into African states in order to overthrow governments or anything of the like.

I think the key is the Africans, from our perspective, need to develop a greater capacity to deal with the security challenges they face in their own backyards, so that the international community – they don’t rise to the level where they’ve been neglected for so long that the international community is forced to come in en masse and attempt to try and address these crises.

There is a little phrase in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review that I think captures what we are trying to do with Africa Command. And that is, it says we must try to, in this age, prevent problems from becoming crises, and crises from becoming catastrophes or conflicts. And so, it sort of gets back to the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Now that, of course, makes economic sense. But now it’s also very important in this day and age in terms of threat mitigation. You want to try and deal with problems when they’re small, before they morph and become something that is much more difficult to deal with and much more challenging and much longer term.

And that’s what AFRICOM is about, the United States being involved in Africa – not in a reactive mode, which is how we’ve been involved in Africa, really for the past decade-and-a-half. Everything’s reactive. Somalia was reactive. Rwanda was reactive. Liberia was reactive …

LEE: Or non-reactive, as the case may be.

WHELAN: Or reactive later. I mean, we reacted …

LEE: Too late.

WHELAN: In some cases, the time at which we reacted would be considered too late. That’s part of the problem. The crisis morphs, because you’re not paying attention to it when it’s a smaller problem. The crisis expands and morphs and becomes a huge problem. And then everybody says, “You’re a day late and a dollar short. Where were you?”

So, consequently, by having a command, a geographic command like now every other region in the world – we have SOUTHCOM focuses on Latin America. Of course, CENTCOM, PACOM, et cetera – Africa was the only part of the world which the United States didn’t have a command with a primary focus on. Essentially, at best, on a good day Africa was a secondary or even a tertiary focus of the three commands.

So …

SWAIN: Ten minutes left.

MICHAELS: As a combatant command, it’s different. It’s a different approach than, I think, most other combatant commands, in the sense – I’ll call it almost a softer approach. You’re going to have a civilian deputy to the commander, which is unlike any other combatant command, and so forth.

And I guess my question is twofold. One is, critics have said this sort of militarizes a function that should be diplomatic and State Department. In other words, it sort of blurs the distinction between a military approach and a diplomatic approach.

And secondly is, why approach it this way? Why make it different than other combatant commands? Why not just have a very distinct State Department function which focuses on aid and diplomacy, and a combatant command that focuses on combat?

WHELAN: So your question assumes that the Africa Command is going to be doing the State Department’s job, and it’s not. Africa Command is going to be doing DOD’s job.

Why we want it to be different is, the commands that exist, their focus is on war fighting. I mean, that’s their nickname: the war-fighting commands. They’re supposed to fight and win the nation’s wars.

Africa Command is not necessarily designed to be a war-fighting command. I mean, its primary purpose is not to sit at the ready to jump in and fight a war in Africa. Its primary purpose is to be proactive and help build African capacity to deal with their own security problems, both land and maritime.

And so, that’s a fundamental mission. We’re sort of turning the mission set upside-down.

It’s not that Africa Command wouldn’t be able to do the necessary, if that becomes a requirement. But essentially what we’re saying is, we want to get involved before the fire breaks out, as opposed to just waiting around until the fire is a six-alarm blaze and everybody has to come in.

So, that’s why we want to make Africa Command different. But making it different and making it focus on proactive and preventative measures doesn’t mean that it’s going to do the State Department’s job or USAID’s job, or anybody else’s job. They do their jobs very well, and we have no desire to take over their job.

What we want to do, by integrating people from those agencies into the command, is not integrate authority, but simply integrate expertise and knowledge, expertise on Africa. The U.S. military, there are probably today within the U.S. Army, the entire U.S. Army, maybe 50 – and that might even be a little high – officers who specialize in Africa as an area of expertise.

We have very little expertise within the military on this part of the world. So, by bringing in these people from other agencies who have that expertise, we can sort of lower the learning curve a bit for the command.

We can also help the command in terms of identifying the places in other parts of the U.S. government that they need to interface with and coordinate with on security issues. Security – and one of our problems, one of the lessons learned over the last decade plus, is that we don’t – security, you can’t manage it in a stovepipe.

It’s not just a function of how well your military performs. It’s also a function of things like economic opportunity, good governance, rule of law. They all work together to make everything fit together and stand. But institutionally we’re organized in stovepipes.

And so, what we want to try and do is break down those stovepipes, so that we can work together more effectively – not that we’re going to do somebody else’s job. But just that, as we’re doing our job, it’s coordinated with the other folks who are doing their jobs. And therefore, we actually get a more effective product in the end.

LEE: Can I ask a specific question about what happens – the United States already has a military base in Africa, in Djibouti.

WHELAN: Right.

LEE: And when you talk about basing – the potential basing of AFRICOM on the continent, in Africa – why is Djibouti not being considered for this? And is it correct that the Joint Task Force there will remain with CENTCOM?

WHELAN: No, it will not remain with CENTCOM. Everything on the African continent, except for Egypt, will fall under the Africa Command. Egypt will continue to remain under CENTCOM administratively, although it will have the ability to interface with the Africa Command on Africa-related issues. Egypt is sort of in a unique spot.

But everything else falls under the Africa Command, including combined Joint Task Force HOA. And yes, we recently signed an agreement with the Djiboutians that will allow us to be there for at least five more years, and we intend to continue to have our presence there.

LEE: So that will be part of AFRICOM.

WHELAN: Yes, it will.

LEE: And where else can we expect to see – there has been a lot of talk about – a lot of places that have been discussed and a lot that have been thrown out, apparently, as it goes on.

WHELAN: Lots.

LEE: I’ve heard Tunis, Lagos, even getting down to South Africa – Cape Town, Durban, that kind of thing. Now the latest flavor of the day seems to be Sao Tome.

If you look at, especially in the west, in the Gulf of Guinea, there’s a lot of oil there – or people think there’s a lot of oil there. Where are you looking at?

You talk about the African Union having these five places that it would like to see staff officers. Where are those five?

WHELAN: Well, we are currently looking at the pros and cons of various possible locations. And then, of course, we’ll begin to reach out to countries, to ask them whether or not they want to host us.

Our basic premise is, we’re not going to go anywhere that we’re not invited and that we’re not wanted.

So, we’re beginning that process now. We haven’t engaged in it, despite a lot of the press chatter that the United States has been running around talking about basing in a lot of countries, making definitive statements.

The fact is, we haven’t said “boo” to anyone on a presence or where we’d like to be located.

There have been countries that have come to us and made offers. Those – with one exception – those have all been pretty private, so I won’t mention them here. The only one that has made it quite public is the president of Liberia.

But we’re sort of going through all that. There’s political issues and there are also practical issues.

LEE: Is it possible that there won’t be any permanent presence for AFRICOM on the continent?

WHELAN: I suppose anything is possible. I’m not going to rule out and say that we’ve come to a hard and fast decision on exactly what we’re going to do.

I think our desire is to have some presence on the continent, staff presence on the continent, partly because of what I was saying a bit ago about our lack of knowledge about the continent itself. You really can’t understand Africa unless you spend some time there, unless you live there.

And so, establishing a command headquarters in a place thousands of miles away where people sit around in Dilbert cubicles and come up with good ideas based on watching movies like “Blood Diamonds” or reading books, that’s no way to really understand the security challenges we face.

SWAIN: Two minutes left. Last question?

MICHAELS: Yes, if I could just follow on to the security challenge.

The AFRICOM approach is a very sort of methodical, lengthy approach to the threat. But how imminent is the al Qaeda threat on the continent? And how worried should we be about it?

WHELAN: Well, of course, that’s the $64,000 – or maybe, I don’t know, these days with inflation, $64 million question. How imminent did we think the threat was on September 10th from, you know, coming out of Afghanistan?

You never can know something like that, not with any great degree of certainty.

I think we certainly believe that there are growing challenges in northern and in Sahelian areas of Africa. This recent merger of an existing regional group, the GSPC, with the al Qaeda group to form this new “al Qaeda in the land of the Islamic Maghreb,” was very disturbing and something that we had hoped wouldn’t happen, but it has.

And so, that’s not a – the trend line was not in a positive direction in that area. And certainly, we have a continuing, low-level – I mean, it’s not a major – we don’t have a major presence in East Africa, but we have a continuing presence in East Africa that we can’t seem to get rid of. And so, that’s an ongoing problem.

But it’s hard to predict exactly how imminent anything is. And so, that’s why this is one of these things that you have to – you’ve got to have a constant focus on it. You can’t go in and say, “OK, we’re going to solve this problem and then we’re going to move on.”

And that’s essentially why we’re building Africa Command, because we know this is not a sprint. This is a marathon. And when you’re in a marathon, though, you also have to conserve your energy and you just kind of plod along, knowing that you’ve got to conserve it to get to the finish line.

And so, AFRICOM is about running a marathon – with partners in Africa, not by ourselves.

SWAIN: Well, it’s a very complex set of issues on the continent. Our time is short, and it’s run out. But thank you very much for being with us today.

WHELAN: Sure. A pleasure. Thanks.

(BREAK)

SWAIN: We are back with Matthew Lee of the Associate Press and Jim Michaels of “USA Today,” just having finished 25 minutes with the Defense Department’s point person on African affairs, Theresa Whelan.

Well, gentlemen, we’ve talked about the military’s creation of a new combatant command for Africa, unifying the U.S. strategic interests there.

Is this, in fact, a controversial idea?

MICHAELS: I think there is a number of controversial things about it. There’s still a lot of concern on the continent, I think, about what the U.S. role is going to be. Is it going to be militarizing our relationships with a lot of African countries?

We’re well into the planning for this, and there is yet to be any real, firm notion of where it’s going to be based.

So, I think there are some controversial aspects about it. There’s no question.

LEE: And actually, the question that Jim raised with Ms. Whelan about the concern about the melding of – or the State Department losing its diplomatic focus. There are a lot of aid agencies who do a lot of work in a lot of countries in Africa, and they are also very concerned about this.

I mean, if you have too close of an identification with U.S. civilians, with the military, do you not get into a kind of – it’s a slippery slope that you can often go down in terms of perceptions, which, as this administration knows well, perceptions of America are not that great.

SWAIN: Well, another side of that same description, though, is that conflicts and tensions between State and the Defense Department over other regions of the world are pretty well known.

How do they blend the forward-looking mission, as Secretary Whelan described this, with the interests of the State Department?

MICHAELS: Well, you know, actually, as is the case with a lot of these things, on the ground level I think things may work out a little better than sort of when you get back to Washington and you have the top people at State and the top people at the Pentagon sort of fighting over it. I mean, I think it’s a doable thing.

One of the interesting things that sort of emerged is really how little we know about this area and how little we know about the threat there, and how little reach we have into the area.

I mean, if you look at what happened in Somalia, we mostly relied on Ethiopia as a military force to go in there to get targets that were of interest to the United States.

So, you really see a very vast area with a lot of concerns over an emerging threat, about which we don’t know much. And we have very little sort of reach into this area, so it’s kind of a ground level start to address these issues, but it’s going to take years.

SWAIN: How important is the protection of oil supplies?

LEE: You look at the statistics right now, the United States is getting a little over 20 percent of its oil from West Africa – Nigeria, mainly – and this whole area around the coast of West Africa is a very oil-rich place.

What we didn’t get into was, of course, the Chinese – the expansion of China, also very energy hungry, into places in Africa and into Sudan, but also into the west, in Nigeria. And I think that there will be a lot of suspicions about U.S. power being shown to protect energy.

SWAIN: What is the role for specifically NATO allies, who also have very strategic interests in this part of the world? As the secretary talked about this sort of forward-looking mission here, why is it all incumbent upon the United States to be doing that?

MICHAELS: Well, and again, that’s something we didn’t get into. But NATO right now is pretty much stretched out.

I mean, that mission in Afghanistan is really the first time NATO has gone outside its area of responsibility and projected power far away. And it’s taken every bit of energy and cooperation to sustain that mission.

But it does raise an interesting question. There are European countries – and China and others – with interests in Africa.

SWAIN: And with the Europeans, long historical interests.

MICHAELS: Exactly. And will they view us as competitors or as colleagues?

And I think it’s going to – I think it’ll depend a little bit.

LEE: Well, that’s – I agree with that. But also, I think another thing we have to realize is that, if you look at Darfur, the situation there, you look at Rwanda, the world is very slow to act. And the United States is really – despite their colonial pasts, the European countries have been less willing to come out and speak their minds about the situations, things – the crises that have been going on.

And the African Union itself, Africa itself has been very slow or unable to address these things. And so, it really is left, then, to the United States, or the United States has seen itself as the protector of Africa’s downtrodden and poor. At the same time, its image has not – it’s not perceived that way.

SWAIN: We’re over-time. The last question is, is there congressional support for this command?

MICHAELS: I think it’s generally considered – I think it’s fairly well supported at this point. I don’t see any problems on the horizon. I don’t know if …

SWAIN: Will it cost a lot more?

MICHAELS: I think they’re doing it in a – everything will cost money if the U.S. government does it – but I think they’re doing it – and it’s a fairly small command by comparison with a lot of the others.

So, I don’t think that the cost will become a big issue.

SWAIN: Thanks to both of you for being here and for your questions this week.

LEE: Thank you.

MICHAELS: Thank you.

END