10/15/08 – Shashank Bengali – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
Our next guest today is Shashank Bengali.
He is a Sub-Saharan Africa correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers and he's written this very interesting article about the new Pentagon agency AFRICOM, the new African command.
It's called the Pentagon's New Africa Command Raises Suspicions About U.S. Motives.
Welcome to the show.
Hi, how are you?
I'm doing great.
How are you?
Pretty good, thanks.
Shashank is on the phone today from Sana, Yemen, which I guess means this is going on my permanent record.
I hope I do a good job.
Now we have the unified combatant commands around the world.
I think Don Rumsfeld renamed them.
They used to be called the CINCS, the Commanders-in-Chief, and these were the generals and admirals who controlled the different portions of the earth as divided by the Pentagon.
The Central Command, the European Command, the Pacific Command, the Northern Command that we have now in America, and the New Africa Command.
That's what we're talking about here.
I guess my first question is, is there a general who's been appointed to be the head of the New Africa Command?
Do we know who he is?
There is, yes.
It's General William Ward.
He goes by Kip Ward.
He's a three-star general, very well respected within the military, and he is the current head of AFRICOM.
Have you had a chance to interview him yet?
I have not spoken with him, no.
AFRICOM was not really speaking to the press in the run-up to the launch, but I believe they are doing so again.
Okay, now one thing that's really interesting here that you say, several countries that have been asked so far have refused to host the command, and so far it's going to be based in Stuttgart, Germany, for the foreseeable future.
Is that right?
That's right.
They were trying to quietly put dealers out within Africa to see if any countries would host the command, but there was a lot of resistance.
There was a great deal of suspicion among civil society groups and members of the public in various countries that this might mean more U.S. troops, it might mean greater military presence, and that sort of PR problem dogged AFRICOM from the start, and before they even really got close to being able to decide where to put it, they decided just to keep it in Germany.
Can you tell me which countries have said no so far?
Publicly, actually, no country has publicly rejected.
I mean, it's officials in different countries that have said negative things about it.
Nigeria was reluctant, Rwanda was reluctant, but the one country that did express interest and offered to host it is Liberia in Western Africa, and there's a history there because Liberia actually was founded by freed U.S. slaves back in the early 1800s, so there's a bit of a history, Liberia feels a relationship to America that most other African countries don't.
But it was decided because of various problems, Liberia's a very poor country recovering from the Civil War, there's really no infrastructure there, it was decided that it wouldn't be the ideal place to put it, basically it's going to be a major communications and command operation.
There's really nothing in Liberia that would be able to sustain that right now.
You know, I'm reminded of the book The Dark Side by Jane Mayer, she talks about how one of the original options that they thought of for hosting the ghost prisons was putting them somewhere in Zambia.
Do you know if that's part of the African command, or whether they've been approached on this?
Liberia, as far as I know, was not approached one way or the other, I mean, the thing they were looking for, I think, there already is a U.S. base in Africa, in Djibouti, which is a tiny nation in the Horn of Africa in the eastern side of the continent, it hosts about 1,700 U.S. troops there doing mostly civil affairs projects, so that's the only real permanent presence that the U.S. military has now, so anything else would be a major expansion, and because this was all sort of in the planning phase, there was really no public discussion of where the command might go, except for Liberia offering to host it.
Now, it should be noted that I believe all but one of the other combatant commands are based outside of their region, you know, CENTCOM is based in Florida, I believe, and European Command is the only one that's actually based in Europe, so it isn't sort of a deal-breaker that AFRICOM isn't hosted in Africa, but I think for the mission that they were trying to achieve with AFRICOM, which was a more hearts-and-minds-focused mission, you know, less sort of hard power and more of what they call soft power, they really wanted to have AFRICOM in Africa, that was what President Bush said when he announced it, but because of the resistance, again, they had to kind of cut back on that, and now they've really retooled their mission a bit, they went through a number of different iterations of what the mission statement would be, and they've gone away from the hearts-and-minds bit now, and they're just talking about building capacity of the African militaries and coordinating affairs from the U.S. State Department and other U.S. agencies, so they've really kind of changed the game plan a bit because of the PR problem that they face.
That's interesting, you said, if I heard you right, on the phone over there from the other side of the world, building up the African military, is that the African Union has their own standing army now, a permanent, is that what you're talking about?
Sorry, no, no, I meant African military, the military from the various countries.
I see.
There isn't a standing military force.
Right, yeah, I didn't think so, or hadn't heard of one yet, okay, just making sure.
Not yet.
And now, you point out in your article here for McClatchy from a couple weeks ago, again, it's called The Pentagon's New Africa Command Raises Suspicions About U.S. Motives.
You bring up, in I think even the same order, three things that were brought up by an expert on the issue of Somalia, who I interviewed on the show a couple, a few weeks ago, and that was the three overriding missions of the United States in Africa, one of them is counterterrorism, the other is, as you just referred to, building up state militaries of friendly governments on that continent, and then also humanitarian aid, and this guy, Ken Menckhouse, he talked about, you know, kind of the disputes and the difficulty in resolving, completing these three missions at the same time, and this is the same sort of thing you bring up in continental terms, rather than just in Somalia.
It's true, I mean, these are three very, very different things, and the military, you know, the U.S. military is very good at certain things, it's, you know, typically been good at fighting, you know, conventional wars, it's not as good, or it doesn't have as much of a track record in humanitarian work, and there's been a lot of criticism, you know, from even from within the U.S. government, from USAID, which is the main humanitarian arm of the government, within the State Department about their, you know, State Department's role being kind of usurped by DOD, if the Pentagon suddenly begins to take a more active role in humanitarian work, that would be something that could pose sort of a mission problem for state.
But in terms of, you know, the counterterrorism work, and the military training, those are two things that the military, the U.S. military definitely knows how to do.
The problem in a place like Somalia, which is just so lawless, and where we haven't had a presence since the infamous Black Hawk Down incident of 1993, when 18 U.S. servicemen were killed in an ambush.
There's been no real U.S. presence there since then, and really no foreign presence until last year when some African Union troops came in.
It's such a lawless, no-go zone, that to really address that problem, you know, the military isn't prepared to go into Somalia, which is probably the biggest military problem in Africa right now.
So you have all these things the military wants to do, but the number one problem is still Somalia, where there's an Islamist insurgency, there's been no functioning government for nearly two decades.
If you talk to any U.S. official, really anyone around the world who knows the region, Somalia is the big black hole and the big question mark.
And there's also criticism or questions about AFRICOM, you know, what can you do about Somalia, and really there isn't a good answer to that question.
Well, and when you say no U.S. presence in Somalia, I guess you must mean, you know, humanitarian aid and boots on the ground, because we've certainly had C-130 gunships flying around and submarines launching missiles, and a U.S.
-backed Ethiopian regime change in that country.
Sure, that's true.
I mean, a permanent presence that goes beyond, you know, airstrikes and hit-and-run type stuff.
Sure.
And now, I believe Mr. Menkaus said that there were a million and a half people on the brink of starvation there, that that has now eclipsed Darfur and Congo, both, and even Iraq as the greatest humanitarian crisis on Earth.
Is that right?
That is what the experts tell us, that Somalia, you know, for about a year now has been the biggest problem.
And the estimates range from a million and a half to two and a half million people on the brink of starvation.
I mean, Somalia has been on the brink for, you know, more than ten years now, and it's constantly on the brink of famine.
The violence, though, in the past several months, as this insurgency picks up steam and the African Union force can't secure the areas it's trying to secure, you know, as the violence gets worse, of course, the humanitarian situation gets much worse.
And so, therefore, we've got this major problem now where, as you said, it's probably the worst catastrophe on the planet right now.
And can you address the situation in Congo?
I'm sorry, I should remind the listeners, I'm talking with McClatchy Newspaper's Sub-Saharan Africa correspondent Shashank Bengali on the phone from Sana'a, Yemen, and you can check out his blog somewhere in Africa.
It's at washingtonbureau.typepad.com slash Nairobi.
And this is a subject I don't think I've ever really covered on this show at all, and yet it is one of the greatest crises on Earth right now, and that is, as far as I know, the war that has taken over a million lives, perhaps over two million lives in Congo, is that right?
Well, the estimates are as many as four million, actually, since about 1998.
It began, the war in Congo began with the end of the genocide in Rwanda when the militias that were accused of perpetrating the genocide there fled into eastern Congo, into the forest there, and sort of the conflict that began there eventually grew in about eight or ten other countries from the region, and it became sort of Africa's World War, but a very low-level conflict that involved a lot of militias and proxies and, you know, some government troops and some just sort of armed bandit groups.
But because of disease and starvation and just general calamities that occurred there, there are estimates of as many as four million dead in the past ten years.
Now is most of this attributable to, well, I mean, as you say, the crisis next door bleeding over and all that, but it seems like in Africa you have, well, and it's getting more and more this way here now too, but you have these winner-take-all politics, kind of, where the battles over who's going to be the next administration are really life-and-death battles, where people are not willing to accept their loss and just go home and wait until they have a shot the next time, like we do here, because they really have everything to lose if the other side gets power.
That's very true.
I mean, I think that's a very good point, because there is so little else going in many of these countries, you know, government and political power is really the biggest form of power you can have, because it's a means of patronage, it's a means of access to state resources and all the trappings that come with that, and you've got, therefore, situations like we've seen this year in Kenya and in Zimbabwe more recently, where presidents have to, you know, lie, cheat, and steal, basically, to hang on to power, and it's a very troubling development that even a country like Kenya that's so stable, or had been so stable, saw such an outbreak of violence.
Zimbabwe is, of course, a different story where it's been really a mess for a long time under the rule of one man for 28 years there, but it's true that in many of these countries that once you get on the power, you know, you have access to all the resources, the monopoly of the use of force and all the goods that come with that, all the mineral wealth, the oil wealth, in Zimbabwe's case, you know, a lot of minerals and things like that.
So it is winner-take-all, and so the stakes are very, very high, and no one's willing to accept defeat lightly.
You know, it's interesting, because I'm sure that's part of the suspicion, and perhaps, or almost certainly a justified suspicion, that this is why America wants a footprint in Africa.
It's not about helping people and curing AIDS.
It's about resources, winner-take-all politics, just like when we're not there.
That is a very common sentiment.
I mean, it's not one that I personally share, because the U.S. definitely has a little interest in West Africa, to be sure.
It's got a big stake in Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria and countries like that.
It gets more and more oil from Africa than it ever has before.
In fact, they get more oil from Africa now than they do from Saudi Arabia, and that's over several different countries, but it's a growing share.
And so therefore, there's a lot of, because of the history of colonialism and Africa having been taken advantage of by, you know, foreign powers and foreign-owned companies, there's a great deal of suspicion when, you know, a military power like the U.S. says it wants to establish a new command-and-control center for the continent, and that was sort of one of the major suspicions, was this is just a bid to secure oil resources.
And you know, to be fair, I think certainly if there was going to be a U.S. military presence in Africa, it would definitely be coordinating activities in the Gulf of Guinea, which is where most of the oil that the U.S. gets comes from, and it would certainly be doing things like it's doing now, coordinating U.S. warships that are watching the Somali pirates in East Africa.
So it would be coordinating all those things, but I think many Africans felt that it would be much more kind of actively trying to meddle in African affairs.
Well, and there's oil in Somalia, isn't there?
There's supposedly oil.
You know, they have not found very much.
There's some small deposits of oil in northern Somalia, which is a bit more stable in a semi-autonomous region called Somaliland.
As far as where the main conflict is going on now, South Central Somalia, it's not really about resources there.
It's just about burglary and access to ports and those kinds of things.
Right.
All right.
Now, the reason I focus on the oil is not so much that I know anything about American oil companies and what they're doing in Africa.
I know a little bit about Shell Oil in the Niger Delta.
But as far as Somalia and that kind of thing, I really don't know.
But I keep hearing that the Chinese are there, the Chinese are there, and it sort of sounds like somebody thinks this is a problem we have to do something about, that these foreign people are the ones getting the oil out of the ground there, not us.
Yeah, that's true.
I mean, the Chinese are here in a big, big way.
And I think if you ask experts in the U.S., they think a lot of them believe that AFRICOM was meant as some sort of a response to China's growing involvement in Africa.
I mean, China is now far and away the number one player in terms of its activities in Africa.
It's helping countries prospect for oil.
It's now getting a lot of oil from Africa.
It's even doing things like building roads and bridges and doing infrastructure work that the U.S. hasn't done in Africa in 30 or 40 years, because we felt it wasn't profitable.
China with its communist system, they're able to direct resources in a way that the U.S. can't.
And therefore, they saw a chance to make a bit of money, but also to have access to resources and to build a sphere of influence to get, you know, countries on their side and kind of a broader geopolitical sense from, you know, African countries that tend to back China.
You know, that no one criticized, in Africa, no one criticized China on the run-up to the Olympics, you know, for example.
And therefore, you know, when Sudan's president gets indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, China is the reliable, going to be a reliable veto in the U.N.
Security Council for any further action on that.
All right.
So one of the things that you brought up in another article that you wrote was about humanitarian aid groups giving away water pumps to people and helping them out.
Can you tell us a little bit about that story?
Because I got another angle I want to go off after you explain.
This was a story I wrote about, this is part of what the U.S. military is doing.
I mentioned the base that the U.S. military has in Djibouti, where they have about 1,700 water pumps, and they're doing civil affairs projects like water pumps and repairing schools and doing medical projects and veterinary projects.
I mean, this was sort of the kind of thing that the U.S. military used to do back in Vietnam in civil affairs work, you know, helping villagers keep watch at night and things like that, real kind of community-based hearts and minds type stuff.
And it felt the need to do that in East Africa, because after 9-11, there were some in the U.S. military who thought that Somalia and the countries around Somalia, with their Muslim population, the history of Al-Qaeda operations in the area, they thought this could be a place where Al-Qaeda or Islamic militants kind of gain a foothold.
And so they, I think quite wisely, thought, let's go in there in a way we haven't done before and try to go into some of these places and really become a friendly face and do things the communities need.
So they have been doing that since about 2004.
They have been doing these very kind of small-scale projects.
You know, it's funny, you see these huge, you know, C-130s and, you know, big U.S. military craft in these small, small, landing in these small airstrips in the middle of nowhere in parts of Ethiopia and rural Kenya and doing these kinds of projects.
And I think they have been quite popular in the places they have worked.
But the question is, you know, that's all well and good for a few years.
What happens, you know, 5, 10, 20 years down the road if the U.S. military leaves and the water pump breaks?
You know, then, you know, what happens to those people and if all that goodwill kind of, you know, go up in smoke?
Yeah, that's interesting.
And that's funny, I got to confuse a group with the U.S. Army.
But as you say, you know, operating in a civil affairs capacity.
But to me, this brings up, I think, sort of the point you just made about the Chinese government and their authoritarian rule there that under their communist government that they can divert resources in ways and get away with it in ways that we couldn't.
Like, for example, your example was building up roads and bridges and infrastructure and things in Africa that Americans wouldn't spend the money on.
But it's sort of really the same thing with the U.S. Army is a government bureaucracy.
And when I read this water pump story, it reminded me of something I read only couldn't have been more than a couple of years ago about an African guy who was going around and making a bunch of money selling water pumps to people and had created a very decent living for himself and had a bunch of employees in a water pump factory where he made them.
And he was traveling all up and down sub-Saharan Africa selling water pumps.
And it was a great business.
And this is exactly what Africa needs.
And instead, here come American do-gooders, even in, you know, U.S. Army Republican form come.
And I don't know the exact story, what effect what they've been doing has had on this particular guy's business, if anything.
But you know, in the larger sense, seems like exactly the kind of thing that would destroy his business selling these things, giving them away.
And then, as you said, these are only temporary.
Once they break and America's gone and not there to help anymore, people are right back where they were again.
So it seems like even the best intentions here can only make matters worse to me.
Well, it's a really complicated situation.
As we talked about just a few moments ago, I mean, the U.S. military isn't in the business of doing humanitarian work.
So it's a big question when, you know, you start to do these kinds of things, do you have the capacity to keep them up?
Because, you know, the aid community has been, you know, working on these questions for many, many years.
And even they haven't figured out what's the best way to solve problems like, you know, chronic drought, chronic famine.
You know, so I think, you know, the U.S. military went in with a very, you know, very good intentions.
And the question is, and it's not really been figured out yet, I don't think, but, you know, the question is, you know, how much does this get sustained and how, you know, how willing are they to stay in it for the long haul?
Well, yeah, and that begs the whole question of whether the American people can afford to, even with the best of motives, help all the poor people of the world from now on, especially right now.
Let me ask you about AIDS.
This is something that is never covered on this show, but apparently is a major crisis in Africa.
What is America doing as far as the AIDS issue there?
And is it helping?
Well, actually, this is one of the good legacies of the Bush administration, which is its AIDS policy in Africa.
President Bush announced what he calls the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
It's known as PEPFAR.
And it's given, I believe the latest figure was $30 billion, that's a beat, to countries around the world, most in Africa, for fighting HIV-AIDS.
And when Bush came to Africa earlier this year, I believe back in February, he visited a couple of countries like Rwanda and Tanzania that have made major strides against HIV-AIDS, in part, in large part, I would say, because of that huge influx of money.
I mean, no disease or sort of non-military operation, I think, has ever received this kind of, just a tidal wave of money.
I mean, when you think about $30 billion over dozens of countries, I mean, this is still some countries getting $100, $200 million in Africa.
Rwanda is a country about the size of Maryland.
It's a very, very small place.
And they received, you know, I think about, I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but somewhere between about $15 million and $100 million last year from the U.S. government just for HIV-AIDS.
You know, there's a bit of a take-up problem, I think, where, you know, some of the aid agencies that the U.S. government is working with to disperse these funds and find the right projects and the right medicines to use and things like that didn't know what to do with all the money.
I mean, it's sort of a, you know, drinking from a fire hose at a certain point.
But the fact is, it has put many, many people on life-saving drugs that have had a major impact on improving health systems in very poor countries.
So I will say that that's been one of the good things that this administration has done.
And so in Africa, Bush's legacy is a lot brighter than it is in, say, Iraq.
Well, yeah, theory of relativity going on there.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, OK, a couple more issues I'd like to ask you to cover, if you can.
I interviewed a gentleman by the name of Sebastian Younger, who wrote, I think, for Rolling Stone, an article a couple of years ago, I guess it was the beginning of 2007, about the warriors in the Niger Delta and how basically my understanding in, you know, kind of brief, broad-stroke terms is that the oil companies, particularly Shell Oil, I believe, are taking the oil out from under these villages in the swampland of the Niger Delta and the local villagers who live there, and that's their hunting ground and it's their property.
They're not getting paid.
The national government of Nigeria is getting paid, but the locals aren't.
And now they're waging this insurgency where they're kidnapping people and then selling them their story and sending them back unharmed to tell their story.
And apparently there have been some violent battles.
But this guy, Sebastian Younger, went and took pictures of them, talked about how they would draw these little white circles on their body that meant that they would be bulletproof with protection, magic protection from the gods and so forth.
Seems like the setup for what could become a major conflict there, and yet that was a year and a half ago.
Can you tell me whether that's even basically right and any kind of development since then about Nigeria?
You're basically right.
I mean, I was actually there nearly three years ago when, if you look every few months or every year, there's a big upsurge in the Delta.
I mean, the insurgency has been raging there for several years now, but it's really picked up steam in the past couple of years.
And I was there in early 2006 when there was a fresh wave of attacks.
There was a new group that was formed, we called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, called MEND.
And they're still seen as the main group behind most of the attacks.
What they do is they, you know, the Niger Delta is this very swampy, marshy area.
It's full of little creeks and backwaters, and it's really impossible for anyone to patrol there.
And these little militant groups operating in speedboats kind of go out to offshore areas and to pipelines, and they kind of, you know, they bust up pipes.
They do what's called bunkering, which is they actually literally steal the oil from the pipes.
They've got a method of cracking into a pipe, and they somehow gather a bunch of oil and crude, and then they go and sell the crude, I guess.
I'm not really clear on how they make their money, but what is clear is that they terrorize the oil workers in the region.
You know, you don't, if you're a foreign oil worker there, you don't travel around without armed escort.
You know, you live in big compounds.
I mean, they've succeeded in creating a lot of fear and getting a lot of media attention, and occasionally even in shifting the price of oil, because, you know, before we had these recent shocks in the oil price about two years ago, you know, you could look at the oil price and watch it go higher, you know, $5, $10 a month or whatever, purely based on what's going on in the Niger Delta.
I mean, they had a major impact for a while, and they still do.
But the fact is, oil is still being pumped, and Nigeria is still a major oil supplier.
It's a big OPEC country.
You know, the offshore reserves are estimated to be very, very large.
So you know, they're wreaking a lot of havoc, and no one's quite figured out what to do about them.
But meanwhile, oil still keeps getting pumped.
Shell is still there, you know, so it's a bit of a strange story.
You know, you do have these militants who are very sophisticated, despite believing in magic and some of these things that we wouldn't really understand.
But yet, oil still keeps getting pumped, and the sad fact is that the actual people on the ground, you know, in this poor, very poor region of Nigeria, aren't getting really any of the benefits.
It's one of the poorest parts of the country, and oil is more expensive there than anywhere else in Nigeria, despite the fact that the oil comes from there.
Yeah, well, that's its own thing.
We have that same thing that goes on in Iraq and in Iran, too, where they've got to export it to get it refined in Turkey or the Gulf states, and then turn around and re-import it.
But, you know, one radio show host's opinion, it wouldn't be conceding to terrorists to pay these people for the oil we're taking from their property.
I mean, obviously, you've got to pay the national government or whatever, but it seems like Shell Oil could afford to pay these people, you know, not even a good price, just anything for this oil, and would solve a lot of this, I mean, from the way that...
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Well, one thing I did mention, you know, you bring up, you know, paying these people, and the fact is that Nigeria does have very, kind of, you know, well-laid-out laws about how to divide up the oil money, and a large amount of the oil revenue is supposed to go to the three oil-producing states in the delta.
And by most accounts, the money actually gets to the regional governments.
Now, what happens with the money from there, you know, you can probably figure it's going mostly in the pocket of the regional governors.
There's been a lot of...
Nigeria's one of the most corrupt places in the world.
There's almost no oversight of government, especially the regional governments.
So I don't doubt that there's a lot of money, that the oil companies are paying what they're supposed to be paying to the government.
And I also don't doubt that much of that money gets dispersed to the regional governments.
But from there, I mean, if you've ever been in the Niger Delta, it's, you know, the roads are a disaster.
You're mostly driving in mud and muck.
You know, there's no infrastructure, schools are crumbling, there are no hospitals, there are no drugs in the hospitals.
I mean, it's really a very desperate place and very overpopulated.
And so, you know, just the question is, where is the money going?
Meanwhile, you've got, you know, the governors have huge mansions up, you know, in the hills outside the cities and things like that.
So corruption is a big part of the story there as well.
All right.
Now, last issue is Osama bin Laden and his podcast from the summer of 2006, where he told, I don't know, would-be jihadists everywhere, I guess, go to Africa, Somalia, Sudan.
The Americans are coming.
This is the next front in the terror war.
And six months later, America sponsored the regime change in Somalia, and at least three of the four, I don't know if Palin has addressed the issue, but John McCain, Joe Biden and Barack Obama are all on the record of saying that they favor intervening in Sudan, perhaps even putting American ground forces on the ground in the Darfur region.
And I wonder what your perspective on that is.
Are these people seeing something that I'm not, that the whole spreading another front in the so-called war on terror is going on here?
Are these people just blind and think that, oh, well, we're just going to help these people and it's going to be entirely separate from everything else going on in the world?
Or what do you think is going on there?
Well, as far as I can tell, in the couple of debates where they talked about Darfur, my understanding is that it's been posed as a question of what to do in the case of a genocide or humanitarian crisis.
And I think both McCain and Obama, and I believe also in the VP debate, Biden and Palin both expressed support for intervention in Darfur, but on the grounds of stopping a genocide.
Now, I have issues with that.
Not that I don't think that would be a good thing to do, or the problem with that viewpoint is that, you know, it's treating Darfur as if it was the conflict it was four years ago when the reality of Darfur is very, very different.
It's no longer a case of, you know, the Sudanese government sending militias in, backed by government helicopters and setting fire to villages and killing people.
I mean, most of that has stopped, you know, and the fact is that nothing was done about it when it was going on.
And now the major conflict and the major problem in Darfur is the rebel groups and various armed groups just kind of moving around, hijacking United Nations vehicles, hijacking humanitarian aid convoys, basically preventing people who are trying to save the lives of Darfurians from doing their job and getting food and medical care and those kinds of things out to these refugee camps in Darfur.
So, you know, I think intervention is good and worth debating when it comes to a genocide.
But the genocide phase in Darfur is over, and now we have this sort of low-level, desperate conflict where people are fighting over roads and stealing vehicles and committing carjackings and things like that, while there's two million people living in refugee camps, far away from that sort of thing, and they're suffering from malaria and malnutrition and disease.
And that's what's killing people in Darfur now, not a military conflict.
Well, and what of the war on terror?
I mean, if these guys do intervene based on a model of what was happening there a few years ago, is the local population in Sudan likely to see this as the extension of America's war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that they're just next on the list?
Or would they believe the baby blue-helmeted motives of the humanitarian do-gooders?
Or what do you think?
Well, I mean, it's interesting.
The response to the United Nations force that's gone in there, basically it's an African Union force, but with the baby blue helmets of the UN force in Darfur, they've not really been able to get the equipment they need to do their job.
But they have been greeted as saviors by the people, at least that's how they were greeted when they got there.
And maybe the mood will change if they can't actually solve the problem.
But the U.S., because of the legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan, well, mostly of Iraq, the U.S. is going to be a very different story, I think.
And we've already seen this attack on a U.S. AID employee, John Granville, who was killed in Sudan some months ago in a very strange attack around Christmas time, I believe, in Khartoum, in the capital.
And responsibility was claimed by a group that said it was affiliated with al-Qaeda.
Now, there's really nothing to say that those aren't just total whack jobs and have nothing to do with a broader Islamic movement.
But I think that it's certainly plausible that you have an Islamist insurgency in Somalia, you've got Islamist fighters in Algeria and other parts of North Africa.
And you share this is a place in Sudan that there may be elements there that could see a U.S. intervention as something to target.
So I think if the U.S. is going to go in, it has to be with a very clear mandate.
And I think if we do see a new president try and intervene there, it will be more trying to back up and backstop the U.N. mission rather than sending any troops on the ground.
Well, let's hope so, at least.
All right.
Well, listen, we're all out of time.
But I really thank you for your perspective on the show today.
My pleasure.
All right, everybody, that's Shashank Bengali.
He's the Sub-Saharan Africa correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers.
His blog, Somewhere in Africa, is available at washingtonbureau.typepad.com slash Nairobi.