NATO's Involvements in Africa

Earlier we looked at Germany's sub-Saharan adventures. Here's a run-down of other action by NATO on the dark continent. Please try to read through the pejoratives; it's a bit of a biased website.

NATO has now joined AFRICOM's first war, in Somalia.

The bloc's Allied Command Operations website announced on March 18 that from March 5-16 the North Atlantic military alliance had airlifted 1,700 Ugandan troops from their homeland to the Somali capital of Mogadishu for the intensified fighting that began there earlier this month.

The Pentagon supplied the transport planes "under the NATO banner" and the operation was "undertaken by USA contracted DynCorp International." [2]

The commander of AFRICOM, General William Ward, recently informed the Senate Armed Services Committee of plans to focus the military command's attention on East Africa and indicated plans to assist the formal government of Somalia to reclaim the country's capital.

In May the European Union is to began training 2,000 Ugandan troops for deployment to war-wracked Somalia to assist the regime being propped up by the West.

NATO recently confirmed that it has prolonged an agreement to provide strategic sealift and airlift support for African (Ugandan, Rwandan and Burundian) troops to assist Somalia's Transitional Federal Government in the nation's civil war.

The bloc's European command, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), "delegated the authority to Joint Command Lisbon to have the operational lead for NATO engagements with the African Union and they provide the majority of the personnel to support the mission." [3]

As with the government of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, the Western-backed Transitional Federal Government doesn't even control its own capital. Since last week fighting there has led to hundreds of people being killed and wounded and thousands displaced.

Six days earlier NATO effected a changing of the guard "in the Gulf of Aden and Somali Basin" [4] as part of its Operation Ocean Shield, and five warships of the Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 joined four from the Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 in Djibouti, where there are some 2,000 U.S. troops and where AFRICOM bases its Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa. Djibouti also hosts over 1,000 French soldiers and France's second largest military base abroad.

On March 10 NATO extended its deployment of warships in the Gulf of Aden and the Horn of Africa until the end of 2012 in what originally was portrayed as an ad hoc, short-term deployment when Operation Ocean Shield was initiated last August following Operation Allied Protector in March. Instead, NATO has effectively expanded its over eight-year-old naval operation in the Mediterranean Sea, Operation Active Endeavor, through the Red Sea and into the Arabian Sea and is now involved in the Horn of Africa both on land and at sea.

The Standing NATO Maritime Groups consist of warships from member states assigned for the occasion - the latest deployment in the Gulf of Aden includes a U.S. ship - and is under the command of Allied Component Command Maritime Naples, one of the two Component Commands of Allied Joint Force Command Naples.

Allied Joint Force Command Naples (JFC Naples) was inaugurated six years ago as part of NATO strategy to deploy further south and east, succeeding Allied Forces Southern Europe (AFSOUTH). The reorganization was a component of Alliance transformation policy growing out of the 2002 NATO summit in Prague. JFC Naples takes in the entire NATO Area of Responsibility (AOR) which, as will be seen, includes the Balkans, Africa, the Mediterranean Sea region and Iraq.

By: Brant