President George W. Bush is now weighing how or whether the United States will re-engage to help fix Liberia–the biggest regional problem. Opponents of intervention argue that Liberia’s situation is hopelessly complicated, that U.S. forces are stretched too thin, that the United States has no strategic interests at stake and that this sort of “social work” is best left to Africans and Europeans. In fact, the United States today has a unique and unexpected opportunity to work in concert with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, West African leaders, Britain and France to contribute significantly to restabilizing both Liberia and the broader West African region.
As West Africa’s regionalized war escalated in the 1990s, Western powers looked away. Instead Nigeria, the regional hegemon, committed high numbers of peacekeepers to Liberia, with decidedly mixed results. Over time, the discipline of the Nigerian forces deteriorated and they became subject to, and part of, the criminalized networks they were supposed to be breaking up. Popular support for intervention within Nigeria faded. Moreover, Nigeria at the time was under the vicious, plunderous rule of Gen. Sani Abacha, and the regional consultative body ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States) was internally divided.
The good news is that over the past several years, key West African democracies–Senegal, Ghana, Mali and newly democratic Nigeria–have stepped into the breach. They’ve made a serious commitment of diplomacy, peacekeeping troops and money to help establish peace. In addition, the U.N. Security Council is doing its part: imposing sanctions barring diamond, timber and weapons trafficking; curtailing travel by Charles Taylor and his inner circle; commissioning extensive investigations of the criminal networks that support the Liberian dictator, and supporting the work of an independent tribunal in Sierra Leone that, on June 4, unsealed its indictment of Taylor for war crimes.
Perhaps most important, major Western powers have re-engaged. Beginning in 2000, Britain introduced 1,000 Special Forces for a limited period to restore order in Sierra Leone and support a U.N. peacekeeping operation, a strategy that has largely succeeded. France, in 2002, inserted almost 4,000 Special Forces into Cote d’Ivoire to secure a truce in its civil war and force the government and rebel forces into negotiations.
And now the United States, too, might intervene. It’s remarkable that a U.S. administration is even contemplating the dispatch of U.S. troops to an African crisis. A decade ago West Africa was easily written off. Deeply scarred by the 1993 intervention in Somalia, the United States has confined its military engagement in West Africa to basic training for a number of peacekeeping battalions. Today, post-9-11, West Africa sits within a much different world.
In his September 2002 National Security Strategy, President Bush argued that broken countries in Africa are at once a profound moral humanitarian challenge and a threat to U.S. global security interests, requiring proactive U.S. engagement. The Bush administration recognizes that Africa’s porous state borders and byzantine criminal networks have a rising appeal to Al Qaeda operatives under pressure to find permissive new environs in which to operate. At the same time, there is heightened awareness of rising U.S. energy stakes in the region.
At this moment, the United States has the opportunity, the interest and the capacity to act multilaterally to steady West Africa. During his recent trip to Africa, Bush called on Taylor to step down and leave Liberia. Inadvertently, that trip brought Bush back into a positive collaboration with Annan, helping correct the damaging U.S.-U.N. fallout from the Iraq war. It is to be hoped that Washington will have the courage to do enough to make a difference. America needs to strengthen its credibility in a region that yearns for a U.S. re-engagement–but understandably doubts Washington’s conviction.
