Robert Rotberg Commentary: Africa for the New U.S. President

The new president of the United States will want to reaffirm America’s concern for Africans as people – as fellow citizens of a troubled and threatened globe – not just as foreigners who could help us rid the world of terror. In doing so, a new president will recognize that trade and positive policies are more important to Africa and to the U. S. than any number of handouts and relief operations, as important as those latter efforts might be. The new president will want to work with Congress to give African food exporters and textile and other manufacturers easy access to U. S. markets; doing so may mean trying to persuade Congress to reduce agricultural subsidies to U. S. growers – a tough but important sell during the presidential honeymoon period.

The U. S. needs to continue to take principled positions over conflicts like those in Darfur, Congo, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, but it needs to do so systematically and persistently, not episodically as at present. Those principled positions include criticism of despots or anti-democratic behavior, where necessary, and a strengthening of Washington’s concern for human rights everywhere in Africa - even South Africa and Nigeria.

Washington should offer tough love to all of Africa -- critiques of official behaviors that are predatory and inimical to the welfare of citizens and strong positive reinforcement to those leaders who are genuinely working on behalf of their citizens. That means inviting to the White House only those presidents and prime ministers who are governing honestly or well, and not becoming too involved with despots, however much they might be assisting in the struggle against terror.

Moving American policy on to a firmer moral platform will ultimately help win hearts and minds for the struggle against terror. Indeed, it may do so more powerfully than will missile strikes against individual Somali miscreants or Sudanese pharmaceutical factories.

Another important endeavor for Africa and for ourselves will be upgrading assistance to Africa for water, sanitation, and health requirements. If we focused the White House on a range of such initiatives – from simple wells to simple anti-malarial bed nets – and ended counter productive strictures on family planning, Africa would be assisted materially and medically, and so would the battle for African hearts and minds.

America's new president should also end the miltary's plan to base a U. S. command structure in Africa. The Bush administration created a new free-standing command (Africom) for Africa, moving it out from under the existing Eucom in Stuttgart, Germany. But Africans, except for Liberia, do not want a U. S. command base on their soil, and have said so. The new president should immediately agree, and continue to base Africom in Stuttgart. The U. S. Central Command, Centcom, which covers the Middle East, is based in Florida. The Pacific Command is based in Hawaii. It makes perfect sense for Africom to stay in Stuttgart, thus removing one contentious issue between Washington and Africa.

Before the 1990s, Washington knew what was going on in Africa. We now need to train observers and analysts, employ innumerable persons with critical language skills, and greatly beef up the American knowledge base regarding a sub-Saharan region that contains more Muslims than the Arab Middle East, more poor people proportionally than any other continent, and more people at war than any other region.

Robert I. Rotberg is director of the Intrastate Conflict Program at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The views expressed in this article are his own.