A multinational offensive aimed at wiping out Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels - and planned and equipped with U.S. support during the dying days of the Bush administration - has scattered fighters who have unleashed a wave of massacres on Congolese villages.
 
LRA fighters have killed nearly 900 people in reprisal attacks in northeast Congo since Ugandan troops, together with Sudanese and Congolese soldiers, launched a military operation in December against fugitive rebel leader Joseph Kony, whose two-decade insurgency has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted 2 million. (See Alertnet briefing for more)
 
Reuters reported on the U.S. involvement in December. The New York Times said recently that the Pentagon’s new Africa Command (Africom) had contributed intelligence, advice and $1 million in fuel. The Washington Post argues the operation has been so unsuccessful it amounts to little more than “throwing a rock at a hive of bees”.
 
Foreign Policy magazine said that the LRA, who failed to sign a planned peace deal in April, would be hard to stamp out and that the operation was putting the Pentagon’s reputation at risk.
 
There are sceptical voices in the blogosphere too.
 
“One of the first publicly acknowledged Africom operations has turned into a general debacle, resulting in the death of nearly a thousand civilians and sending untold numbers of children into sex slavery and military servitude,” Dave Donelson says on his Heart of Diamonds blog.
 
Writing in Uganda’s Monitor, Grace Matsiko said the offensive was proving a real test for officers of Uganda’s army (UPDF).
 
“Uganda should brace itself for a protracted war, should Kony and his top lieutenants continue to evade the UPDF dragnet,” the journalist wrote.
 
Meanwhile, aid agency MSF has accused the United Nations force in Congo, the world’s biggest, of failing to protect civilians from Ugandan rebel attacks – accusations the world body has rejected as totally unfounded. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has also accused U.N. peacekeepers of inactivity and of living alongside the LRA for three years and doing nothing about the guerrillas.
 
While expressing his horror at the what he called ‘catastrophic’ consequences for civilians from the offensive, U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes has said the joint force still needs to see the operation through.
 
Should the offensive continue or is it time to halt it? If so, what should be done about the rebels? How big an impact should the conduct of this operation have for the U.S. Africa Command’s future role?

How times change. Somalia’s new Islamist president has been feted in Ethiopia, whose army drove him from power two years ago - with Washington’s backing - when he headed a sharia courts movement.

Sheikh Sharif Ahmed was greeted with a standing ovation from African Union leaders at a summit in Ethiopia, which pulled the last of its troops out of Somalia last month, leaving the government in control of little beyond parts of Mogadishu. The hardline Islamist al Shabaab militia control much of the rest of southern Somalia.

Somalia was far from being a prominent front in former President George W. Bush’s “War on Terror”, but the reverse Washington suffered there appears to be among its most dramatic. Meanwhile, the past two years have brought at least another 17,400 civilian dead in Somalia and more anarchy that has fuelled a wave of piracy.

Ahmed’s former administration was marked out by both the United States and Ethiopia as being little different to Afghanistan’s Taliban. Hardline members of the group were accused of links to al Qaeda. Now he is widely described by the international community as a “moderate” and he himself has welcomed the new U.S. stance as positive.

“One can say that the U.S. position towards Somalia has become honest,” he told the Egyptian newspaper el-Shorouk. “In the framework of the Djibouti negotiations, America has become a force which supports peace.”

But Somalia’s new president, chosen by parliamentary vote at the weekend, must now face the al Shabaab militia who grew out of the armed wing of the sharia courts
movement but later split with him. Al Shabaab have vowed to fight and highlighted his support from “non-believers”.

To try to bolster Ahmed, Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete, the African Union chairman, called for U.N. troops to join the 3,500-strong AU peacekeeping force in Somalia. Right now, they cannot do much more than to try to defend themselves.

But some analysts and Ahmed’s aides believe that creating a U.N. force would be counterproductive because it could be seen as Western interference and encourage those who fought the invading Ethiopian troops to pursue their struggle.

Getting Somalia’s clans behind the government will be another big task, a challenge previous leaders have failed to meet during 18 years of conflict.

What is the chance that Ahmed’s election as president will be able to bring peace to Somalia? What should Africa and the rest of the world do to try to make sure that happens? What do you think?

Members of Guinea-Bissau's unruly armed forces have blotted the military's record again with another attack against the country's political institutions. Early on Sunday, Nov. 23, renegade soldiers, their faces hooded, sprayed the Bissau residence of President Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira with machine-gun and rocket-propelled grenade fire. The president survived unhurt this latest apparent attempt to topple him.

But The attack underlined the fragility of the small, cashew nut-exporting West African nation, one of the poorest in the world and a former Portuguese colony which has suffered a history of bloody coups, mutinies and uprisings since it won independence in 1974 after a bush war led by Amilcar Cabral. The assault followed parliamentary elections on Nov. 16 which donors were hoping would restore stability and put in place a new government capable of resisting the serious threat posed by powerful Latin American cocaine-trafficking cartels who use Guinea-Bissau as a staging post to smuggle drugs to Europe.

How can a little-known African country like Guinea-Bissau, prostrated by poverty, its government and military undermined by the corrupting influence of multi-million dollar drug-trafficking, dig itself out of underdevelopment?

What should foreign donors do? Invest hundreds of millions of dollars to back security reforms to downsize and modernise the bloated army and struggling police and fund development programmes -- even though aid workers say the government and state often appear barely functional and incapable of presenting or implementing programmes.

Or, at a time of global economic crisis when financial resources are stretched and Africa seems filled with conflicts, election disputes and refugees, (Congo, Darfur, Chad, Somalia, Zimbabwe), should the international community look for more deserving (or strategic) cases than little Guinea-Bissau?

The new U.S. command for Africa began independent operations on Wednesday, after being carved out of three other Pentagon units previously responsible for the continent. President George W. Bush originally wanted Africom to be based in Africa, and Liberia has offered to host it. But the plan met with considerable hostility on the continent, especially from big powers South Africa and Nigeria and oil giants Algeria and Libya. Many ordinary Africans were also cynical, believing Africom would be a cover for Washington to counter growing Chinese influence and control vital oil supplies from West Africa — expected to provide 25 percent of U.S. needs by 2015.

The hostility forced Washington to rethink its plans and Africom, expected to reach its full complement of 1,300 by the end of next year, began work from Stuttgart, home of the existing European command, although officials clearly expect to open a base in Africa sometime in the future. It also pushed U.S. officials to emphasise that there was no hidden agenda, that Africom would not threaten the sovereignty of any nations and that a base would not be built in Africa without the full agreement of potential host nations. They also said half of Africom’s leadership would be composed of civilian agencies including the State Department. Africom’s stated aim is to help African countries face everything from natural disasters to terrorism and its targets will including drug trafficking, arms smuggling and the kind of piracy now plaguing the waters off Somalia. Experts say U.S. forces have been cooperating quietly for years with African armies, particularly in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel where rebel and al Qaeda-affiliated groups operate. They say Africom got a bad press initially because it was associated with heavy-handed U.S. policy in Somalia and as part of the U.S.-led ”War on Terror”, but now Pentagon officials are treading more carefully, realising how sensitive Africans are about suggestions Washington is trying to dominate.

Do you believe U.S. assurances about Africom or is it the thin end of the wedge, a precursor to a boosted American military presence on the continent that could attract rather than deter terrorist attacks and infringe on the sovereignty and independence of African nations?

Win or not in November, U.S. Senator Barack Obama has already become a hero to Africans.

He is a household name, putting a smile on everybody’s lips and spreading pride across the continent.

Now millions of Africans hope this son of a Kenyan father can turn his nomination to the Democratic presidential candidacy into a place in the White House.

But if he wins, is Barack Obama an answer to Africa’s problems? 

Would an Obama-led USA prioritise issues of poverty, AIDS and trade in Africa? Or would bigger global conundrums like Iraq, the Middle East and the West’s response to the rise of China take precedence as before?

Here are some views from around the continent.

So what tangible benefits would a black U.S. president bring to Africa? And what does Africa have to offer Obama? Have your say.