On October 14 President Obama informed Congress that US military 300 have begun to deploy in Cameroon. The deployment of forces would fall within the framework of operations aimed at combating international and specifically Boko Haram terrorism, which is increasingly present on the territory of the African state.
Forces "Equipped with the necessary armaments to ensure their own safety" they are mostly destined for aerial reconnaissance and are part of an agreement with the Yaounde government, a passage to which the White House seemed to pay particular attention. According to presidential statements, the forces will remain until it is deemed necessary.
In itself this would be part of the list of not very relevant military events. The political sense of Obama's move, whose administration stands out for the relationship that is not always peaceful with the Pentagon and for obvious difficulties in foreign policy, is actually significant.
What happens in Africa?
We are used to the 90 years and to the resurgence of the "Atlantic-African" front. The main events of blood around which the instability of West Africa has revolved in the last twenty years have been essentially three:
- the civil war in Sierra Leone ended after about 10 years at the beginning of the millennium;
- the civil war in Liberia, stabilized (according to African standards) only in the 2005;
- the crisis in Ivory Coast that starting from the 2000 forced France itself to intervene directly with a simultaneous use of almost military 5000.
The picturesque brutality of Gambia President Jammeh (he would cure AIDS with an ointment but only on Thursday ...), the instability of Senegal linked to the conflict in Casamance, the endless list of coups in Guinea Bissau, were the contours to a geopolitical theater that we are resigned to consider fragile.
Without prejudice to the endemic criticality of the state systems of this corner of Africa, there is however a worsening of the equilibrium in an area so far immune from great upheavals. We are not just talking about signs of institutional disintegration in relatively stable nations such as Burkina Faso (we monitored the September events in Ouagadougou).
We refer to real conflicts. To the Mali crisis followed by Online Defense, a series of political turbulences were queued and progressively involved geographically more and more central countries of the continent. The armed clashes in the Central African Republic throughout the 2015 must be considered part of a real civil war with the aggravating circumstance of the religious clash in the background. If we consider that the 11 October a triple attack by Boko Haram at Baga Sola, in Chad has made 41 dead and 50 injured, then we can evaluate the whole Sahel belt practically in disarray.
The explosions in Chad are not new but they mark a decisive qualitative leap in the crisis in Nigeria and the Boko Haram phenomenon. The use of suicide bombers at the fish market and in a neighborhood inhabited by Nigerian refugees escaped the civil war, is part of a program of precise destabilization aimed at achieving two goals:
- to hit the Nigerians who fled across the border, giving the idea of the omnipotence of the jihad;
- definitively widen the stain of terror also to Chad, a country so far only tangent to the Nigerian crisis.
Can the American move to send troops to Cameroon be read in a general framework of destabilization of the area or is it an isolated fact?
Is Boko Haram's alliance declaration to ISIS, is it ideological or is it a detonator for wider imbalances?
The overlap of the influences of France and the USA in the African chessboard is overt, but it has not always been managed with serenity. If Paris treats its direct interests in the former colonies (including Chad), what happens in the realities where the French presence is weakest?
The Cameroon case is emblematic. The north-west is English-speaking and predominantly Muslim. Will the widening of the jihad lead to wider American military involvement?
Given the nebulous behavior of local governments (Boko Haram uses fragmentation bombs taken from the arsenals of the Nigerian army, whose transparency has not always shed light), the geopolitical picture is constantly evolving and dramatically worsening.
The United States, massively present on the economic level, can risk a military escalation or limit itself to a soft strategy awaiting the presidential elections of the 2016.
Africa is also made up of quicksand. We'll see.
(Photo: Armée de l'air du Cameroun)
