For years, the U.S. military has publicly insisted that its efforts in Africa are small scale. Its public affairs personnel and commanders have repeatedly claimed no more than a “light footprint” on that continent, including a remarkably modest presence when it comes to military personnel.  They have, however, balked at specifying just what that light footprint actually consists of.  During an interview, for instance, a U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) spokesman once expressed worry that tabulating the command’s deployments would offer a “skewed image” of U.S. efforts there.

It turns out that the numbers do just the opposite.

Last year, according AFRICOM commander General David Rodriguez, the U.S. military carried out a total of 546 “activities” on the continent -- a catch-all term for everything the military does in Africa.  In other words, it averages about one and a half missions a day.  This represents a 217% increase in operations, programs, and exercises since the command was established in 2008.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month, Rodriguez noted that the 10 exercises, 55 operations, and 481 security cooperation activities made AFRICOM “an extremely active geographic command.”  But exactly what the command is “active” in doing is often far from clear.

AFRICOM releases information about only a fraction of its activities.  It offers no breakdown on the nature of its operations.  And it allows only a handful of cherry-picked reporters the chance to observe a few select missions.  The command refuses even to offer a count of the countries in which it is “active,” preferring to keep most information about what it’s doing -- and when and where -- secret.

While Rodriguez’s testimony offers but a glimpse of the scale of AFRICOM’s activities, a cache of previously undisclosed military briefing documents obtained by TomDispatch sheds additional light on the types of missions being carried out and their locations all across the continent.  These briefings prepared for top commanders and civilian officials in 2013 demonstrate a substantial increase in deployments in recent years and reveal U.S. military operations to be more extensive than previously reported.  They also indicate that the pace of operations in Africa will remain robust in 2014, with U.S. forces expected again to average far more than a mission each day on the continent.

The Constant Gardener

U.S. troops carry out a wide range of operations in Africa, including airstrikes targeting suspected militants, night raids aimed at kidnapping terror suspects, airlifts of French and African troops onto the battlefields of proxy wars, and evacuation operations in destabilized countries.  Above all, however, the U.S. military conducts training missions, mentors allies, and funds, equips, and advises its local surrogates.

U.S. Africa Command describes its activities as advancing “U.S. national security interests through focused, sustained engagement with partners” and insists that its “operations, exercises, and security cooperation assistance programs support U.S. Government foreign policy and do so primarily through military-to-military activities and assistance programs.”

Saharan Express is a typical exercise that biennially pairs U.S. forces with members of the navies and coast guards of around a dozen mostly African countries. Operations include Juniper Micron and Echo Casemate, missions focused on aiding French and African interventions in Mali and the Central African Republic.  Other “security cooperation” activities include the State Partnership Program, which teams African military forces with U.S. National Guard units and the State Department-funded Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) program through which U.S. military mentors and advisors provide equipment and instruction to African units.

Many military-to-military activities and advisory missions are carried out by soldiers from the Army’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, as part of a “regionally aligned forces” effort that farms out specially trained U.S. troops to geographic combatant commands, like AFRICOM.  Other training engagements are carried out by units from across the service branches, including Africa Partnership Station 13 whose U.S. naval personnel and Marines teach skills such as patrolling procedures and hand-to-hand combat techniques.  Meanwhile, members of the Air Force recently provided assistance to Nigerian troops in areas ranging from logistics to airlift support to public affairs.

Previously undisclosed U.S. Army Africa records reveal a 94% increase in all activities by Army personnel from 2011 to 2013, including a 174% surge in State Partnership missions (from 34 to 93) and a 436% jump in Advise-and-Assist activities including ACOTA missions (from 11 to 59).  Last year, according to a December 2013 document, these efforts involved everything from teaching Kenyan troops how to use Raven surveillance drones and helping Algerian forces field new mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles, or MRAPS, to training Chadian and Guinean infantrymen and aiding France’s ongoing interventions in West and Central Africa.

AFRICOM spokesman Benjamin Benson refused to offer further details about these activities. “We do training with a lot of different countries in Africa,” he told me.  When I asked if he had a number on those “different countries,” he replied, “No, I don’t.”  He ignored repeated written requests for further information.  But a cache of records detailing deployments by members of just the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, from June through December 2013, highlights the sheer size, scope, and sweep of U.S. training missions.

June saw members of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team deployed to Niger, Uganda, Ghana, and on two separate missions to Malawi; in July, troops from the team traveled to Burundi, Mauritania, Niger, Uganda, and South Africa; August deployments included the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, South Africa, Niger, two missions in Malawi, and three to Uganda; September saw activities in Chad, Togo, Cameroon, Ghana, São Tomé and Príncipe, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Uganda, and Malawi; in October, members of the unit headed for Guinea and South Africa; November’s deployments consisted of Lesotho, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Guinea; while December’s schedule consisted of activities in South Sudan, Cameroon, and Uganda, according to the documents.  All told, the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division carried out 128 separate “activities” in 28 African countries during all of 2013.

The records obtained by TomDispatch also indicate that U.S. Army Africa took part in almost 80% of all AFRICOM activities on the continent in 2013, averaging more than one mission per day.  Preliminary projections for 2014 suggest a similar pace this year -- 418 activities were already planned out by mid-December 2013 -- including anticipated increases in the number of operations and train-and-equip missions.

Full-scale exercises, each involving U.S. Army troops and members of the militaries of multiple African countries, are also slated to rise from 14 to 20 in 2014, according to the documents.  So far, AFRICOM has released information on 11 named exercises scheduled for this year.  These include African Lion in Morocco, Eastern Accord in Uganda, Western Accord in Senegal, Central Accord in Cameroon, and Southern Accord in Malawi, all of which include a field training component and serve as a capstone event for the prior year’s military-to-military programs.  AFRICOM will also conduct at least three maritime security exercises, including Cutlass Express off the coast of East Africa, Obangame Express in the Gulf of Guinea, and Saharan Express in the waters off Senegal and the Cape Verde islands, as well as its annual Africa Endeavor exercise, which is designed to promote “information sharing” and facilitate standardized communications procedures within African militaries.

Additionally, U.S. and African Special Operations forces will carry out an exercise codenamed Silent Warrior 2014 in Germany and have already completed Flintlock 2014 (since 2005, an annual event).  As part of Flintlock 2014, more than 1,000 troops from 18 nations, including Burkina Faso, Canada, Chad, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Mauritania, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Senegal, the United Kingdom, the U.S., and the host nation of Niger, carried out counterterror training on the outskirts of Niamey, the capital, as well as at small bases in Tahoua, Agadez, and Diffa.  “Although Flintlock is considered an exercise, it is really an extension of ongoing training, engagement, and operations that help prepare our close Africa partners in the fight against extremism and the enemies that threaten peace, stability, and regional security,” said Colonel Kenneth Sipperly, the commander of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahel, during the Flintlock opening ceremony.

Locations, Locations, Locations

A 2013 investigation by TomDispatch analyzing official documents and open source information revealed that the U.S. military was involved with at least 49 of the 54 nations on the African continent during 2012 and 2013 in activities that ranged from special ops raids to the training of proxy forces.  A map produced late last year by U.S. Army Africa bolsters the findings, indicating its troops had conducted or planned to conduct “activities” in all African “countries” during the 2013 fiscal year except for Western Sahara (a disputed territory in the Maghreb region of North Africa), Guinea Bissau, Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Madagascar, and Zimbabwe.  Egypt is considered outside of AFRICOM’s area of operations, but did see U.S. military activity in 2013, as did Somalia, which now also hosts a small team of U.S. advisors.  Other documents indicate Army troops actually deployed to São Tomé and Príncipe, a country that regularly conducts activities with the U.S. Navy.

AFRICOM is adamant that the U.S. military has only one base on the continent: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.  Official documents examined by TomDispatch, however, make reference to bases by other names: forward operating sites, or FOSes (long-term locations); cooperative security locations, or CSLs (through which small numbers of U.S. troops periodically rotate); and contingency locations, or CLs (which are used only during ongoing missions).

AFRICOM has repeatedly denied requests by TomDispatch for further information on the numbers or locations of FOSes, CSLs, and CLs, but official documents produced in 2012 make reference to seven cooperative security locations, including one in Entebbe, Uganda, a location from which U.S. contractors have flown secret surveillance missions, according to an investigation by the Washington Post.  Information released earlier this year by the military also makes references to at least nine “forward operating locations,” or FOLs in Africa.

We Know Not What They Do

“What We Are Doing,” the title of a December 2013 military document obtained by TomDispatch, offers answers to questions that AFRICOM has long sought to avoid and provides information the command has worked to keep under wraps.  So much else, however, remains in the shadows.

From 2008 to 2013, the number of missions, exercises, operations, and other activities under AFRICOM’s purview has skyrocketed from 172 to 546, but little substantive information has been made public about what exactly most of these missions involved and just who U.S. forces have trained.  Since 2011, U.S. Army Africa alone has taken part in close to 1,000 “activities” across the continent, but independent reporters have only been on hand for a tiny fraction of them, so there are limits to what we can know about them beyond military talking points and official news releases for a relative few of these missions.  Only later did it become clear that the United States extensively mentored the military officer who overthrew Mali’s elected government in 2012, and that the U.S. trained a Congolese commando battalion implicated by the United Nations in mass rapes and other atrocities during that same year, to cite two examples.

Since its inception, U.S. Africa Command has consistently downplayed its role on the continent.  Meanwhile, far from the press or the public, the officers running its secret operations have privately been calling Africa “the battlefield of tomorrow, today.”

After years in the dark, we now know just how “extremely active” -- to use General David Rodriguez’s phrase -- AFRICOM has been and how rapidly the tempo of its missions has increased.  It remains to be seen just what else we don't know about U.S. Africa Command’s exponentially expanding operations.

Ancient empires such as Rome, Achaemenid Persia, Mauryan India, and Han China may have been cruel beyond measure, but they were less cruel and delivered more predictability for the average person than did anything beyond their borders. Who says imperialism is necessarily reactionary? Athens, Rome, Venice, and Great Britain were the most enlightened regimes of their day. True, imperialism has often been driven by the pursuit of riches, but that pursuit has in many cases resulted in a hard-earned cosmopolitanism. The early modern empires of Hapsburg Austria and Ottoman Turkey were well known for their relative tolerance and protection of minorities, including the Jews. Precisely because the Hapsburg imperialists governed a mélange of ethnic and religious groups stretching from the edge of the Swiss Alps to central Romania, and from the Polish Carpathians to the Adriatic Sea, they abjured ethnic nationalism and sought a universalism almost postmodern in its design. What followed the Hapsburgs were mono-ethnic states and quasi-democracies that persecuted minorities and helped ease the path of Nazism.

All of these empires delivered more peace and stability than the United Nations ever has or probably ever could. Consider, too, the American example. The humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the absence of such interventions in Rwanda and Syria, show American imperialism in action, and in abeyance....

The implications are revolutionary. Your smart refrigerator will keep an inventory of food items, noting when they go bad. Your smart thermostat will learn your habits and adjust the temperature to your liking. Smart lights will illuminate dangerous parking garages, even as they keep an “eye” out for suspicious activity.

Techno-evangelists have a nice catchphrase for this future utopia of machines and the never-ending stream of information, known as Big Data, it produces: the Internet of Things.  So abstract. So inoffensive. Ultimately, so meaningless.

A future Internet of Things does have the potential to offer real benefits, but the dark side of that seemingly shiny coin is this: companies will increasingly know all there is to know about you.  Most people are already aware that virtually everything a typical person does on the Internet is tracked. In the not-too-distant future, however, real space will be increasingly like cyberspace, thanks to our headlong rush toward that Internet of Things. With the rise of the networked device, what people do in their homes, in their cars, in stores, and within their communities will be monitored and analyzed in ever more intrusive ways by corporations and, by extension, the government.

And one more thing: in cyberspace it is at least theoretically possible to log off.  In your own well-wired home, there will be no “opt out.”

You can almost hear the ominous narrator’s voice from an old “Twilight Zone” episode saying, “Soon the net will close around all of us. There will be no escape.” 

Except it’s no longer science fiction. It’s our barely distant present.

Home Invasion

"[W]e estimate that only one percent of things that could have an IP address do have an IP address today, so we like to say that ninety-nine percent of the world is still asleep," Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's Chief Technology and Strategy Officer, told the Silicon Valley Summit in December. "It’s up to our imaginations to figure out what will happen when the ninety-nine percent wakes up."

Yes, imagine it. Welcome to a world where everything you do is collected, stored, analyzed, and, more often than not, packaged and sold to strangers -- including government agencies.

In January, Google announced its $3.2 billion purchase of Nest, a company that manufactures intelligent smoke detectors and thermostats. The signal couldn’t be clearer. Google believes Nest’s vision of the “conscious home” will prove profitable indeed. And there’s no denying how cool the technology is. Nest’s smoke detector, for instance, can differentiate between burnt toast and true danger. In the wee hours, it will conveniently shine its nightlight as you groggily shuffle to the toilet. It speaks rather than beeps. If there’s a problem, it can contact the fire department.

The fact that these technologies are so cool and potentially useful shouldn’t, however, blind us to their invasiveness as they operate 24/7, silently gathering data on everything we do. Will companies even tell consumers what information they’re gathering? Will consumers have the ability to determine what they’re comfortable with? Will companies sell or share data gathered from your home to third parties? And how will companies protect that data from hackers and other miscreants?

The dangers aren’t theoretical. In November, the British tech blogger Doctorbeet discovered that his new LG Smart TV was snooping on him. Every time he changed the channel, his activity was logged and transmitted unencrypted to LG. Doctorbeet checked the TV’s option screen and found that the setting “collection of watching info” was turned on by default. Being a techie, he turned it off, but it didn’t matter. The information continued to flow to the company anyway.

As more and more household devices -- your television, your thermostat, your refrigerator -- connect to the Internet, device manufacturers will undoubtedly follow a model of comprehensive data collection and possibly infinite storage. (And don’t count on them offering you an opt-out either.) They have seen the giants of the online world -- the Googles, the Facebooks -- make money off their users’ personal data and they want a cut of the spoils. Your home will know your secrets, and chances are it will have loose lips.

The result: more and more of what happens behind closed doors will be open to scrutiny by parties you would never invite into your home. After all, the Drug Enforcement Administration already subpoenas utility company records to determine if electricity consumption in specific homes is consistent with a marijuana-growing operation. What will come next? Will eating habits collected by smart fridges be repackaged and sold to healthcare or insurance companies as predictors of obesity or other health problems -- and so a reasonable basis for determining premiums? Will smart lights inform drug companies of insomniac owners?

Keep in mind that when such data flows are being scrutinized, you’ll no longer be able to pull down the shades, not when the Peeping Toms of the twenty-first century come packaged in glossy, alluring boxes. Many people will just be doing what Americans have always done -- upgrading their appliances.  It may not initially dawn on them that they are also installing surveillance equipment targeted at them. And companies have obvious incentives to obscure this fact as much as possible.

As the “conscious home” becomes a reality, we will all have to make a crucial and conscious decision for ourselves: Will I let this device into my home? Renters may not have that option. And eventually there may only be internet-enabled appliances.

Commercial Stalking

The minute you leave your home, the ability to avoid surveillance technologies masquerading as something else will, if anything, lessen.

Physical sensors connected to the Internet are increasingly everywhere, ready to detect a unique identifier associated with you, usually one generated by your smartphone, then log what you do and leverage the data you generate for insight into your life. For instance, Apple introduced iBeacon last year.  It’s a service based on transmitters that employ Bluetooth technology to track where Apple users are in stores and restaurants. (The company conveniently turned on Bluetooth by default via a software update it delivered to Apple iPhone owners.) Apps that use iBeacon harvest a user’s data, including his or her location, and sometimes can even turn on a device’s microphone to listen in on what’s going on.

Another company, Turnstyle Solutions Inc., has placed sensors around Toronto that surreptitiously record signals emitted by WiFi-enabled devices and can track users’ movements. Turnstyle can tell, for instance, when a person who visited a restaurant goes to a bar or a hotel. When people log-on to WiFi networks Turnstyle has installed at area restaurants or coffee shops and check Facebook, the company can go far beyond location, collecting “names, ages, genders, and social media profiles,” according to theWall Street Journal.

The rationale for apps that track where you are is that business owners can use the data to tailor the customer experience to your liking. If you’re wandering around the male grooming section of a particular retailer, the store could shoot you a coupon to convince you to purchase that full body trimmer that promises a smooth shave every time. If customers enter Macy’s and zig right more often than left, the store can strategically place what’s popular or on sale in those high-traffic areas. This is basically what’s happening online now, and brick and mortar stores want in so they can compete against the Amazons of the world.

Not so surprisingly, however, such handy technology has already led to discriminatory behavior by retailers. About a year ago, an investigation by the Wall Street Journal found that prices quoted by online retailers like Staples and Home Depot changed based on who the customer was. People who lived in higher-income areas generally received the best deals, which is a form of digital redlining. In the future, count on brick and mortar stores to do the same thing by identifying your phone, picking up data about you, and pricing items according to just how juicy a customer they think you may be.

To be able to do this, retailers need companies that can provide rich data about our lives. That’s where a group of pioneering companies in the new universe of customer surveillance called data aggregators come in. Already a multibillion-dollar industry, aggregators like Acxiom, Experian, and Datalogix buy customer data from wherever they can -- banks, travel websites, retailers -- and turn it into Big Data. Then they analyze, package, and sell it to third parties. “Our digital reach,” said Scott Howe, CEO of the largest data aggregator, Acxiom, “will soon approach nearly every Internet user in the U.S.”

Last December, the Senate Commerce Committee investigated the business practices of the nine largest data aggregators: what information they collect, how they obtain it, their invasiveness, and who they sell it to. The committee found that these companies collect information ranging from the relatively mundane to the incredibly sensitive, including names and addresses, income levels, and medical histories. They then sell it off without giving serious consideration to what the buyers might do with it.

In the process, you could find yourself categorized as part of a group of “Mid-Life Strugglers: Families” or “Meager Metro Means” or “Oldies but Goodies,” which aggregator InfoUSA described as “gullible” people who “want to believe their luck can change.” Think of it as high-tech commercial profiling of the most exploitative sort. 

The result is the creation of a twenty-first century permanent record of your very own, which you are unlikely to ever be able to see because, as the Senate report warned, the industry operates under “a veil of secrecy” with little or no regulation. “Three of the largest companies -- Acxiom, Experian, and Epsilon -- to date have been similarly secretive with the committee with respect to their practices, refusing to identify the specific sources of their data or the customers who purchase it.”

Congress’s watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, reviewed U.S. privacy law and found that citizens generally do not have the right to control the scope of information collected about them or limit its use, even when it pertains to their health or their finances. And if the information is incorrect -- something you might never find out -- there’s no U.S. law that requires data aggregators to correct it.

Paul Ohm, a policy advisor to the Federal Trade Commission, calls these immense troves of personal information “databases of ruin.” He worries that, over time, these databases will include new waves of data -- maybe from your conscious home or location information from commercial sensors -- and so become ever more consolidated. Soon, he fears, “these databases will grow to connect every individual to at least one closely guarded secret. This might be a secret about a medical condition, family history, or personal preference. It is a secret that, if revealed, would cause more than embarrassment or shame; it would lead to serious, concrete, devastating harm.”

Sooner or later, with smart devices seamlessly using sensors and Big Data provided by data aggregators, it will be possible to pick you out of a crowd and identify you in complex ways in real time. If intelligent surveillance cameras armed with facial recognition technology have access to social media profiles as well as the information stored by data aggregators, a digital dossier of your life could be called up on-demand whenever your face is recognized. Imagine the power retailers and companies will exert over your life if they not only know who you are and where you are, but what your weaknesses are -- whether that’s booze, cigarettes, or the appealing mortgage rate with the sketchy small print. Are we looking at a future where the car salesman really does know what he has to do to put us in that car?

Big Data is creating the possibility of a far more entrenched, class-based surveillance society that discriminates using our perceived successes and preys on our weaknesses.

The Great Outdoors

Recently, Newark Liberty International Airport upgraded lighting fixtures at one of its terminals to a more eco-friendly alternative known as LEDs. It turns out, however, that energy efficiency wasn’t the only benefit of the purchase. The fixtures also double as a surveillance system of cameras and sensors that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is using to watch for long lines, identify license plates, and -- its officials claim -- spot suspicious behavior.

With all the spying going on these days, this may not seem particularly invasive, but don’t worry, the manufacturers of such systems are thinking much bigger. “We see outdoor lighting as the perfect infrastructure to build a brand new network,” said Hugh Martin, CEO of Sensity Systems, a Sunnyvale, California-based company interested in making lighting smart. “We felt what you’d want to use this network for is to gather information about people and the planet.”

Pretty soon, just about anywhere you are, when you look up at that light pole, it is likely to be looking back down at you. Or into your home or car.

Other surveillance technologies are heading for the heavens. Persistent Surveillance Systems has developed a surveillance camera on steroids. When attached to small aircraft, the 192-megapixel cameras record the patterns of the planetary life they fly over for hours at a time. According to the Washington Post, this will give the police and other customers a “time machine” they can simply rewind when they need it. Placed strategically at the highest points of any town or city, these cameras could provide the sort of blanket surveillance that’s hard to avoid. The inventor of the camera, a retired Air Force officer, helped create a similar system for the city of Fallujah, the site of two of the most violent battles of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It’s just one example of how wartime surveillance technologies are returning home for “civilian use.”

Private surveillance technology is also destroying one of America’s iconic freedoms: the open road. License plate readers are proliferating across America. These devices snap a picture of every passing car. One company, Vigilant Solutions, already holds 1.8 billion license plate records in its data warehouse, known as the National Vehicle Location Service (NVLS). Anyone with access to this information could easily find out where a person has driven simply by connecting the plate to the car owner. And keep in mind that it’s up to the companies gathering them to determine just who can access the information -- data of immense interest to private investigators and anyone else curious to track another person’s movements.

Like many businesses that trade in Big Data or construct massive databases, Vigilant is in regular contact with government agencies craving access to its meaty stores of information.

If You Build It, They Will Come

In February, the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) put out a solicitation to obtain access to a private license plate reader database for the purpose of “locating criminal aliens and absconders.” ICE claims that it wants to enhance officer safety by making it easier to arrest suspects away from their homes. When the mainstream media took notice and privacy advocates like the ACLU objected, new Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson pulled the plug on the project.

A big win? Don’t count on it, because police departments already have easy access to commercial license plate repositories. In the past, Vigilant has, for instance, allowed ICE to test its service free of charge. Police often pony up the cash to access such databases. As a quick experiment, go to Vigilant’s NVLS registration page, click on the drop-down menu beside “Agency name,” and scroll down. Trust us, you’ll get bored by the staggering list of police departments before you reach the bottom.

Which brings us to an axiom of our digital age: law enforcement will exploit any database built, if it makes it easier to figure out what the rest of us are up to. Lucky for them, there’s a wealth of data out there and available. Experian, one of the largest data aggregators, told the Senate Commerce Committee that “government agencies” regularly purchase information from them. 

Often, those agencies don’t even have to pay for the privilege of accessing our data. In many cases, such an agency can simply issue its own subpoena (not seen by a judge) and compel companies to turn over our sensitive data. The culprit here is known as the “third party doctrine,” which some courts have aggressively (and wrongly) interpreted to mean that any information disclosed to a third party isn’t really private.

The danger of the rise of Big Data and the Internet of Things is straightforward enough. Whenever data is perpetually generated, collected, and stored, the result is going to be a virtual ATM of user information that government agencies can withdraw from with ease. Last year, for instance, local, state, and federal authorities issued 164,000 subpoenas to Verizon and more than 248,000 subpoenas to AT&T for user information, while issuing nearly 7,500 subpoenas to Google during the first half of 2013.

The Internet of Things means that, soon enough, the authorities will have yet more ways to learn yet more about us.

Big Data, Little Democracy?

Here are two obvious questions for our surveillance future: Who controls the data generated by our devices? Without doing anything except buying and installing them, do we somehow consent to having every piece of data they generate shared with Big Business and sometimes Big Brother? No one should have to isolate themselves from society and technology in the ascetic mold of Henry David Thoreau -- or more ominously, Ted Kaczynski -- to have some semblance of privacy.

In the future, even going all Jeremiah Johnson might not have the effect intended, since law enforcement could interpret your lack of a solid digital footprint as inherently suspicious. This would be like a police officer growing suspicious of a home just because it was all dark and locked up tight.

When everything is increasingly tracked and viewed through the lens of technological omniscience, what will the effect be on dissent and protest? Will security companies with risk assessment software troll through our data and crunch it to identify people they believe have the propensity to become criminals or troublemakers -- and then share that with law enforcement? (Something like it already seems to be happening in Chicago, where police are using computer analytic programs to identify people at a greater risk of violent behavior.)

There’s simply no way to forecast how these immense powers -- disproportionately accumulating in the hands of corporations seeking financial advantage and governments craving ever more control -- will be used. Chances are Big Data and the Internet of Things will make it harder for us to control our own lives, as we grow increasingly transparent to powerful corporations and government institutions that are becoming more opaque to us.

When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he insisted that we “look forward,” not backward.  While he rejected the widespread use of torture and abuse by the CIA in the Bush years, his Department of Justice refused to prosecute a single torture case, even when death was the result.  (The only CIA agent to go to jail during the Obama presidency was the guy who blew the whistle on the CIA torture program!) 

Jump ahead five years, and instead of looking forward, it seems that we’re again looking backward big time.  The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, usually the staunchest backer of U.S. intelligence, seems to have sworn a vendetta against the CIA on the Senate floor for spying on her oversight committee as it prepared its still-unreleased report on the Agency’s torture program.  The CIA denies it all and claims committee staffers spied on them.  Once again, the Justice Department faces the issue of charges over the Agency’s torture program!  It seems like little short of a constitutional catfight.

What gives, Colonel?  Shouldn’t President Obama have prosecuted CIA torturers in the first place and isn’t it time that he and his Justice Department finally take all this to court?

Tortured in Tacoma

Dear Tortured,

You’ve hit the nail on the head!  When Senator Feinstein turns on the CIA, the situation couldn’t be more disturbing -- or out of hand.  But believe me, the answer is not to call on the Justice Department (of all places!) to sort this out.  After all, as you indicate, it was incapable of prosecuting the killing of tortured prisoners, so it’s hardly likely to adopt a take-no-prisoners attitude toward either the CIA or the Senate Intelligence Committee over possible computer spying. 

Instead, as the president long ago suggested, we need to look forward, not backward.  And with that in mind, Senator John McCain has, I believe, made the most useful suggestion: that an independent investigative body be empaneled to get to the bottom of the dispute between Feinstein and the CIA.  As you know, over the last five years, the Senate Intelligence Committee has managed to write a still-incomplete report on the CIA’s black sites and torture campaign.  Though unreleased to the public even in redacted or summary form, it is reportedly 6,300 pages long.  By comparison, the first novel in history, the Tale of Genji, is only 1,200 pages, and War and Peace only 1,800 pages.  (And yes, Tortured, we in the secret world do have a certain attraction to fiction.)

You can do the math.  Let’s say that it takes months to empanel that committee and get it up to speed.  Among other things, its members will need to read that 6,300-page report and the 6.2 million documents on its interrogation program and related matters that the CIA also reputedly turned over to the committee. (That, of course, doesn’t include the videos of its interrogations that the Agency destroyed back in 2005 because they took up too much shelf space.)  Sorting through this sort of documentation will take time.  Let’s conservatively estimate that the panel doesn’t finish hearing witnesses and going over documents until mid-2015.  Next, it has to write up its report, which will obviously have to be more than 6,300 pages long.  It, in turn, will have to be read and vetted by numerous people in the intelligence community and elsewhere before it can be made public, lest someone find blood on their hands.

A reasonable time estimate for the whole process? Perhaps a heavily edited and redacted summary of the panel’s findings could see the light by late 2017 by which time -- and here’s the great benefit -- passions will have cooled, some of the participants will be dead, and the rest of us will have other things on our minds than a panel reporting on possible crimes committed in relation to a report about possible crimes committed a decade and a half earlier.  In short, this is a stellar example of effective long-term problem-solving the national security way.

Yours looking forward,

Col. Manners (ret.)

***

Dear Col. Manners,

I thought you were the only one!  Now, thanks to the nine zillionth document in the Edward Snowden revelations and journalist Peter Maass, I discovered that the National Security Agency has its own secret advice columnist who writes “Ask Zelda,” focusing on dear-to-the-NSA topics like what to do if your boss is spying on you. 

My question is this: Were you disappointed to discover that you had company and has “Zelda” stolen your thunder?

Blindsided in Biloxi

Dear Blindsided,

Actually, despite what you might imagine, “Zelda” and I are good friends.  In fact, the community of advice columnists inside the national security world is a very close-knit crew.  We even have a social group we jokingly call the Redacted Lonely Hearts Club Band.  We meet every Friday for happy hour at a local bar (name redacted) to exchange notes.  Zelda was indeed recently “outed” in the Snowden carnage.  I wouldn’t want to out other national security advice columnists, but it is a shame that most Americans don't have access to their everyday wisdom.  I can tell you that the CIA’s columnist is not only smart as a tack, but hilarious as well.  His offhand comments at our Friday gatherings regularly leave me in stitches.  “Advice from the Dark Side,” his column in the Bush years, was a national security hit.

Believe me, living in the shadows as we all do, our community desperately needs advice.  The hundreds of thousands of us (including private contractors) in the secret world often have no one to turn to.  We certainly can’t talk about our problems in your world, and yet issues of manners, mores, or morals arise all the time, and we often have no one to consult.  That’s why, in addition to Zelda, just about every secret outfit has an advice columnist. 

I can assure you that if Edward Snowden had reached out to Zelda he would never have become a Russian pawn.

Yours advisedly,

Col. Manners (ret.)

***

Dear Col. Manners,

My head’s spinning and I thought you might be able to straighten me out.  Vice-Admiral Michael Rogers, the nominee to be the new head of the National Security Agency, recently appeared before Congress and testified that aggressive cyberwar capabilities won’t simply be located in a single cyber command.  Instead, all the major combat commands of the U.S. military will soon have their own “dedicated” cyberforces and each will be capable of launching cyberattacks. 

Say it ain’t so, Colonel!  I know that every service wants a piece of every budgetary and operational pie, but isn’t it crazy to spread the ability to launch an aggressive cyberattack around widely?

Head Spun in Houston

Dear Head Spun,

It’s not crazy at all.  It’s the height of good sense.  Recently, while testifying about the collection of the phone data of Americans, Vice-Admiral Michael Rogers said, “One of my challenges as the director, if confirmed, is how do we engage the American people, and by extension their representatives, in a dialogue in which they have a level of comfort as to what we are doing and why.”  Quite right!  So let me lend a hand in that process.

I understand where you’re coming from, and I’d like to explain why the ability to launch a cyberattack can’t be spread widely enough in our military (and possibly beyond).  Response time on a cyberattack is everything.  If you’ve ever been inside Washington's bureaucracy, you know that anything not located at your fingertips is functionally not located anywhere.  Let’s say that U.S. Navy intelligence detects a North Korean plot to attack some aspect of its cyber-domains.  If that service has its own cyber command, then it’s instant, preemptive obliteration for North Korea's cyberwarriors.  If the Navy has to make its way through a labyrinth of military or civilian bureaucracies to get a decision on when and how to act, the North Koreans might be steering a couple of our aircraft carriers before anything gets done. 

Spend your career in Washington and you’ll discover soon enough that these are the realities.  In fact, you’ll be interested -- and now undoubtedly relieved -- to know that among the options being explored by U.S. cyber experts is the possibility of providing dedicated cyberforces to the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the EPA, the IRS, and possibly even Head Start.  (What, just to take an obvious example, if a group of disgruntled tax-paying cyberterrorists is plotting to launch a first strike on the IRS?)

"Be prepared" isn’t just a saying for boy scouts -- not any more, not on our new, totally connected, and remarkably dangerous cyberplanet.

Head straightly yours,

Col. Manners (ret.)

***

Dear Col. Manners,

Honestly, what gives?  Since Vlad Putin sent his troops into the Crimea, it seems like every American official from the president on down has called what he did a gross violation of international law.  It is, of course, but I haven’t seen “international law” invoked this often in Washington in my lifetime.

How time flies (if you’ll excuse a note of sarcasm).  It seems like only yesterday that the Geneva Conventions were being called “quaint” by American officials, that we were invading another country (nowhere near our border) on trumped up weapons of mass destruction charges, and that there were all those not-so-internationally accepted acts we were enthusiastically involved in.  (You know, setting up black sites, Abu Ghraib, torture, kidnappings, etc.)  More recently, to offer just a couple of examples, the president has been ordering the drone killings of American citizens based on a Department of Justice legal finding so secret it has yet to be made public, and his officials, according to the New York Times, have seconded the Bush administration in claiming that a bill of rights-style international agreement the U.S. signed onto in 1995 does not apply to our treatment of anyone outside the boundaries of the United States.  This is evidently an internationally unique interpretation of that document. 

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m a local lawyer and not especially enamored of “international law,” but really, what is it?  Is the law ours to determine or is it the international community’s?  Can we really have it both ways, depending on whether we’re doing the bad things or they are?  You tell me.

Local Law Man from Baltimore

Dear Local Law Man,

There's a “law” you ignore in comparing Russian and U.S. actions.  Call it the law of exceptionally good intentions.  Manners and intent do matter, whether in our personal lives or in international invasions.  I’ve noticed, for instance, that John Kerry has been taken to the woodshed by critics for supporting the invasion of Iraq in the Senate back in 2002 and then making this statement about Russian actions in the Crimea: “You just don't in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on [a] completely trumped up pretext.”

This is a typically bum rap for our secretary of state.  Our invasion of Iraq and the recent Russian troop movements into Ukraine shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath.  Admittedly, we launched a war that killed many on the basis of a nonexistent arsenal of weaponry, while Russian troops crossed an international border in an intervention in which, so far, no one has died.  Still, the difference lies in the intentions of the invading parties.  Think of it as invasion etiquette.  Even when, as in Iraq, a U.S. invasion results in massive collateral damage and mistakes are made, they are honest ones taken with the best of intentions to bring freedom and democracy to peoples under tyranny.  This is commendable, whatever the results, and highlights the exceptional nature of our country.

Who would claim the same for the Russians (except of course, the Russians)?  In fact, when it comes to the rest of the so-called international community, it’s remarkable how seldom genuine good intentions are mixed up with aggressive acts.  For them, the constraints of international law are crucial.  For the United States, international law might be thought of as a luxury item.  Since we can be relied on to do our best, whatever the circumstances, we can naturally be left free to pick and choose among international law, national law, and a growing body of well-thought-out secret law, depending on the situation.

Yes, we make mistakes; yes, there are bad eggs in any basket; but please, this is the United States of America!  Don’t get all legalistic on us.

From the well-intentioned,

Col. Manners

A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.

There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs....

You could be forgiven if this jumble of words looks like nonsense to you.  It isn’t.  It’s the language of the U.S. military’s simmering African interventions; the patois that goes with a set of missions carried out in countries most Americans couldn’t locate on a map; the argot of conflicts now primarily fought by proxies and a former colonial power on a continent that the U.S. military views as a hotbed of instability and that hawkish pundits increasingly see as a growth area for future armed interventions.     

Since 9/11, the U.S. military has been making inroads in Africa, building alliances, facilities, and a sophisticated logistics network.  Despite repeated assurances by U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) that military activities on the continent were minuscule, a 2013 investigation by TomDispatch exposed surprisingly large and expanding U.S. operations -- including recent military involvement with no fewer than 49 of 54 nations on the continent.  Washington’s goal continues to be building these nations into stable partners with robust, capable militaries, as well as creating regional bulwarks favorable to its strategic interests in Africa.  Yet over the last years, the results have often confounded the planning -- with American operations serving as a catalyst for blowback (to use a term of CIA tradecraft). 

A U.S.-backed uprising in Libya, for instance, helped spawn hundreds of militias that have increasingly caused chaos in that country, leading to repeated attacks on Western interests and the killing of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. Tunisia has become ever more destabilized, according to a top U.S. commander in the region. Kenya and Algeria were hit by spectacular, large-scale terrorist attacks that left Americans dead or wounded.  South Sudan, a fledgling nation Washington recently midwifed into being that has been slipping into civil war, now has more than 870,000 displaced persons, is facing an imminent hunger crisis, and has recently been the site of mass atrocities, including rapes and killings. Meanwhile, the U.S.-backed military of Mali was repeatedly defeated by insurgent forces after managing to overthrow the elected government, and the U.S.-supported forces of the Central African Republic (CAR) failed to stop a ragtag rebel group from ousting the president.  

In an effort to staunch the bleeding in those two countries, the U.S. has been developing a back-to-the-future military policy in Africa -- making common cause with one of the continent’s former European colonial powers in a set of wars that seem to be spreading, not staunching violence and instability in the region.

The French Connection 

After establishing a trading post in present-day Senegal in 1659, France gradually undertook a conquest of West Africa that, by the early twentieth century, left it with a vast colonial domain encompassing present-day Burkina Faso, Benin, Chad, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, and Senegal, among other places.  In the process, the French used Foreign Legionnaires from Algeria, Goumiers from Morocco, and Tirailleurs from Senegal, among other African troops, to bolster its ranks.  Today, the U.S. is pioneering a twenty-first-century brand of expeditionary warfare that involves backing both France and the armies of its former colonial charges as Washington tries to accomplish its policy aims in Africa with a limited expenditure of blood and treasure. 

In a recent op-ed for the Washington Post, President Barack Obama and French President François Hollande outlined their efforts in glowing terms:

“In Mali, French and African Union forces -- with U.S. logistical and information support -- have pushed back al-Qaeda-linked insurgents, allowing the people of Mali to pursue a democratic future. Across the Sahel, we are partnering with countries to prevent al-Qaeda from gaining new footholds. In the Central African Republic, French and African Union soldiers -- backed by American airlift and support -- are working to stem violence and create space for dialogue, reconciliation, and swift progress to transitional elections.”

Missing from their joint piece, however, was any hint of the Western failures that helped facilitate the debacles in Mali and the Central African Republic, the continued crises plaguing those nations, or the potential for mission creep, unintended consequences, and future blowback from this new brand of coalition warfare.  The U.S. military, for its part, isn’t saying much about current efforts in these two African nations, but official documents obtained by TomDispatch through the Freedom of Information Act offer telling details, while experts are sounding alarms about the ways in which these military interventions have already fallen short or failed.

Operation Juniper Micron

After 9/11, through programs like the Pan-Sahel Initiative and the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Partnership, the U.S. has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into training and arming the militaries of Mali, Niger, Chad, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in order to promote “stability.”  In 2013, Captain J. Dane Thorleifson, the outgoing commander of an elite, quick-response force known as Naval Special Warfare Unit 10, described such efforts as training “proxy” forces in order to build “critical host nation security capacity; enabling, advising, and assisting our African CT [counterterror] partner forces so they can swiftly counter and destroy al-Shabab, AQIM [Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb], and Boko Haram.”  In other words, the U.S. military is in the business of training African armies as the primary tactical forces combatting local Islamic militant groups.

The first returns on Washington’s new and developing form of “light footprint” warfare in Africa have hardly been stellar.  After U.S. and French forces helped to topple Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, neighboring Mali went from bulwark to basket case.  Nomadic Tuareg fighters looted the weapons stores of the Gaddafi regime they had previously served, crossed the border, and began taking over northern Mali.  This, in turn, prompted a U.S.-trained officer -- a product of the Pan-Sahel Initiative -- to stage a military coup in the Malian capital, Bamako, and oust the democratically elected president of that country.  Soon after, the Tuareg rebels were muscled aside by heavily-armed Islamist rebels from the homegrown Ansar al-Dine movement as well as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Libya’s Ansar al-Shariah, and Nigeria’s Boko Haram, who instituted a harsh brand of Shariah law, creating a humanitarian crisis that caused widespread suffering and sent refugees streaming from their homes. 

In January 2013, former colonial power France launched a military intervention, code-named Operation Serval, to push back and defeat the Islamists.  At its peak, 4,500 French troops were fighting alongside West African forces, known as the African-led International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA), later subsumed into a U.N.-mandated Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA).  The AFISMA force, as detailed in an official U.S. Army Africa briefing on training missions obtained by TomDispatch, reads like a who’s who of American proxy forces in West Africa: Niger, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Senegal, Benin, Liberia, Chad, Nigeria, Gambia, Ghana, and Sierra Leone.           

Click here to see a larger versionU.S. Army Africa briefing slide detailing U.S. efforts to aid the African-led International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA).

Under the moniker Juniper Micron, the U.S. military supported France’s effort, airlifting its soldiers and materiel into Mali, flying refueling missions in support of its airpower, and providing “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance” (ISR) through drone operations out of Base Aerienne 101 at Diori Hamani International Airport in Niamey, the capital of neighboring Niger.  The U.S. Army Africa AFISMA document also makes reference to the deployment to Chad of an ISR liaison team with communications support.  Despite repeated pledges that it would put no boots on the ground in troubled Mali, in the spring of 2013, the Pentagon sent a small contingent to the U.S. Embassy in Bamako and others to support French and MINUSMA troops.

After issuing five media releases between January and March of 2013 about efforts to aid the military mission in Mali, AFRICOM simply stopped talking about it.  With rare exceptions, media coverage of the operation also dried up.  In June, at a joint press conference with President Obama, Senegal’s President Macky Sall did let slip that the U.S. was providing “almost all the food and fuel used by MINUSMA” as well as “intervening to assist us with the logistics after the French response.” 

A January 2014 Stars and Stripes article mentioned that the U.S. air refueling mission supporting the French, run from a U.S. airbase in Spain, had already “distributed 15.6 million gallons of fuel, logging more than 3,400 flying hours” and that the effort would continue.  In February, according to military reports, elements of the Air Force’s 351st Expeditionary Refueling Squadron delivered their one millionth pound of fuel to French fighter aircraft conducting operations over Mali.  A December 2013 briefing document obtained by TomDispatch also mentions 181 U.S. troops, the majority of them Air Force personnel, supporting Operation Juniper Micron.   

Eager to learn where things stood today, I asked AFRICOM spokesman Benjamin Benson about the operation.  “We’re continuing to support and enable the French and international partners to confront AQIM and its affiliates in Mali,” he told me.  He then mentioned four key current mission sets being carried out by U.S. forces: information-sharing, intelligence and reconnaissance, planning and liaison teams, and aerial refueling and the airlifting of allied African troops.

Click here to see a larger versionDecember 2013 U.S. military document detailing American efforts to support French military operations in Mali and Central African Republic.

U.S. Army Africa documents obtained by TomDispatch offer further detail about Operation Juniper Micron, including the use of Lion Forward Teams in support of that mission.  I asked Benson for information about these small detachments that aided the French effort from Chad and from within Mali itself.  “I don’t have anything on that,” was all he would say.  A separate briefing slide, produced for an Army official last year, noted that the U.S. military provided support for the French mission from Rota and Moron, Spain; Ramstein, Germany; Sigonella, Italy; Kidal and Bamako, Mali; Niamey, Niger; Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; and N’Djamena, Chad.  Benson refused to offer information about specific activities conducted from these locations, preferring to speak about air operations from unspecified locations and only in generalities.

Click here to see a larger versionOfficial briefing slide with details on U.S. training for Chad and Guinea -- “troop contributing countries” aiding the U.S.-supported military mission in Mali.

Official military documents obtained by TomDispatch detail several U.S. missions in support of proxy forces from the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali, including a scheduled eight weeks of pre-deployment training for troops from Niger in the summer of 2013, five weeks for Chadian forces in the autumn, and eight weeks in the autumn as well for Guinean soldiers, who would be sent into the Malian war zone.  I asked Benson about plans for the training of African forces designated for MINUSMA in 2014.  “In terms of the future on that... I don’t know,” was all he would say. 

Another official briefing slide produced by U.S. Army Africa notes, however, that from January through March 2014, the U.S. planned to send scores of trainers to prepare 1,400 Chadian troops for missions in Mali.  Over the same months, other U.S. personnel were to team up with French military trainers to ready an 850-man Guinean infantry force for similar service.  Requests for further information from the French military about this and other missions were unanswered before this article went to press.

Operation Echo Casemate

Last spring, despite years of U.S. assistance, including support from Special Operations forces advisors, the Central African Republic’s military was swiftly defeated and the country’s president was ousted by Seleka, a mostly Muslim rebel group.  Months of violence followed, with Seleka forces involved in widespread looting, rape, and murder.  The result was growing sectarian clashes between the country’s Muslim and Christian communities and the rise of Christian “anti-balaka” militias.  (“Balaka” means machete in the local Sango language.)  These militias have, in turn, engaged in an orgy of atrocities and ethnic cleansing directed against Muslims.

In December, backed by a United Nations Security Council resolution and in a bid to restore order, France sent troops into its former colony to bolster peacekeepers from the African-led International Support Mission in the Central African Republic (MISCA).  As with the Mali mission, the U.S. joined the effort, pledging up to $60 million in military aid, pouring money into a trust fund for MISCA, and providing airlift services, as well as training African forces for deployment in the country.

Dubbed Echo Casemate, the operation -- staged out of Burundi and Uganda -- saw the U.S. military airlift hundreds of Burundian troops, tons of equipment, and more than a dozen military vehicles into that strife-torn land in just the first five days of the operation, according to an AFRICOM media release.  In January, at France’s request, the U.S. began airlifting a Rwandan mechanized battalion and 1,000 tons of their gear in from that country’s capital, Kigali, via a staging area in Entebbe, Uganda (where the U.S. maintains a “cooperative security location” and from which U.S. contractors had previously flown secret surveillance missions).  The most recent airlift effort took place on February 6th, according to Benson.  While he said that no other flights are currently scheduled, he confirmed that Echo Casemate remains an ongoing operation.

Asked about U.S. training efforts, Benson was guarded.  “I don’t have that off the top of my head,” he told me.  “We do training with a lot of different countries in Africa.”  He offered little detail about the size and scope of the U.S. effort, but a December 2013 briefing document obtained by TomDispatch mentions 84 U.S. personnel, the majority of them based in Burundi, supporting Operation Echo Casemate. The New York Times recently reported that the U.S. “refrained from putting American boots on the ground” in the Central African Republic, but the document clearly indicates that a Lion Forward Team of Army personnel was indeed sent there. 

Another U.S. Army Africa document produced late last year noted that the U.S. provided military support for the French mission in that country from facilities in Germany, Italy, Uganda, Burundi, and the Central African Repubilc itself. It mentions plans to detail liaison officers to the MISCA mission and the Centre de planification et de conduite des opérations (the Joint Operations, Planning, and Command and Control Center) in Paris.

As U.S. personnel deploy to Europe as part of Washington’s African wars, additional European troops are heading for Africa.  Last month, another of the continent’s former colonial powers, Germany, announced that some of its troops would be sent to Mali as part of a Franco-German brigade under the aegis of the European Union (EU) and would also aid in supporting an EU “peacekeeping mission” in the Central African Republic.  Already, a host of other former imperial powers on the continent -- including Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom -- are part of a European Union training mission to school the Malian military.  In January, France announced that it was reorganizing its roughly 3,000 troops in Africa’s Sahel region to reinforce a logistical base in Abidjan, the capital of Côte d’Ivoire, transform N'Djamena, Chad, into a hub for French fighter jets, concentrate special operations forces in Burkina Faso, and run drone missions out of Niamey, Niger (already a U.S. hub for such missions).

Scrambling Africa

Operations by French and African forces, bolstered by the U.S. military, beat back the Islamic militants in Mali and allowed presidential elections to be held.  At the same time, the intervention caused a veritable terror diaspora that helped lead to attacks in Algeria, Niger, and Libya, without resolving Mali’s underlying instability. 

Writing in the most recent issue of the CTC Sentinel, the official publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, analyst Bruce Whitehouse points out that the Malian government has yet to reassert its authority in the north of the country, reform its armed forces, tackle graft, or strengthen the rule of law:  “Until major progress is made in each of these areas, little can be done to reduce the threat of terrorism…  the underlying causes of Mali’s 2012 instability -- disaffection in the north, a fractured military, and systemic corruption -- have yet to be fully addressed by the Malian government and its international partners.”

The situation may be even worse in the Central African Republic.  “When France sent troops to halt violence between Christians and Muslims in Central African Republic,” John Irish and Daniel Flynn of Reuters recently reported, “commanders named the mission Sangaris after a local butterfly to reflect its short life.  Three months later, it is clear they badly miscalculated.”  Instead, violence has escalated, more than one million people have been displaced, tens of thousands have been killed, looting has occurred on a massive scale, and last month U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper informed Congress that “much of the country has devolved into lawlessness.” 

It is also quickly becoming a regional arms-smuggling hot spot.  With millions of weapons reportedly unaccounted for as a result of the pillaging of government armories, it’s feared that weaponry will find its way into other continental crisis zones, including Nigeria, Libya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.   

In addition, the coalition operation there has failed to prevent what, after a visit to the largely lawless capital city of Bangui last month, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres called “ethnic-religious cleansing.”  Amnesty International found much the same.  “Once vibrant Muslim communities in towns and cities throughout the country have been completely destroyed as all Muslim members have either been killed or driven away. Those few left behind live in fear that they will be attacked by anti-balaka groups in their towns or on the roads,” the human rights group reported.  “While an African Union peacekeeping force, the African-led International Support Mission to the Central African Republic (MISCA), supported by French troops, has been deployed in the country since early December 2013, they have failed to adequately protect civilians and prevent the current ethnic cleansing from taking place.”

French Wine in New Bottles?

“We’re not involved with the fighting in Mali,” AFRICOM spokesman Benjamin Benson told me, emphasizing that the U.S. military was not engaged in combat there.  But Washington is increasingly involved in the growing wars for West and Central Africa.  And just about every move it has made in the region thus far has helped spread conflict and chaos, while contributing to African destabilization.  Worse yet, no end to this process appears to be in sight.  Despite building up the manpower of its African proxies and being backed by the U.S. military’s logistical might, France had not completed its mission in Mali and will be keeping troops there to conduct counterrorism operations for the foreseeable future.   

Similarly, the French have also been forced to send reinforcements into the Central African Republic (and the U.N. has called for still more troops), while Chadian MISCA forces have been repeatedly accused of attacking civilians.  In a sign that the U.S.-backed French military mission to Africa could spread, the Nigerian government is now requesting French troops to help it halt increasingly deadly attacks by Boko Haram militants who have gained strength and weaponry in the wake of the unrest in Libya, Mali, and the Central African Republic (and have reportedly also spread into Niger, Chad, and Cameroon).  On top of this, Clapper recently reported that Chad, Niger, Mali, and Mauritania were endangered by their support of the French-led effort in Mali and at risk of increased terror attacks “as retribution.”

Still, this seems to have changed little for the director of national intelligence.  “Leveraging and partnering with the French is a way to go,” he told Congress last month. “They have insight and understanding and, importantly, a willingness to use the forces they have there now.” 

France has indeed exhibited a longstanding willingness to use military force in Africa, but what “insight and understanding” its officials gleaned from this experience is an open question.  One hundred and sixteen years after it completed its conquest of what was then French Sudan, France’s forces are again fighting and dying on the same fields of battle, though today the country is called Mali.  Again and again during the early 20th century, France launched military expeditions, including during the 1928-1931 Kongo-Wara rebellion, against indigenous peoples in French Equatorial Africa.  Today, France’s soldiers are being killed on the same ground in what’s now known as the Central African Republic.  And it looks as if they may be slogging on in these nations, in partnership with the U.S. military, for years to come, with no evident ability to achieve lasting results.

A new type of expeditionary warfare is underway in Africa, but there’s little to suggest that America’s backing of a former colonial power will ultimately yield the long-term successes that years of support for local proxies could not.  So far, the U.S. has been willing to let European and African forces do the fighting, but if these interventions drag on and the violence continues to leap from country to country as yet more militant groups morph and multiply, the risk only rises of Washington wading ever deeper into post-colonial wars with an eerily colonial look.  “Leveraging and partnering with the French” is the current way to go, according to Washington.  Just where it’s going is the real question.

Ukraine is a nation divided, and this dramatically exacerbates its other problems. During the two decades since it gained independence, it has struggled to build a nation but has not got far. Ukraine’s divide is commonly described as being between, on one side, its east and south, which are linguistically and culturally closer to Russia, and its west, which has strong ties with Poland and historical roots in Austria-Hungary.

In fact, the divisions are more diverse and complex, but Ukraine’s eastern regions are indeed more similar to Russia and share its decades of Soviet history and memories, including pride in defeating Nazi Germany, in the Second World War, which is a key event in holding the Russian nation together. The western parts were annexed to the Soviet Union in the course of and following the Second World War, and had a history of resistance to the Soviet occupation; nationalistic, anti-Russian sentiments are fairly common there. Western Ukrainians have long loathed Yanukovych, whom they see as an unambiguously pro-Russian figure, dragging Ukraine “back under Russian occupation.” From that perspective, it is no wonder that Ukrainians of the western regions have actively joined the Kiev protests. And yet the western parts are also less urban and less industrialized than the eastern territories. Kiev, which has increasingly turned into a battlefield, is not part of Ukraine’s west, either geographically or historically; it’s a cosmopolitan and European city, and this defines its culture and politics. To give an idea—still a fairly superficial one—of the dangerous diversity of Ukraine, there’s the problem of the Crimean Peninsula, a mostly pro-Russian region with formal autonomy, where existing separatist sentiments appear to be further incited by Russian emissaries....

On the issue of history, China’s diplomats have been convincing. Yet their message has largely fallen on deaf ears in the U.S., particularly in Congress. The lack of moral outrage in the U.S. on China’s behalf illustrates just how difficult a task the world’s most populous country faces in overcoming American fears over its growing assertiveness.

Beijing’s complaints about Japan are valid. It would be unthinkable for Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to downplay the Holocaust, or for a U.S. politician to describe female slaves who had been coerced into having sex with their masters as whores. Yet prominent Japanese politicians have made equivalent statements on multiple occasions in the recent past....

Conflicts between Congress and the White House on executive orders tend to be greatest when each is under control of a different party. I can find no evidence that the Republican-controlled Congresses of the 1920s objected to the 1,203 executive orders issued by Calvin Coolidge, nor did the Democratic Congresses of the 1930s complain about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 3,522 executive orders.

President Obama has issued 168 executive orders and at this rate probably will issue fewer during his two terms than George W. Bush, who issued 291.

The modern history of congressional concern about executive overreach begins with Richard Nixon. His Executive Order 11615 on Aug. 15, 1971, was among the most expansive in history, freezing all wages and prices in order to control inflation....

Chicago, where Mr. Obama made his home and built his political career, seems the likeliest site, but people in Honolulu, where he was born, and New York, where he finished college (at Columbia) and where he is believed to want to live after he leaves the White House, are making the case for their cities.

There is speculation in the architectural press that the British architect David Adjaye, who is designing the National Museum of African-American History and Culture on the Mall in Washington, has the inside track for the commission.

But where the library is situated or who designs it is less important than whether Mr. Obama will follow the grandiose example of his predecessors, or chart a new course....

For a long time the AHA and the MLA conventions were like parallel universes that coalesced annually in different cities at the same time. They both stage high-profile conventions during winter break that combine a myriad of scholarly panels with a high-volume, high-tension job fair filled with nervous, well-dressed candidates who generate
heavy traffic to interviews in job centers and hotel suites. But new scheduling policies separated them on the calendar this year, so I pinballed between Washington and Chicago during the first part of January, attending both shows with a few days respite in between....

It’s hard to generalize when faced with two monster conferences that offered more than 1,000 panels altogether, but I will anyway: The AHA is doing the most creative work in the humanities on alternative-academic careers right now, while the MLA is reflecting more deeply and practically on the problem of time-to-degree.

The AHA’s most noteworthy alternative-career project is called the Malleable Ph.D. Rolled out last year, it showcases careers for historians outside the professoriate. The Malleable Ph.D. threaded together a number of panels at this year’s conference, and placed a range of different kinds of historians on the profession’s biggest stage....

It was Haining who posed that question to some of our interviewees - the oldest of whom would have been a child in 1945.

"I feel sorry for what happened," said one man. "There were many regrettable incidents," said another.

"But maybe my regret isn't enough?" added one of them, a Japanese nationalist, who argues that most school textbooks exaggerate the abuses carried out by Japanese soldiers. "No," Haining responded. "It's not enough."

There are some undisputed facts. Japan was the aggressor, occupying Manchuria in northern China in 1931. A wider war began in 1937, and by the time Japan surrendered in 1945, millions of Chinese had died.

A notorious massacre occurred in the city of Nanjing, which was the capital under the Kuomintang government. Atrocities were also carried out in other Asian countries.

But it made me feel uncomfortable every time I had to translate the word "guilt" into Japanese. And none of our Japanese interviewees would use it....

So it was fitting that North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement held a massive “Moral March” in Raleigh today which began at Shaw University, exactly fifty-four years after North Carolina’s trailblazing role in the civil rights movement. Tens of thousands of activists—from all backgrounds, races and causes—marched from Shaw to the North Carolina State Capitol, where they held an exuberant rally protesting the right-wing policies of the North Carolina government and commemorating the eighth anniversary of the HKonJ coalition (the acronym stands for Historic Thousands on Jones Street, where the NC legislature sits).

The day began cold and cloudy, a fitting metaphor for politics in North Carolina last year. Since taking over the legislature in 2010 and the governor’s mansion in 2012, controlling state government for the first time in over a century, North Carolina Republicans eliminated the earned-income tax credit for 900,000 North Carolinians; refused Medicaid coverage for 500,000; ended federal unemployment benefits for 170,000; cut pre-K for 30,000 kids while shifting $90 million from public education to voucher schools; slashed taxes for the top 5 percent while raising taxes on the bottom 95 percent; axed public financing of judicial races; prohibited death row inmates from challenging racially discriminatory verdicts; passed one of the country’s most draconian anti-choice laws; and enacted the country’s worst voter suppression law, which mandates strict voter ID, cuts early voting and eliminates same-day registration, among other things....

“Generation War” traces the fates of five friends in summer 1941 Berlin cheerily toasting their departure to the eastern front with the expectation of a reunion back home by Christmas. The film ends with three of the five returning four years later — more than four and a half hours in cinematic time — to the war-ravaged ruins of Berlin to begin rebuilding the Germany that Angela Merkel governs today.

The film, which originally aired last March as a three-part series on German and Austrian television under the title, “Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter,” or “Our Mothers, Our Fathers,” left some Germans feeling as uneasy as A.O. Scott. A reader of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit was particularly troubled by the portrayal of Polish anti-Semitism and Soviet Army excess. “The depiction of our eastern neighbors reminds me of Goebbels’ propaganda,” he wrote on a blog, invoking the Nazi-era spin-meister, Josef Goebbels.

But most of the 7.6 million Germans who watched the final episode, an impressive 24 percent of all viewers that night, welcomed a film that portrayed their “mothers” and “fathers” neither as heroes nor “monsters” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) but rather as a generation in their 20s and younger subjected to systematic indoctrination and gradual “brutalization” to which they succumbed in myriad and horrific ways....

I have no degree in art history or particularly detailed knowledge of the Holocaust. My experience with genealogy is that of an amateur, one who traced my own family to 15th-century Spain.

But as a reporter, I track people for a living. And I was intrigued by the difficulties that French authorities report having as they try to find the heirs to more than 2,000 unclaimed works of art looted or sold under murky circumstances during the war and now held in French museums.

Over the past 60 years, the French have returned just 80 of the so-called orphaned works of art. The rest, some of them masterpieces, sit or hang in 57 French museums, which are their guardians until the rightful owners can be found....

But what can Israelis possibly expect a Palestinian president — or any Palestinian for that matter — to feel toward Mr. Sharon? Are they supposed to celebrate his sponsorship of violence and bloodshed against them throughout his long military career? Or laud his expansionist colonialist policies against them during his long political career?

Only out of respect for the stature of death itself was the official Palestinian response of silence appropriate. Many believe that a full accounting for Mr. Sharon’s violent and bloody history was warranted — nothing less than what Human Rights Watch did when it issued a statement expressing regret that he had died without facing justice for his crimes against Palestinians....

His enmity toward Palestinians was unbridled, and he used the most violent means against them. Throughout his career he did not take a single positive step toward reaching a political settlement with them to bring about peace. The motivation behind every one of his policies was to force them to surrender....

In his Memoirs, published in 1956, Truman cast himself as a consistent proponent of the Jewish state, and some of his noted biographers have followed suit. In Truman, David McCullough writes that when Truman recognized the new state of Israel in May 1948, he had “no regrets” about what “he achieved.” Truman’s reputed devotion to Israel has become the standard by which subsequent president’s commitment is measured. In 1982, Richard Nixon described Ronald Reagan as the “most pro-Israel president since Truman.” A Boston Globe editorial in 1998 described Bill Clinton as “the most pro-Israel president since Harry Truman.” In 2009, Charles Krauthammer described George W. Bush as “the most pro-Israel president since Harry Truman.” And Vice President Joseph Biden declared in 2012 that “no president since Harry Truman has done more for Israel’s security than Barack Obama.”

To be sure, Truman had no regrets about Israel after he left office. Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion recounted how when, during a meeting in New York in 1961, he praised the former president for his “constant sympathy with our aims in Israel … tears suddenly sprang to his eyes.” But in the years leading up to, and in the months following, American recognition of Israel in May 1948, Truman was filled with doubt and regret about his role. The rosy portrayal of Truman’s unquestioning commitment to and constant sympathy with Israel, which is often linked to a picture of the younger Truman as a Christian Zionist, is dead wrong....

Here was another cause for celebration and laughter. "Have you heard this Sardarji joke?" was a common query among schoolboys till roughly 1984. This was an age prior to the dawn of political correctness; and anyway Sikhs were presumed to be big-hearted enough and well-to-do and well-loved enough not to mind (Singh – the surname of most male Sikhs – translates as "lion"). If the first two and a half decades of independence in India represent an idyll (granted, an inexorably endangered one), then the Sikhs play an essential role in it of what an idyllic community, even an ideal minority, in a somewhat arbitrarily conceived federal set-up might look like.

The history of tears begins, where the contemporary Sikh is concerned, with the entanglement of Sikh politics in the sort of politics that has always produced, in India, efficacious results in the short term and tragic ones in the long: the policy of divide and rule, inherited from the British and given a personal modulation by Indira Gandhi in her urgent quest to subvert the nuisance of parliamentary democracy. Federalism in India as we've seen it since the late 80s – the discomfiture with an overarching centre; coalitions fuelled by caste, sectarianism and other drives – germinated in Punjab in the form of provincial Sikh coalitions, a development Gandhi felt compelled to unravel in the interests, no doubt, of a strong, secular nation state and herself....

Let’s say we counted the number of Democrats who were more conservative than the 10th percent, 25th percent, and 50th percent most liberal Republican in the House and Senate, and the number of Republicans who were more liberal than the 10th percent, 25th percent, and 50th percent most conservative Democrat. (Here, we’ll use DW-NOMINATE scores, which political scientists commonly use to measure ideology, although almost any other measure will work.) Those conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans are the ones who lie in what we call the “overlap” region—the region where members from both parties overlap with each other. In periods of higher ideological polarization, there will be fewer—or no—members in the overlap region, and more members in that region during periods of lower polarization.

If we simply count the number of legislators in the overlap region in each year, what becomes evident is that the present period of polarization is akin to the polarization we had for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The graph below, taken from a previously published paper (ungated, gated, and discussed further here), makes this point by tracking the percentage of overlapping Democrats and Republicans over time....

Are more Americans living in poverty today? Sure. But in 1964, less than 200 million people lived in the U.S. Today, more than 300 million do. In other words, the population as a whole has increased by more than half.

Has the official poverty rate hovered around one-in-five since that time? Yes. But it has fluctuated. And, as most experts will tell you, the official poverty rate fails to account for safety net supports like food stamps, housing vouchers, and the Earned Income Tax Credit program. An alternative poverty measure, developed by Columbia University researchers and designed to capture these effects, shows that poverty has indeed fallen. See the graph below, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Note that even this measure understates the progress, because it does not count the impact of government-provided health insurance, particularly Medicare and Medicaid, both of which took effect in 1966....