US quietly assumes military posture in Africa

Yahoo ^ | 10/27/11 | Jason Straziuso - ap

[NormsRevenge]

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — By the time U.S. military forces left Somalia in 1994 after entering the lawless nation more than a year earlier to stop a famine, 44 Army soldiers, Marines and airmen had been killed and dozens more wounded. Thus ended America's last large-scale military intervention in Africa.

But the U.S. has come back, using special forces advisers, drones and tens of millions of dollars in military aid to combat a growing and multifaceted security threat. This time the United States is playing a less obtrusive role but is focusing once again on Somalia.

While putting few U.S. troops at risk, the United States is also providing intelligence and training to fight militants across the continent, from Mauritania in the west along the Atlantic Ocean, to Somalia in the east along the Indian Ocean.

The Pentagon is paying a lot more attention to Africa than in years past, analysts say. ..

And, most worrisome to the United States, an al-Qaida-linked group in Somalia has recruited dozens of Americans, most of them of Somali descent.

"If you ask me what keeps me awake at night, it is the thought of an American passport-holding person who transits through a training camp in Somalia and gets some skill and then finds their way back into the United States to attack Americans here in our homeland," Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of the U.S. Africa Command, said in Washington this month. "That's mission failure for us."

U.S. and European officials also worry that AQIM is working to establish contacts with Boko Haram and al-Shabab, the Islamist Somali insurgent group.

[NormsRevenge]

We learned nothing from Nam.. or history for that matter.. well, maybe we didn’t .. but politicos and media did.. How to lie.. How to get a lot of innocents killed.. PolPot would be proud.