Posted on 06/19/2022 12:07:48 PM PDT by robowombat
Why Does the United States Have a Military Base in Ghana? By Sri Lanka Guardian •June 16, 2022 •feature Vijay Prashad World View
In April 2018, the president of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, said that Ghana has “not offered a military base, and will not offer a military base to the United States of America.” His comments came after Ghana’s parliament had ratified a new defense cooperation agreement with the United States on March 28, 2018, which was finally signed in May 2018. During a televised discussion, soon after the agreement was formalized in March 2018, Ghana’s Minister of Defense Dominic Nitiwul told Kwesi Pratt Jr., a journalist and leader of the Socialist Movement of Ghana, that Ghana had not entered into a military agreement with the United States. Pratt, however, said that the military agreement was a “source of worry” and was “a surrender of our [Ghanaian] sovereignty.”
A Ghanaian soldier greets a U.S. soldier from the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment, during a field training exercise for the United Accord exercise at the Bundase Training Camp in Ghana in 2018. In 2021, the research institute of Pratt’s Socialist Movement produced—along with the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research—a dossier on the French and U.S. military presence in Africa. That dossier—“Defending Our Sovereignty: U.S. Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity”—noted that the United States has now established the West Africa Logistics Network (WALN) at Kotoka International Airport in Accra, the capital of Ghana. In 2019, then-U.S. Brigadier General Leonard Kosinski said that a weekly U.S. flight from Germany to Accra was “basically a bus route.” The WALN is a cooperative security location, which is another name for a U.S. military base.
Now, four years later after the signing of the defense cooperation agreement, I spoke with Kwesi Pratt and asked him about the state of this deal and the consequences of the presence of the U.S. base on Ghanaian soil. The WALN, Pratt told me, has now taken over one of the three terminals at the airport in Accra, and at this terminal, “hundreds of U.S. soldiers have been seen arriving and leaving. It is suspected that they may be involved in some operational activities in other West African countries and generally across the Sahel.”
U.S. Soldiers Don’t Need Passports
A glance at the U.S.-Ghana defense agreement raises many questions. Article 12 of the agreement states that the U.S. military can use the Accra airport without any regulations or checks, with U.S. military aircraft being “free from boarding and inspection” and the Ghanaian government providing “unimpeded access to and use of [a]greed facilities and areas to United States forces.” Pratt told me that this agreement allows U.S. soldiers “far more privileges than those prescribed in the Vienna Convention for diplomats. They do not need passports to enter Ghana. All they need is their U.S. Army identity cards. They don’t even require visas to enter Ghana. They are not subject to customs or any other inspection.”
Ghana has allowed the United States armed forces “to use Ghanaian radio frequencies for free,” Pratt said. But the most stunning fact about this arrangement is that, he said, “If U.S. soldiers kill Ghanaians and destroy their properties, the U.S. soldiers cannot be tried in Ghana. Ghanaians cannot sue U.S. soldiers or the U.S. government for compensation if and when their relatives are killed, or their properties are destroyed by the U.S. Army or soldiers.”
Why Would Ghana Allow This?
The U.S.-Ghana agreement permits this disregard for Ghana’s sovereignty. Pratt told me that the political ideology of the Ghanaian government that is in power now has been to adhere to a long history of appeasement toward the demands made by colonial and Western states, beginning with Britain—which was the colonial power that ruled over the Gold Coast (the former name for Ghana) until 1957—and leading up to providing “unimpeded access” to the United States troops under the defense deal.
The current president of Ghana, Akufo-Addo, comes from the political ideology that the former prime minister of Ghana (1969-1972) Kofi Abrefa Busia also conformed to. In the early 1950s, Pratt told me, those following this ideology “dispatched a delegation to the United Kingdom to persuade the authorities that it was too early to grant independence to the Gold Coast.” This led to a coup in Ghana, where those supporting this ideology “collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the [then-President of Ghana] Kwame Nkrumah government on February 24, 1966, and resisted [imposing] sanctions against the South African apartheid regime in 1969,” Pratt said. The current government, Pratt added, will do anything to please the United States government and its allies.
Why Is the United States Interested in Ghana?
The United States claims that its military presence on the African continent has to do with its counterterrorism campaign and aims to prevent the entry of China into this region. “There is no Chinese military presence in Ghana,” Pratt told me, and indeed the idea of Chinese presence is being used by the United States to deepen its military control over the continent for more prosaic reasons.
In 2001, then-U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy Development Group published the National Energy Policy. The contents of this report show, Pratt told me, that the United States understood that it could “no longer rely on the Middle East for its energy supplies. A shift to West Africa for [meeting the] U.S. energy needs is imperative.” Apart from West Africa’s energy resources, Ghana “has huge national resources. It is currently the largest producer of gold in Africa and… [is among the top 10 producers] of gold in the world. It is the second-largest producer of cocoa in the world. It has iron, diamond, manganese, bauxite, oil and gas, lithium, and abundant water resources, including the largest man-made lake in the world.” Apart from these resources, Ghana’s location on the equator makes it valuable for agricultural development, and its large bank of highly educated English-speaking professionals makes it valuable for meeting the demands of the West’s service sector.
Apart from these economic issues, Pratt said, the United States government has intervened in Ghana—including in the coup of 1966—to prevent it from having a leadership role in the decolonization process in Africa. More recently, the United States has found Ghana to be a reliable ally in its various military and commercial projects across the continent. It is toward those projects, and not the national interest of the Ghanaian people, Pratt said, that the United States has now built its base in a part of Accra’s civilian airport.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.
The only justifiable reason would be to have a place to send sad sacks that you want to punish.
because they speak English ?
It’s vast technology and Quantum Physicists?...
Answering the title question from the article, “It is the second-largest producer of cocoa in the world.”
I keep thinking that all — I mean ALL — FBI agents should be sent to work at Thule AFB in Greenland. Might help thin the herd.
The United States has hundreds of bases around the world. The vast majority are not manned. They are a designated area with, perhaps, a few buildings some of which are decades old and not occupied. At the start of the Gulf War a friend was a crewman on a US cargo plane that flew into what had been an allied air base in the Mediterranean during WWII. It was a tine waterless rock in the sea with an air strip, little vegetation and a suspiciously good runway although covered with sand. They landed and unloaded tons of cargo. Which, in a few days, was all you needed for a base...housing, cooking equipment, etc.
I’ve read there are some unknown quantities of “bases” in Africa that consist of a runway, a building and no stored assets. The assets are flown in. One of these was an operating drone base in mere days used to support something the substance of which has escaped my mind. What we have are agreements with many nations that allow the US the flexibility to move anything anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice. No one else in the world has anything like this and it’s necessary if our intent is to support any mission the government decides we must undertake.
Why would someone in Sri Lanka care? Did China approve this message?
“The only justifiable reason would be to have a place to send sad sacks that you want to punish.”
In the Navy it was Adak, Alaska.
Anybody Ghana answer this question???
The author is a socialist and writes article that promote a pro-socialist, anti-Western viewpoint.
Article is as expected.
Good post. These inactive facilities are the grist of paranoid obsessions for many intellectuals.
Opposing the jihadists operating in West Africa.
The only reason the government supports the base is that they know, no one will mess with them as long as the gringos are around. It's smart self preservation.
Which US Senators and Representatives have some connection to Ghana? Or senior military guys?
They’re all grifters now.
For the Army, Ft Richardson Alaska. TR’s monumentally screwed up son Kermit shot himself to death there in 1943 after FDR had him sent there at the request of his family to keep him from causing some publicity disgrace in the states.
Why do we need military in the US? I doubt there will be any need to use them here.
“The United States has hundreds of bases around the world. The vast majority are not manned. “
THOUSANDS.
There’s a Youtube channel dedicated to it. The “audit” by the Pentagon was so big, they didn’t “know” how big the numbers were and had to rely on a book author to find out how many bases the US has and how much was being spent.
The host said his clearance allowed him to go anywhere and ended up in an undisclosed military base in Belgiun and inside was AMERICA complete with malls, movie theaters, gyms etc. It was nuts. The US really is an empire.
All you have to do is look at a map. Its support for counter-terrorism operations in sub-Saharan Africa and as staging area to support shipping route protection - the Europe to South Africa link.
Should we be doing it? That’s a different question!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.