It has been a longstanding-and, alas, all-too-true-cliché that Africa is the stepchild of United States foreign policy. Sadly long blighted by environmental degradation, economic malaise, social tensions and political misrule, the continent is viewed as little more than a source of trouble, albeit one that could be safely ignored since it rarely impinged upon the core strategic interests of the world's sole remaining superpower. After 9/11, there were some signs that Africa was finally emerging as an American foreign policy concern. In the National Security Strategy of the United States of America published in 2002, the administration acknowledged that:

In Africa, promise and opportunity sit side by side with disease, war, and desperate poverty. This threatens both a core value of the United States-preserving human dignity-and our strategic priority-combating terror. American interests and American principles, therefore, lead in the same direction: we will work with others for an African continent that lives in liberty, peace, and growing prosperity.

However, old habits die hard and other challenges soon took priority. In the current presidential campaign, the world's most troubled continent has once again been almost entirely forgotten. Under the rubric of "foreign policy," Senator John Kerry's campaign website presents "priorities" ranging from a "New Policy for Latin America" to "Securing Afghanistan," but a search of "Africa" turns up mainly references to Teresa Heinz Kerry's birth and upbringing in colonial Mozambique. A similar search of President George W. Bush's reelection website turns up little more than a single November 2003 "Talking Points" memorandum that asserts "the Administration has an unparalleled record of engagement in Africa that incorporates support for democracy, reform, respect for human dignity and peace on the continent" and specifically cites three examples: the U.S. role in the Liberian transition, the negotiations leading to the peace accord between the Sudanese government and southern insurgents and sanctions enacted against Zimbabwe's thuggish regime.

This lack of attention is not just shortsighted, but will, unless remedied in the coming years, prove downright perilous to U.S. national interests due to a number of factors, both natural and geopolitical. While many Americans, including policymakers, seem oblivious to the fact, sub-Saharan Africa currently supplies the U.S. with sixteen percent of its petroleum needs. According to the National Intelligence Council, within a decade, that figure will rise to twenty-five percent, surpassing the total volume of oil imports from the Middle East region. The continent also boasts the world's fastest rate of population growth: by 2020, today's 900 million Africans will number more than 1.2 billion-more than the combined populations of Europe and North America. Nor do these absolute numbers tell the whole story: by then, the median age of Europeans will be 45, while nearly half of the African population will be under the age of 15.

Despite the dynamic potential implicit in the natural and human resource figures just cited, Africa also suffers from many woes. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the world's economic basket case, with a per capita GDP of barely $575, according to the World Bank's World Development Indicators 2003 report. The United Nations Development Program's just-published Human Development Report 2004 determined that, of the thirty-six countries found to have "low development," thirty-two were in Africa. While the continent is home to only fifteen percent of the world's overall population, more than three-fourths of the people living with HIV are sub-Saharan Africans. In 2003 alone, an estimated three million Africans became infected and 2.2 million died of AIDS.

Poverty and disease are not the only challenges facing the continent and the world, although they certainly complicate the search for solutions to a wide array of difficulties. Throughout the continent, the very institution of the state itself is in trouble. Sierra Leone is only now emerging from more than a decade of civil war that saw the near total collapse of its government as well as frightening scenes of apocalyptic violence; today, the country's government is propped up by a 12,000-man UN peacekeeping force. Until last year, Liberia was run as a personal fiefdom by a warlord-turned-president who is currently wanted for war crimes by the UN-sponsored Special Court for Sierra Leone; the country is presently a de facto UN protectorate supervised by a former U.S. Air Force major general, Jacques Paul Klein. The present conflict in Côte d'Ivoire has, since its start in September 2002, killed an estimated 12,000 people and displaced anywhere between 700,000 and 1,000,000 persons; the fragile truce only holds because the former colonial ruler, France, has deployed several soldiers to separate the warring parties. The ironically-named Democratic Republic of Congo-which has never, in its history as an independent state, had so much as one free and democratic election-has been embroiled in a conflict that has been called "Africa's first world war" and taken an immense toll of at least 3.3 million lives, giving the DRC the world's highest crude mortality rate. Zimbabwe has degenerated from the breadbasket of Africa to its basket case in less than five years: last year, production of maize was down to one-third and that of wheat to one-twelfth of 2000 levels. Somalia-or at least the southern half-still lacks a central government more than a decade after the ill-starred U.S.-led international intervention. While a peace deal is tenuously holding in Sudan's south, the western Darfur region is witnessing a state-sponsored pogrom that has displaced more than a million people and threatens to tear apart Africa's largest country just as it is beginning, with revenues from newly-discovered oilfields, the first sustained development effort in its history.

Even aside from the question of oil reserves, state failure and conflict in Africa directly impact U.S. national security interests. While post-invasion of Iraq volte-face of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi has presumably exorcized the specter of state sponsorship of terrorism from the continent, Africa's weak states and corrupt rulers still willingly or unwittingly provide haven and other support for all manner of terrorists and other non-state actors. It was by no accident that Osama bin Laden ran al-Qaeda from Khartoum in the 1990s. My forthcoming book on the Sierra Leon conflict documents the shadowy role that various factions from the Middle East, many associated with Islamist groups in Lebanon, played in that West African country's civil war. In fact, Nabih Berri, the speaker of Lebanon's parliament and leader of the Shiite Amal militia closely aligned with Syria, was born in Sierra Leone. Islamists have also been actively exploiting economic stagnation and political corruption in Nigeria in an attempt to fracture Africa's most populous state (and America's fifth largest source of crude petroleum). Muslim-Christian clashes over Islamist attempts to impose sharia law regularly leave hundreds dead.

Despite these security concerns, the U.S. has yet to establish a coordinated strategic response. In an arrangement harking back to the colonial and Cold War eras, 37 of the 48 sub-Saharan African states fall under the military aegis of the U.S. European Command (EUCOM). Given the current geopolitical realities, it would make more sense to align most of Africa with the Middle Eastern countries covered by the Central Command (CENTCOM), if a separate African Command is definitively precluded. Historically, Africa is also the only region in the world where the U.S. never developed a system of regional security structures as it did successfully in the North Atlantic with NATO and with some good effect, if not the same level of success, in Southeast Asia (SEATO), the South Pacific (ANZUS), and the Middle East (CENTO). African-led initiatives like the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) intervention in the Liberian and Sierra Leonean civil wars have been almost unmitigated disasters. However, to their credit, African leaders have not given up. Last year, twenty-eight African states ratified a protocol to bring an African Peace and Security Council into existence. That body might even have an army to command since leaders of the African Union agreed in early March to form five brigades of soldiers, policemen, and military observers-15,000 people in all-to be based in each of the five regions of the continent. As details remain to be worked out, the U.S. has an opportunity to support and shape the nascent joint force which, if all goes well, would also absolve America of the need to intervene directly in crises in a region where military intervention would enjoy little, if any, popular support at home.

To be fair, the Bush administration has taken some steps to implement the National Security Strategy's recommendation that the U.S. should work with other countries to "help strengthen Africa's fragile states, help build indigenous capability to secure porous borders, and help build up the law enforcement and intelligence infrastructure to deny havens for terrorists." The U.S. has significantly increased assistance to African nations coping with AIDS, even if the level of support and the strings attached still raise the hackles of critics. The Millennium Challenge Account initiative, by rewarding countries that have seriously undertaken reform efforts, is a step in the right direction with respect to traditional aid programs that delivered little more than cycles of dependency. However, more is needed economically, politically and militarily.