U.S. takes terror fight to Africa's 'Wild West'
Critics say Saharan plan backs despots, is magnet for trouble
San Fransisco Chronicle Foreign Service
Abidjan, Ivory Coast-
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/27/MNGISGDLR91.DTL&feed=rss.news{snip}
"The U.S. military and the State Department, which officially leads the program (The
Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative), are counting on an annual budget of at least $100 million for the trans-Sahara initiative from 2007 until 2011. This represents a big increase from the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a $7 million forerunner that was initiated in 2002 in what Theresa Whelan, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, called "just a drop in the bucket" compared with the region's needs.
Some observers say terrorism in the Sahara is little more than a mirage and that a higher-profile U.S. involvement could destabilize the region.
"If anything, the (initiative) ... will generate terrorism, by which I mean resistance to the overall U.S. presence and strategy," said Jeremy Keenan, a Sahara specialist at the University of East Anglia in Britain.
A report by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, said that although the Sahara is "not a terrorist hotbed," repressive governments in the region are taking advantage of the Bush administration's "war on terror" to tap U.S. largesse and deny civil freedoms."
Oil?
"Since the mid-1990s, several countries in sub-Saharan Africa -- others are Nigeria, Angola and Gabon -- have experiencedstrong revenue growth from the petroleum industry. In most cases, however, this new wealth is not contributing to economic development or improving living standards. Rather, it has been used almost exclusively for the enrichment of the countries' leaders, and as a consequence most of the population remains poor and unprotected.
Sub-Saharan Africa's production -- more than 4 mm bpd of oil -- surpasses that of Iran, Venezuela and Mexico combined, and the region has the potential to become as important a crude oil resource as Russia or the Caspian Sea. The area has the additional advantage of being more politically stable than the Middle East, at least at this time.
According to estimates by the US National Intelligence Council,
sub-Saharan Africa could fill up to 25 % of US fossil fuel needs by 2015, up from 16 % now."
http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/nta43362.htmand,
"West Africa, led by Nigeria, already supplies the United States with 15 % of its oil -- approximating Saudi Arabia's share of the US market. The US National Intelligence Council projects US oil supplies from West Africa will swell to 25 % by 2015 -- more than from the Persian Gulf."
http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/nta24258.htm 
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