AFRICOM’s Multinational Cooperation Center and Strategic Outreach Division convened this event to educate elements of the command on irregular migration concerns across the African continent, from origin to transit and destination countries. “The purpose of the forum was to let the command have a better idea of how migration works both at the policy level but also at the practical, on the ground level,” 

Supporting the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and African partner nations, service members from U.S. Africa Command help facilitate the building of an Ebola Treatment Unit (ETU) in Liberia as part of Operation United Assistance, a humanitarian relief operation in Ebola-stricken West African nations.

They're involved in Algeria and Angola, Benin and Botswana, Burkina Faso and Burundi, Cameroon and the Cape Verde Islands. And that's just the ABCs of the situation. Skip to the end of the alphabet and the story remains the same: Senegal and the Seychelles, Togo and Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia. From north to south, east to west, the Horn of Africa to the Sahel, the heart of the continent to the islands off its coasts, the US military is at work.

The Gulf of Guinea was one of the primary areas in Africa where "stability," the command spokesman assured me, had "improved significantly," and the US military had played a major role in bringing it about. But what did that say about so many other areas of the continent that, since AFRICOM was set up, had been wracked by coups, insurgencies, violence, and volatility?

Continuing their blistering critique, diplomats vented that Brasilia was merely interested in currying favour amongst African nations so as to shore up its own bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Brazil...was "more concerned with counting heads for UNSC reform... than in being a champion of Africa's interests, supporting African peacekeeping or augmenting trade."