"With every group we met with, there were a number of misconceptions, and I think the discussion changed quite a bit as we were able to correct some of those misconceptions," Ryan Henry, the Defense Department's deputy undersecretary for policy, said Monday.
Questions included why the U.S. was setting up the new Africa Command, how many troops would come, how much aid it would bring and so on.
A weeklong trip by representatives from the Defense and State departments and the U.S. Agency for International Development ended Saturday after visits to Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana and Senegal.
The group was holding consultations on the Bush administration plan to create the new command, an administrative structure to coordinate activities on the continent.
"We hopefully cleared up the misunderstanding that AFRICOM was not being stood up in response to Chinese presence on the continent, it was not being stood up solely for the effort of enhanced counterterrorism and it was not being stood up in order to secure resources - a particular sensitivity to the oil resources," Henry said.
"While some of these may be part of the formula, the reasons that AFRICOM is being stood up is Africa ... is emerging on the world scene as a strategic player and we need to deal with it as a continent," he told a Pentagon press conference.
The U.S. military has a system of regional headquarters such as the Pacific Command, Central Command and so on. Africa is now split among three commands, which have been increasing activities on the continent greatly in recent years.
Central Command, which controls the Horn of Africa, set up a task force there to try to catch al-Qaida terrorists escaping from Afghanistan after the war started in late 2001. It since has expanded to humanitarian and other missions. The European Command has sent forces to do training exercises in North African countries as well as humanitarian projects and other missions such as harbor maintenance in oil-producing nations in the Gulf of Guinea.
The operations are aimed at building partnerships and strengthening the ability of African governments and militaries to do their jobs, officials have said. They also hope the activities will make nations there less vulnerable to the recruiting efforts of terrorists and help catch terrorists already using it as a safe haven. Officials also have said that Africa is strategically more important because of its oil production and increased efforts by China to gain influence on the continent.
U.S. officials are still working out such details as the size and location of the new command, and they promised during their trip to continue consulting Africans as they work on it, Henry said.
"AFRICOM does not mean there would be additional U.S. forces put on the continent ... does not mean a dramatic increase in resources" from the Pentagon or U.S. government to Africa, he said.
"This administration has made significant investment into the improvement of the quality of life on the African continent, increasing it over threefold" and the new headquarters would be there to coordinate those investment efforts, he said.
