AMERICANS TRAINING COPS IN AFRICA

Tom Barnett's batting average is good so far. In his book The Pentagon's New Map--link to the right--he predicted that the global war on terrorism would lead to some fundamental re-thinking of our role in the world. We would become a kind of sysadmin, exporting our "source code," the rule of law, representative government, basically capitalist free-enterprise and pro-human rights outlook, to the world.

This story suggests our source code export is proceeding:

Otse, Botswana - The burly North Dakota investigator surveys the classroom of about 40 young African cops and asks: "Would you expect a suspect to look you in the eye when you are questioning him?"

The diverse replies come from trainees serving in police forces in
Mozambique, South Africa, Angola and Botswana, the latest batch of
law-enforcement officers to undergo training at a United States
academy nestled near the Lenlitswe-la-Barantant mountains in Otse,
about 45km south of Gaborone.

The International Law Enforcement Academy (Ilea) - a $7-million
(R42-million) facility where about 30 instructors are bringing
crime-fighting, American-style, to Africa - opened last year.

Run by the US department of homeland security, the Ilea in Botswana is
one of three such academies - the other two are in Budapest and
Bangkok - where the United States is trying to enlist allies in the
fight against global crime.

We are teaching them that police aren't all-powerful masters of all they survey--a revolutionary concept in some parts of the world. We're also making allies in the war against jihad:

The six-week training course offers tips and techniques to crack trans-border crimes like money-laundering and trafficking in humans, drugs and arms.

Kenyan airport security officer Stanley Mutungi, attending a course on
human trafficking, said it was an eye-opener. "We learned the tricks
about how they come from Asia," he said.

Other special training sessions on counter-terrorism and
intelligence-gathering allow students to do a case study of the 1998
US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that left 224 dead and more
than 5 000 injured.

This new effort is akin to the old US military footprint, which extended our reach around the globe to promote stability and keep potentially warring states (China and Japan, South and North Korea, the USSR and Europe, etc) from killing each other. By training cops we're not putting our boots on the ground around the world, but putting thinking similar to ours into boots already there.

It's a big deal, and will fly entirely under the legacy media's radar.