By Jim Fisher-Thompson
Washington File staff writer

Washington -- Briefing the press on President Bush's first trip to Africa where regional stability and security will be high on the U.S. agenda, a senior Administration official was unaware of any decision made by the White House to send U.S. troops to Liberia, a hotspot of turmoil in West Africa.

The official, speaking on background at the State Department's Foreign Press Center (FPC) on July 2, briefed foreign journalists on Bush's July 7-12 visit to Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Uganda and Nigeria.

Responding to questions about possible U.S. intervention in Liberia, where President Charles Taylor is battling rebel forces that have advanced to the outskirts of the capital, Monrovia, the official said, "I can't confirm or deny that any decision has been reached.... I personally have no knowledge of any decision. All I know is what the President himself said this afternoon at about noon, which was that he's still considering all options."

While some press reports indicate between 500 and 2,000 U.S. troops could eventually be sent to Liberia to buttress a U.N./West African sponsored peacekeeping force, no such announcement was forthcoming from Bush during a special July 3 pre-trip interview he granted to several African journalists.

At the FPC briefing the official explained: President Bush "wants to work with the regional states, the regional leaders, in ECOWAS in particular, to try to find a solution to the crisis in Liberia. He has also asked Secretary Powell to work with [U.N. General Secretary] Kofi Annan to make sure that we're doing all that we can on the diplomatic front to see that the cease-fire holds between the LURD/MODEL and the Government forces."

Asked by the Washington File whether the Administration was considering expanding U.S., African military training partnerships used in the past to help African nations strengthen their peacekeeping capabilities, the official said, "Our primary peacekeeping initiative for Africa is the African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) program," which is currently undergoing a "revamping."

ACOTA, a Defense Department partnership with African militaries aimed at upgrading their peace-enforcement capabilities follows a similar program known as the African Crisis and Response Initiative (ACRI), which focused more on enhancing peacekeeping skills and did not include weapons training.

Between July 1997 and May 2000, ACRI helped train battalions [between 800-1,000 men] in Senegal, Uganda, Malawi, Mali, Ghana, Benin and Cote d'Ivoire. As part of the program, the U.S. Defense Department supplied boots, generators, mine detectors, night vision devices, vehicles and water purification units to the more than 6,000 troops who underwent training.

The senior official told journalists, "We looked at ACRI, which was the initiative we inherited from the Clinton Administration, and we felt that we needed to beef it up in its substance and training. And so, we created the ACOTA program. That program is still, I would say, under development. There is still more room for improvement of the initiative."

Turning back to the Liberia crisis, the senior official added: "When President Bush goes to Africa he will talk to the leaders in West Africa; he will talk to President [Olusegun] Obasanjo and President [Thabo] Mbeki to think about ways in which we can more effectively assist the capacity of African countries to carry out peacekeeping missions, monitoring missions, peace-enforcement missions. And so, we do see our dialogue on this trip as critical to the evolution of our peacekeeping" assistance to the continent.

In an interview with the Washington File last November, Theresa Whelan, Africa director in the Defense Department's Office of International Security Affairs (ISA), noted that a main difference between the two programs is that ACOTA is configured to be more "robust" than ACRI because of its "expanded range" of security responsibilities and, so, will require weapons training.

ACRI troops were never meant to be put into a non-secure setting, Whelan explained; whereas the "enforcement" aspect of ACOTA means troops need to be made ready for "a threat environment."

Another major difference with ACRI is that ACOTA will focus more on training troops who as trainers themselves will return to their units and impart their skills to their fellow soldiers.

Emphasizing the "the multiplier effect" in ACOTA, Whelan said, "by training trainers, we can train a smaller group of soldiers and they, in turn, go out and train more troops." This is an important factor at a time when many of the traditional trainers -- members of U.S. Special Forces units -- are currently busy battling terrorists worldwide.

Peacekeeping partnerships have been especially popular with the African diplomatic corps, including Ugandan Ambassador Edith Ssempala who told the Washington File in an interview last August that she welcomed ACOTA as a worthy successor to ACRI.

"You cannot have stability," Ambassador Ssempala said, "unless you have a professional, trained army. So, any help -- even to countries involved in conflicts now" -- is an important contribution to peace on the continent.