The Africa continuum - CBS News This post originally appeared in National Journal. DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania Presidents Obama and Bush met here to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Osama bin Laden's first coordinated murderous assault on America. Neither was president when suicide truck bombs blew up in front of the U.S. embassies here and in Nairobi, Kenya. As president, both have coped with what those hideous attacks--11 dead and 85 injured here and 212 dead and 4,000 injured in Nairobi--foreshadowed. Bush was the first American president to preside over thousands of civilian deaths in a battle that's never had a name and never offered a country to vanquish. On Saturday in Johannesburg, Obama called it the "so-called war on terror." By whatever the name, the war goes on in myriad ways. Some of them are grindingly familiar. The 12th year of combat with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan's eastern badlands. Drones. Guantanamo. Some are startlingly unfamiliar. Obama presiding over wider surveillance than Bush used, a regimen that logs phone calls and data mines in the U.S. and that bugs phones and hacks into computer lines of our closest European allies. There are also a dizzying number of counterterrorism wars on this continent, all either launched or intensified on Obama's watch: against Boko Haram in Nigeria; al-Shabaab in Somalia; the Lord's Resistance Army (Joseph Kony) in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the U.S.-midwifed state of South Sudan; and the Signatories in Blood in Algeria. And this doesn't count the U.S. efforts to reverse a coup in Mali staged by Amadou Haya Sarog, a commander who received extensive military training in the U.S. America now has 4,000 to 5,000 troops, mostly in Djibouti and drone bases there and Niger. Questions about the U.S. "militarization" of Africa were raised before and throughout Obama's three-nation tour. They rippled through the comments of retired Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu in Cape Town on Sunday. Looking squarely at Obama, Tutu said, "Your failure, whether you like it or not, is our failure. We pray that you will be known as having brought peace in all of these places where there is strife ...and no more need for Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. Obama. Lectured by Tutu. About Gitmo. In Africa. Could there be a better, more prickly example, of how deeply Obama and Bush have become entwined? But it doesn't stop there. Tutu spoke in an AIDS clinic funded in part by the $3.7 billion the U.S. has poured into AIDS-fighting efforts in South Africa alone under the Bush-created President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Overall, the U.S. has spent $44 billion in direct and bilateral assistance in Africa and saved millions of people from near-certain death. Obama has continued PEPFAR but shifted some funding to combat malaria and tuberculosis. Bush announced the AIDS intervention in 2003 in the teeth of his battle with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and on the cusp of the war in Iraq. "Today, on the continent of Africa, nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus, including 3 million children under the age of 15," Bush said then. There are whole countries in Africa where more than one-third of the adult population carries the infection. More than 4 million require immediate drug treatment. Yet across that continent, only 50,000 AIDS victims--only 50,000--are receiving the medicine they need. Bush told Congress the message AIDS sufferers received was blunt and bloodless: "'You've got AIDS. We can't help you. Go home and die.'