How Committed is America to Fighting the Lord's Resistance Army?

Does the United States have a strategic interest in the stability of Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo? If so, is our national security interest in this region compelling enough to justify U.S. military intervention to eliminate the Lord’s Resistance Army? Are the American people committed enough to the outcome of this conflict to justify the deployment of an already-overstretched military, the allocation of scarce resources in a time of budget austerity, and potential American casualties?

One would hope so, because the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) is now committed to a new campaign to aid the governments of Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in their long, painful effort to eliminate the Lord’s Resistance Army which has terrorized their countryside, killed at least 12,000, abducted as many as 75,000 and displaced up to 2 million civilians. President Obama justified this operation in an October 14th letter to the Speaker of the House and President Pro Tempore of the Senate.

On October 12, the initial team of U.S. military personnel with appropriate combat equipment deployed to Uganda. During the next month, additional forces will deploy, including a second combat-equipped team and associated headquarters, communications, and logistics personnel. The total number of U.S. military personnel deploying for this mission is approximately 100. These forces will act as advisors to partner forces that have the goal of removing from the battlefield Joseph Kony and other senior leadership of the LRA. Our forces will provide information, advice, and assistance to select partner nation forces. Subject to the approval of each respective host nation, elements of these U.S. forces will deploy into Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The support provided by U.S. forces will enhance regional efforts against the LRA. However, although the U.S. forces are combat equipped, they will only be providing information, advice, and assistance to partner nation forces, and they will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self defense. All appropriate precautions have been taken to ensure the safety of U.S. military personnel during their deployment.

One can almost imagine that on the morning of October 15th, staffers at every single one of our nation’s Congressional offices and news outlets crashed the server of Wikipedia when they entered the same search terms in unison: “What is the Lord's Resistance Army?” …

Unlike Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya, the political discourse has seen no constitutionalist argument against Obama administration’s deployment of military advisers to Uganda because, well, there really is none. Yes, you read that correctly – the military intervention against the more obscure warlord in Central Africa whom no one has ever talked about, which Congress did not debate, is perfectly constitutionally fine. You see, back in May of 2010, Congress passed the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009; this law declared as official Congressional policy:

“To support stabilization and lasting peace in northern Uganda and areas affected by the Lord’s Resistance Army through development of a regional strategy to support multilateral efforts to successfully protect civilians and eliminate the threat posed by the Lord's Resistance Army and to authorize funds for humanitarian relief and reconstruction, reconciliation, and transitional justice, and for other purposes.”

Buried somewhere in this tangle of euphemism and understatement was the by-the-way authorization for the President to use military means to achieve this grand objective, so subtle that even the most discerning reader of Congressional resolutions might not have caught it. The prime mover behind the LRA Disarmament Act, the Senate’s erstwhile progressive icon Russell Feingold, was quite explicit in his intent; “supporting viable and legitimate efforts to disarm and demobilize the LRA is exactly the kind of thing in which AFRICOM should be engaged.”

If you might be scratching your head in puzzlement, don’t feel alone. This matter of war and peace, the weightiest of subjects that a democratic government might address, was simply slipped under the rug. On May 10, 2010, the Senate passed Feingold’s resolution with unanimous consent, and two days later the House of Representatives passed it by a voice vote – a procedural measure by which representatives’ positions are not even tabulated. At a time when the world was fixated on the heroic efforts needed to address the oil spill in the Gulf Coast and the earthquake in Haiti, apparently the most liberal of bleeding hearts in journalism did not consider as newsworthy the fact that Congress authorized the President to engage in military action against the Lord’s Resistance Army. At most it was buried in a one paragraph blurb on page A24

There never was an earnest debate on this issue at all. Congress treated a resolution authorizing the use of military force as essentially just another symbolic resolution to rename a post office or congratulate the St. Louis Cardinals on their World Series championship. The Beltway media followed suite.

This blogger remains undecided as to whether or not President Obama did the right thing by sending 100 military advisers to Uganda. I am ashamed to admit that I do not know as much as I should know about a security issue facing four of Africa’s 55 countries in which I have never lived, which I have only read about, and on which I know nothing more than anyone else who follows BBC Africa.

However, I do have a very strong opinion on the fact that President Obama’s recent decision to send troops to Uganda has demonstrated the American people’s and the American political class’ complete and utter disregard for anything happening in Africa. Not only are we as a nation ignorant about African affairs, but we are not very interested in educating ourselves about them. The now patently-offensive term – “The Dark Continent” – unfortunately remains an apt moniker for how a continent home to 1 billion of the world’s population remains a black hole to which American thought rarely penetrates and from which some of the world’s greatest tragedies and triumphs of the human spirit never escape to see the light of day. One could retort that maybe it takes a military intervention to stimulate demand for journalistic assignments, research grants and course enrollment. After all, it was not until we invaded Afghanistan that most Americans could be bothered to care about the plight of women in Kandahar, it wasn’t until American boys were stationed in Iraq that any noticeable iota of Americans cared to learn the difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites. Maybe, one argues, now that we have troops in Uganda, Congressmen and military academicians might finally take note of this long-ignored part of the world.

The obligatory Congressional hearing on the U.S. deployment to Uganda demonstrated no such thing.

“What is the strategic interest of the United States in doing this?” asked Gerry Connolly (D-Virg.), “I mean, there are lots of unpleasant people in the world. There are lots of insurgencies and terrorist movements in the world. The United States obviously cannot try to dethrone every one of them.”

Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) dismissed the LRA – which has killed at least 12,000, abducted as many as 75,000 and displaced in the environs of 2 million people – as “not a sophisticated insurgency” because they have not used high-tech weaponry.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Cali.) and Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) utilized the hearings as a soapbox to decry government spending and the federal deficit.

Representatives Connolly, Duncan, Rohrabacher and Schmidt should receive steak knives for at least bothering to show up to the discussion. Most Republican candidates running to be the Leader of the Free World have not even issued press releases on the subject.

Stunningly, the most prominent voice in American politics to give U.S. intervention in Uganda anything resembling due air time was Rush Limbaugh. In a radio segment titled “Obama Invades Uganda, Targets Christians”, Limbaugh somehow managed to take the side of the Lord’s Resistance Army as a proxy in the Global War between Christian Civilization and Islamic Barbarism.

[The] Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. It means God… They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops, to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. So that’s a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda.

One of the most powerful mouthpieces on the Right demonstrated that he was willing to opine and bloviate on an issue as seminal as war and peace without having even taken the time to so much as Google: “Lord’s Resistance Army” or leaf through the World Almanac. And think about how many countless Republican voters and legislators take their cues from Limbaugh. This is how the American political class formulates its Africa policies.

I would hope that the American people, media and political class take this issue a bit more seriously. Sure, there are now only 100 military advisers in Uganda – just few dozen less than there will be in Iraq by New Year’s Day. Sure, they constitute a relative few, and they are only serving in an advisory role – for now. But the American tradition of intervention in faraway lands has proven time and time again to be particularly susceptible to a thing called “mission creep”; we are a people who generally prefer escalating our mission to accepting defeat.

As much as Obama, Feingold, et al. are right to acknowledge the importance of African stability to global security and the potential of AFRICOM, I am concerned that the generally dovish Democrats so blithely justified this mission on security grounds. This mission in Central Africa does not appear to have much if anything to do with the vital interests of the United States or our allies. It is unclear whether this mission has clearly defined political and military objectives, or whether the U.S. military even has the capacity to defeat a guerrilla insurgency in the midst of the remote jungles and savannas of the Ugandan, South Sudanese, Congolese and Central African Republican interior. It remains hazy just how committed the U.S. military establishment is to defeating the Lord’s Resistance Army. Most importantly, there does not appear to be that much wholehearted support of U.S. public opinion. If U.S. military intervention in Central Africa were to escalate to a combat role, it wouldn’t pass the requirements of the Weinberger Doctrine.

I am concerned that the general ignorance of all things African is not limited to Republican isolationists. But for a few policy analysts in the State Department, the vast majority of the most genuinely-committed, TOMS Shoes-wearing do-gooders must concede general ignorance of the politics of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Yes, I’m sure you’ve read plenty of newsletters from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – I get those emails too. Nevertheless, I would beg the “Save the World” camp to maintain a healthy level of skepticism before marching to the trumpets of the just war. It was only months ago that the outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told a class of West Point cadets, “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined.’”

Does the U.S. misson to defeat the Lord's Resistance Army fulfill the rigors of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine? Is the humanitarian crisis in Uganda as imminently catastrophic as the situation in Benghazi might have been had NATO not enforced a no-fly zone? Why is the humananitarian crisis in Uganda worthy of U.S. intervention when the humanitarian crises in Darfur, Abyei, Côte d’Ivoire, Zimbabwe, et al., are not? President Obama has not adequately explained to the American people why this mission is necessary and consistent with U.S. foreign policy. An open letter to the Speaker of the House and the Presiden Pro Tempore of the Senate hardly suffices.

Just because a certain faction in an African conflict is systematically violating the human rights of civilians does not meant that the opposing faction in that conflict is genuinely interested in upholding those civilians’ human rights. Just because the Ugandan government is fighting the Lord’s Resistance Army does not mean that the Ugandan government is worthy of U.S. military aid. Strongman Yoweri Musevini, who has ensconced himself in power for 25 years, has within the past months rigged his “re-election” and clamped down on pro-democracy demonstrators with teargas and water cannons. There is a strong human rights-based argument that the U.S. should curtail military aid to the Ugandan government – not increase it. Don't even get me started on the “Democratic Republic” of the Congo…

Moreover, just because the Lord’s Resistance Army might be one of the most evil, despicable terrorist groups in the modern world does not mean that deploying U.S. commandos to Uganda is necessarily going to make things any better. Fair arbiters of U.S. foreign policy should remain wary of military intervention even when it is done for purely humanitarian reasons – or rather, especially when it is done for purely humanitarian reasons.

For now I’m willing to give President Obama the benefit of a doubt, there is still a chance that this mission might just save a whole lot of people from a brutal warlord and his minions. But it remains the duty all Americans to take this opportunity to study more about the reasons why our troops are now in Uganda, ostensibly South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic. The new U.S. military mission might do a lot of good for people in Africa, God willing it should be a great success. But when we are willing to send troops to far-flung corners of the world in complete ignorance, without earnest inquiry and debate, there is only reason to be concerned about the state of democracy in America.

Brokering Peace in Sri Lanka

(October 2005)

In August 2005, Foreign Minister Lakshmin Kadirgaman was shot in his swimming pool by snipers located in a vacant house next door. His government reasonably suspects the assassins to be members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a rebel group fighting for the independence of the ethnic Tamil minority. Though the type of gun used in the killing was one frequently used by the LTTE, authorities have yet to identify his killers, and thus a firm connection between the murder and the rebel group remains elusive.

Kadirgaman’s assassination took place while I traveled in Sri Lanka as a volunteer with the Tsunami Relief Project, and the streets and airwaves of the entire nation were immediately awash in hagiographical tributes to their revered statesman. Because he was an ethnic Tamil working in a government accused of anti-Tamil prejudice, Kadirgaman carried an aura of dignity which transcended partisanship. He had actively worked to attain international aid for the Sri Lankan civil war from nations around the world, particularly Norway (which is currently facilitating negotiations with the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE rebels) and the United States (which has given billions of dollars in military aid as part of the Global War on Terrorism). Kadirgaman was a great individual, and so as to further his legacy, I spread the story of his country’s plight.

There are two main ethnic-religious groups in Sri Lanka: the predominantly Buddhist Sinhalese, who make up approximately 74% of this country of 19 million, and who live in the developed South; and the predominantly Hindu Tamils, who make up another 18% of the country and live mostly along the Eastern seaboard and in the Northern jungles. Both groups were treated fairly equitably while under the colonial rule of the British viceroyalty, but when the country became the independent republic of Ceylon in 1948, the Sinhalese imposed a barefaced tyranny of the majority. The country now has a vibrant spoils system in which Sinhalese government officials give most public sector jobs to their lighter-skinned brethren, an unofficial policy which has created an obvious socioeconomic disparity in many communities – communities where the steadiest paycheck comes from the police station. Aspiring Sri Lankan politicians have historically made demagogic appeals to the Sinhalese people’s chauvinistic anxieties against the Tamils, and have banned the Tamil language in public schools, universities, and government offices.

This flagrant bias could even be seen in the government’s actions in response to last December’s tsunami; state-financed refugee camps were quickly constructed in Sinhalese South. In the Tamil East, the Kumaratunge administration handed over lands which used to be home to poor fishing villages to private tourism developers, displacing hundreds of thousands from the mostly darker-skinned underclass inland. And now, nine months afterwards, the Sri Lankan government had still done almost nothing to rebuild Tamil communities hit by the tsunami - almost all relief projects there were sponsored by either private charities or foreigners.

The straw that broke the camel’s back and first ignited the Tamil revolt, however, came in 1983 when members of the notoriously corrupt police forces organized violent riots against the Tamil minority in the capitol city of Colombo. Immediately, Tamils across the island nation went to the streets calling for freedom from violent discrimination, and radicals led by current insurgent leader Colonel Villupillai Prabakharan called for an independent Tamil homeland in the North. The sensitivity of the Tamil minority were no stranger to us Tsunami Relief Project volunteers; while we were working in the mixed-ethnicity city of Batticaloa, riots had broken out along the Jaffna peninsula after a Sri Lankan military officer’s rifle discharged at a barbershop and killed his Tamil barber. News of the outrage quickly spread to the Tamils of Batticaloa and violent demonstrations ensued.

For 22 years the LTTE has waged a guerilla war against the Sri Lankan government, and ruthless acts of terrorism are among their favorite tactics; assassination is in fact their preferred method of changing administrations. So as to expel the Indian peacekeeping force from the Tamil regions, Liberation Tigers killed Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and in 1993 the insurgent group assassinated Sri Lankan president Rasinghe Premadasa. Civilians targets have also been hit, such as the Temple of the Tooth which houses what is supposedly a mandible from the jaw of Buddha; this act, if it had successfully destroyed the relic, would have had enormous symbolic consequence, since Sri Lankan regimes since antiquity have carefully guarded the tooth as a source of divine legitimacy.

Nevertheless, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam are more than just a motley gang of thugs and killers. The LTTE is less like Al Qaeda and more comparable to Hezbollah; they finance their militant activities mostly through taxes from the Tamil population and actually operate what can be called a weakly-functioning civil administration in the territory they control. That is why, though the LTTE is undeniably a terrorist organization and classified as such by the US State Department, it is difficult to lump them into the same category as the religious fundamentalist terrorists on which our FBI, CIA and military have squared their sights.

The LTTE is nonetheless a fringe group primarily limited to the despised and impoverished caste of Untouchables, a group so radical that they impede economic progress so as to maintain the suffering of their constituents, which is then used as a rallying cry for their cause. They are so lacking in willing recruits that they resort to abducting fourteen-year-olds to use as child soldiers. The vast majority of Sri Lankans, Sinhalese and Tamils alike, are weary of this war, which has afflicted thousands of families and costs $700 million a year, out of an annual federal budget of only $4.2 billion. This spending has deprived the economy of funds sorely needed to invest in basic infrastructure; as I was walking along a path of sand and rocks in the war-torn town of Batticaloa, my guide remarked to me, “This is a road. It will never be paved until our civil war ends.”

The truth is that Sri Lanka has so much potential for development and growth that were it not for the Liberation Tigers, it could have possibly been one of the Asian Tigers like nearby India. But such a long-lasting civil war and climate of political instability have frightened off the kind of foreign investors that could create new industries and Western tourists who might otherwise be spending their money there. Peace could very well transform the culture of entrenched poverty which is all-too-familiar for millions.

Since the island’s people so fervently desire peace, in 2001 Lakshmin Kadirgaman and the LTTE rebel leaders settled a cease-fire in what is known as the P-TOMS agreement (“Cease-fire” is an extremely relative term, as shots are routinely exchanged in Batticaloa and kill about one person per day). And while the Norwegian government has since taken the mantle of the international community in an attempt to negotiate a permanent peace treaty, it now seems more elusive without the diplomatic skills of the late Foreign Minister. Nevertheless, if peace is ever to be achieved it will be either through granting the Tamils complete independence or at least a significant degree of autonomy in a federalist scheme. The latter seems much more likely, as neighboring India does not want to kindle the flame of sovereignty among its own Tamil population, and Sinhalese opinion is adamantly against granting independence to a group whom, though they have historically been on the receiving end of Sinhalese oppression, they see as their fellow countrymen.

The world power which could do the most to end the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka – the United States of America – is painfully uninvolved in the peace process. The only evidence of our country’s involvement I found while taking a break from clearing rubble at a beachfront YMCA now used as a base by Sri Lankan soldiers. I went to hang out with the machine gun-wielding platoon that was napping and playing poker, and the commanding officer proudly showed me their dog’s new puppies in his office. There I caught a newspaper on his desk blaring: “US Ambassador Pledges More Military Aid to Combat Terrorism”.

Simply put, giving block grants of military aid to the Sri Lankan government without any further engagement is only slightly better than doing nothing at all, and does little to further our campaign to weaken organized terrorist groups. The amount of change that we can effect by simply sending an ambassador to the peace negotiations, or by commissioning Condoleeza Rice to condemn the LTTE’s use of child soldiers at a press conference, would be incredible for these people. Though the prospects seems bleak when our current administration is so preoccupied with its own ethnic conflicts in a much more strategically important region of the world.

Even so, our country has other tools with which we can attain a lasting peace in Sri Lanka, namely our unrivaled economic power. The deeply-indebted government is wholly dependent on loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which in turn are effectively run by the United States. At the time being we are using this influence over Sri Lanka to make it privatize its banks, deregulate its industries, and institute other policies consistent with orthodox free market ideology – policies which, by the way, led to such a dramatic decrease in the job security of Sinhalese public employees that they vented their rage at the Tamils as scapegoats in the riots of 1983 which precipitated the civil war. But while we are using our influence to make the country more attractive to foreign entrepreneurs, we can also nudge the Sri Lankan economy in a way that services their own desperate needs.

According to the Four Noble Truths adhered to by Sri Lanka’s Buddhist majority, all of life is suffering, suffering has a cause, suffering can be ended, and suffering can only be ended by eliminating its cause. The radicalism which fuels the LTTE rebels is a result of an impoverished population – a population that is fairly cognizant of the ethnic discrimination which has caused them such hardships. We as Americans are in a position to at least dull the edges of this radicalism. While Paul Wolfowitz is privatizing and deregulating the Sri Lankan economy at the head of the World Bank, he can also make loans to the government contingent on their being spent more proportionally among the Sinhalese and Tamil populations, or he could he could push for fair distribution of tsunami relief funds and fair hiring practices. And if he wanted to be truly meddling, Wolfowitz could even encourage the Sri Lankan government to make Tamil another official language.

Any of these options are more than feasible and would not require a cent of American tax dollars. Once the Sri Lankan civil war ends, we too can garner a peace dividend by saving money on military aid and gaining a newly dynamic trading partner. We would also gain the goodwill of a small but grateful nation, a commodity for which our country is in desperate need.