The American military helped plan and pay for a recent attack on a notorious Ugandan rebel group, but the offensive went awry, scattering fighters who carried out a wave of massacres as they fled, killing as many as 900 civilians.
The operation was aimed at the Lord's Resistance Army, and the U.S. provided the Ugandan's with "satellite phones, intelligence and $1 million in fuel." The U.S. has been training Ugandan troops for years, but has never had this level of reported involvement in actual operations.
This action raises all sorts of questions. Leaving aside the fact that the planned offensive was horribly bungled, I have to wonder, is this really a wise use of our resources? What makes Uganda worthy of U.S. support and training in the first place? The Lord's Resistance Army is by all accounts a vicious group that perpetrates atrocities on a regular basis. But atrocities are common on all sides in African warfare. Is the LRA an enemy of the U.S.? Why is it necessary for the U.S. military to take an active role attempting to suppress it? Why do we want to be involved in the horrific mess that is the Congo civil war? I'm not an isolationist, but I'm not sure there are solid answers to all these questions.
That does seem like a strange thing to do, particularly as the US is most notable for its lack of involvement in central Africa. Perhaps it 'found religion' after Rwanda in '94 and is eager to prevent a sequel. If that's the case, they're not doing a very good job.
ReplyDeleteAlways looking for the dark side, I ask, "Are there drugs involved?"
ReplyDeletePaul Collier argues that conflicts in failed states reduce global economic growth so much that even from a self-interested perspective, it's worth the money to intervene. In most cases the costs are fairly low, because the rebel army isn't very well-organized. Most insurgencies aren't the LTTE, Hezbollah, or Hamas; many, like Sierra Leone's RUF, were in it for the natural resource control, and collapsed the moment experienced foreign troops attacked them.
ReplyDeleteAlon Levy,
ReplyDeleteGood point, but for every Sierra Leone and Liberia, there's a Somalia. The circumstances always differ to the extent that a blanket advocacy of intervention in failed states cannot be a wise idea.
Somalia was a fairly technical failure. Collier talks about that, too; he explains that the experience of losing a few US troops was so traumatic that the lesson the US drew was "Never intervene," even though a rematch would've worked quite well in defeating the insurgency. He makes the same comment about Iraq, where US failure has led to an uptick in isolationism.
ReplyDeleteAlon Levy,
ReplyDeleteWhat's the name of this book?
I wonder, what did you say or think in 2003 about the U.S. involving themselves in Iraq's civil terrorism? And for that matter, what business did we have in Europe in the 1940s?
ReplyDelete