his ambitious 4-pronged plan aimed at eradicating the Lord's
Resistance Army (LRA) in Central Africa.
To all intents and purposes, however, the Obama Plan seems thin,
impractical, unimaginative, and may as well be therefore deemed dead
on arrival. For it bears, firstly, all the hallmarks of any number of
those stillborn grand ideas on behalf of Africa the denizens of the
continent are accustomed to seeing churn out sporadically and randomly
over the years from successive "planetarchs" at the remove of the Oval
Office.
Secondly, if Obama presented his Plan to Congress in the hope of
securing its funding, the hard fact remains that there's no way the
new Tea-Party-prone (and therefore domestically-inclined) Republican
Congress would entertain the fanciful notion of adding to the federal
deficit by disbursing taxpayers' dollars to fund a plan so far afield
of the traditional Republican purview and constituency of the US
national security interests.
Is the Prez really willing to waste so much needed precious political
capital on these elusive "Killers Without Borders" (Gérard Prunier)
moving in tiny predatory bands deeply burrowed under the canopy of a
"vast swaths of jungle the size of California," as one analyst
recently described the Central African region?
The answer is a resounding no. The Prez could have saved himself the
unnecessary embarrassment of a rejection by the new mercurial Congress
had he introduced his worthwhile initiative in the earlier part of his
term when he still enjoyed the backing of a robust congressional
majority.
Thirdly, since the LRA has gone international, why make Uganda the
cornerstone of the Plan, thus reinforcing with US taxpayers' dollars
an everlasting autocratic regime?
Last and not least, consider the Plan per se--its public version, that
is, for there's for sure a classified addendum.
Bizarrely, the Plan seems pirated from Yoweri Museveni's anti-LRA
book. To his credit, Museveni had been attempting for over more than 2
decades to deal with LRA killers--using carrot and stick.
For instance, one component of Obama Plan calls for incentivizing
defections in the rank and file of the LRA. Well, this had repeatedly
been attempted with limited results in northern Uganda, where former
LRA fighters were disarmed and given means to reintegrate their
communities. And President Museveni had often gone out of his way to
try and accommodate John Kony--even footing the bill of Kony's
mother's funerals!
Besides, how do you penetrate an impenetrable millenarian murderous
sect to incentivize its members for defection? Does the incentives go
hand in hand with a "de-programming" initiative?
More importantly, the military component of the Plan lacks local
communities' ownership, thus fails to integrate lessons (if there were
any) stemming from the past disastrous joint FARDC-UDF anti-LRA
military operations with the intelligence and logistical backing of
AFRICOM. In point of fact, the Plan bluntly tells these local
communities, "Step aside, folks, pray, cross your fingers, and await
the eradication of the scourge by the deus ex machina of the joint
military forces of the region under Ugandan command!."
Local communities' ownership I have in mind turns on its head the
received COIN (counter-insurgency) doctrine that's currently applied
in Central Africa--particularly in eastern DRC by MONUSCO and the
FARDC. And it's bound to achieve at low cost the major objective of
the Obama Plan: Protection of civilians.
It's so simple that I'm amazed it hasn't so far been seriously considered.
It has in fact been attempted in a northern DRC village by the border
with the Sudan, but without any follow-up capacity building.
In that village, in the wake of a particularly vicious attack by the
LRA, women and men spontaneously organized self-defense groups. The
one thing these bold villagers lacked was weapons. They made do with
clubs and machetes, even setting up surveillance perimeters and shifts
as well as protection posses to accompany people to their fields.
Why not take a cue from this out-of-the-box initiative much as is done
in development projects that integrate local initiatives? Isn't this
brilliant initiative in keeping with the very spirit of the Second
Amendment of the US Constitution?
The areas and villages under LRA threat are identified. The sensible
thing to do is to arm people in those areas for their
self-defense--with maybe two or three soldiers at each site to teach
handling of weapons and basic tactical skills. Had this kind of
pragmatic approach conceived and implemented in eastern DR Congo, I
doubt we'd be bemoaning today epidemic rapes occurring there.
There's simply no other way to deal with vicious killers of the likes
of the LRA and the FDLR. It's high time this approach be integrated
into the Obama Plan for the elimination of the threat posed by the LRA
in Central Africa. Failing that, people in threatened areas would
still be like lambs to the slaughter.
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