Cabbages and Kony

The four-year fiasco that is the futile search for renegade militia leader, Joseph Kony and his army of child soldiers, has once again become the focus in Washington, DC.

Congress discussed Kony recently during a meeting of the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations. The hearing was titled, “Ridding Central Africa of Joseph Kony: Continuing US Support.”

While there appears to be continuing support to keep up the hunt for Kony, the reality on the ground in Africa is typically confusing at best.

A recent article in the Washington Post provides a well-crafted update on the search for Kony. It focuses on the apparent dealings the Ugandan army and U.S. special forces advisers have had with Muslim rebel fighters in the region, known as the Seleka.

I have argued in First Kill Your Family that the Ugandans aren't truly committed to finding Kony.

It is absurd for the Ugandans and their American advisers to complain that they can'd find Kony. Many people know where he is. The Post even published the following map:

The only ones who don't seem to know are the soldiers who have been hunting him ever since late 2008 when the Ugandan army botched an air and ground assault on Kony's camp in the Garamba National Park in the north eastern corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In 2011, President Obama ordered 100 U.S. military advisers to help the Ugandans with the hunt for Kony. They've been unsuccessful so far, and Obama will soon have to decide to continue the U.S. support or cut it.

Kony has been killing elephants and rhinos in Garamaba ever since he arrived there in late 2005, having abandoned his marauding of northern Uganda for some "fresh meat." Only recently, however, has this on-going slaughter of wildlife become an issue.

Kony and others, it seems, have been selling the highly valuable tusks to black marketeers who arrive in helicopters, load their cargo, and fly off. If a bunch of men who deal in wildlife parts can find Kony, why can't the Uganda and U.S. Special Forces?

While the Post article looks at a potential controversy should the U.S. advisers be pumping the Seleka for information and cooperation, it's a needless discussion.

The Seleka are apparently among the many who have been dealing with Kony. So if the Ugandans and the Americans are serious about finding Kony and bringing him to just, then WHY NOT talk to them? How can the Kony mission not use any and all means to find Kony?

While the Kony mission stumbles along, the reasons for it lack of success became quite evident as one reads deep into the article. The problems are many.

First, the U.S. has been rotating personnel in and out of the mission, which is based in Entebbe, a town south of the capital of Kampala, and the site of a military airport that also hosts UN planes. This has made it nearly impossible for continuity of the mission.

Second, the U.S. made some noise about adding to the mission three of the highly mobile Osprey aircraft, which can take off and land vertically, along with crew and added personnel. It only lasted three weeks before they were all pulled and reassigned to missions with higher priorities.

This has forced the mission to rely on private contractors to ferry food and supplies around to the various remote base camps. But officials now say that these contractors work at their own pace, meaning that they fit in the work when they can. Hardly a high priority mission.

Third, the U.S. advisers complained about how the Ugandans use, or abuse, U.S. equipment. In one instance, the Ugandans used a U.S. helicopter for a resupply mission, but only put five cabbages on it. Five cabbages? Are you serious?

That's supposedly a resupply mission for soldiers who are supposed to trekking around the jungles looking for Kony?

If anything, it shows that the Ugandans are not serious about finding Kony, as I've long argued, and are more interested in getting and using U.S. arms and equipment for their own purposes.

Is Karzai crazy?

In the Monday, January 27 issue of the Washington Post, reporter Kevin Seiff reported from Kabul that Afghan President Hamid Karzai believes that the U.S. is secretly helping the Taliban and is behind many of the deadly attacks there in recent years.

This includes the recent suicide bombing and gun attack on La Taverna, the Lebanese restaurant in Kabul, where 21 people, including three Americans, were killed.

The rational response, of course, is that this is ridiculous. Why would the United States fight a war in Afghanistan against the Taliban for 13 years, and all the while secretly help the Taliban? Of course it's absurd.

But as I researched and wrote Above the Din of War, it's an attitude and belief in Afghanistan that is shared by many people.

The thinking is this: Why has the world's most powerful army, which has the world's most sophisticated weaponry, best intelligence services, and employs the best trained soldiers not been able to defeat the Taliban? After all, the Taliban are essentially untrained and miserably equipped. They use antiquated weapons, only AK-47s and RPGs, communicate largely by cell phones, and run around the countryside wearing blankets and broken down shoes.

Good question. Many Afghans answer by saying that the U.S. simply does NOT want to defeat the Taliban. They believe the U.S. is keeping the Taliban alive by equipping it and aiding it.

Karzai has picked up on this thinking and is now, according to Seiff, trying to develop a dossier of photos and information that would prove this assertion. Unfortunately, the evidence that Karzai has been gathering is bogus, as was pointed out in a recent article by the New York Times.

In that Times piece, angry survivors of a northern village that had been attacked by an airstrike showed a photo of dead and mutilated bodies that was from an attack that had occurred elsewhere in 2009.

What's going on here? As I have said before, it is time to stop taking Karzai seriously, which is what the Obama administration continues to do, and is why Seiff and the Washington Post tried to make sense of Karzai's comments and thought process.

I can only agree with U.S. Ambassador James B. Cunningham's assessment of Karzai's comments: "It's a deeply conspiratorial view that's divorced from reality," the Post quoted him as saying. "It flies in the face of logic and morality to think that we would aid the enemy we're trying to defeat."

The key words here are "divorced from reality."

One of the few times I saw Karzai in person was during a 2004 press conference with former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. At the time, Karzai was friendly and talked about the great cooperation between the two countries in fighting a common enemy.

But what struck me, however, was that Karzai was essentially a prisoner of his own device inside the highly fortified presidential palace. As far as I knew, he never left. It was too dangerous. The only people Karzai sees are the ones who come to him, passing through an incredible gauntlet of security -- paid for by the U.S.

No wonder he sounds wacky. He has spent the last 10 years knocking around a fortified palace watching as the war has dragged on for more than a dozen years with no clear resolution in sight. Meanwhile, the Taliban grows stronger and stronger as the U.S. and NATO steadily ratchet down their forces.

After more than a decade as Afghanistan's nominal leader, Karzai sees his country ebbing into the chaos, civil war, and the hands of the Taliban. There's nothing Karzai can do to stop it. He has been and is completely at the mercy of the U.S., which after the coming April 5 presidential election -- if it actually occurs -- will happily toss him out on the street.

(Karzai will probably turn up in Dubai the day after the election, if not earlier.)

What few shreds of dignity that Karzai may have left can only be salvaged by his increasingly strident and self-destructive anti-American ravings. These are, after all, nothing more than his sad and futile attempt to align himself with the 30 million Afghans who abandoned him long ago.

It's pathetic, of course, but no more pathetic than the U.S. government officials, policy makers, and perhaps even some journalists who still take him seriously.