Shadow Wars: Chasing Conflict in an Era of Peace

8. The American Way of War

133 8 The American Way of War The U.S.-led training began in Kinshasa in December 2009 with a small contingent of FARDC officers. The idea was to create a new battalion around a core of officers steeped in human rights and international law, without disbanding the entire army—a major flaw in American security-reform efforts in Iraq. In February, the training shifted to a base in Kisangani, in central Congo. There, the American instructors focused their attention on the new battalion’s rank and file. Much of the training was in such traditional military tasks as shooting, patrolling, and communications. The soldiers also got agricultural training and a lot of the same human rights instruction as the officers. Lessons in farming and fishing were supposed to ensure that the model battalion would never need to pillage civilian farms for its own survival. The AmericAn WAy of WAr 134 The human rights curriculum was oriented toward preventing sexual violence. Rape prevention was a tricky subject for the American instructors . “That’s something that we didn’t know how to do. We don’t have those textbooks,” one officer told Stars and Stripes. Indeed, the American military itself has long been marred by a rate of sexual assault twice that of the civilian population. But as a curriculum for foreign students, rape prevention was new to the American trainers.1 The command, based in Germany, was taking the sexual violence in Congo seriously. Using information gathered on the ground, U.S. Command Africa developed an anti–sexual violence program to integrate into the training of forces in the Congo. A third of the battalion also received training in how to be an instructor—“training the trainer,” the U.S. Army called it. While the model battalion would ideally set an example of how the rest of the FARDC should behave, the instructors were meant to fan out across the Congolese military to deliberately seed other units. “Hopefully, that’s a platform from which additional training of Congolese troops can be done by very welltrained Congolese troops,” U.S. ambassador to the DRC William Garvelink said.2 As the commandos in Kisangani were wrapping up their courses, a fresh contingent of American troops flew into Kinshasa . I went to Congo to observe them. The roughly one hundred medics and doctors from the North Dakota National Guard spent two weeks working to improve a FARDC medical unit. The “final exam” was a free health clinic, supervised by the Americans, where Congolese medics, doctors, anddentistsconductedphysicals,pulledrottenteeth,andhanded out medicine to some two thousand Kinshasa residents.3 The U.S. presence in Congo, utterly unknown to all but a handful of Americans, was rapidly expanding. But the biggest developments were yet to come. The AmericAn WAy of WAr 135 Get Kony Years of determined lobbying by international aid groups led to the passage, in May 2010, of a law requiring the United States to formulate a comprehensive strategy for beating the LRA. The U.S. approach so far had been too scattered, too soft. Unsurprisingly , the new strategy borrowed pages from the shadow war playbook presently seeing heavy use in Somalia, the Philippines, and other conflict zones. In October 2010 the White House announced the deployment of a hundred Army Special Forces to Congo. “These forces will act as advisers to partner forces that have the goal of removing from the battlefield Joseph Kony and other senior leadership of the LRA,” President Barack Obama said. These “partner forces” would include the UN peacekeepers, the Congolese FARDC, plus the armies of Uganda, Central African Republic, and South Sudan—the latter a major beneficiary of covert U.S. military support as it continued the uneasy process of breaking away from genocidal Sudan. The U.S. advisers began deploying the same week as the announcement. “Although the U.S. forces are combat-equipped, they will only be providing information, advice and assistance to partner nation forces,” Obama said. “They will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense.”4 Still, any effort against the LRA posed serious risks. Previous operations targeting Kony had all ended badly. In 2006, Guatemalan commandos trained by the United States trekked deep into the Congolese forest to attack an LRA encampment. Kony was away, but his fighters were there in strength. In the ensuing firefight, LRA troops wiped out the entire eight-man commando force and beheaded...