BUNgle in the JUNgle

With the Battlegroup in Kandahar set to turn into a pumpkin next year, the military and government are looking ahead to what comes next. Congo has figured prominently in the early running, so I thought it worthwhile to look into what we might hope to achieve there.

What's wrong with the place? That's easy: pretty much everything. No functional government, rampant banditry, staggering levels of rape and mutilation, child abduction for use as sex slaves and drugged up mini soldiers, and all of this in a country which is huge with poor communications. The poor communications (roads, railways, airstrips, etc.) are due to previous corrupt governments letting things slide and recent ones being both too corrupt and too busy fighting various factions to work on infrastructure.

The biggest problem with the place though is not the hardware but the software, e.g. people. The population is large (c. 68M) which causes governance issues even if they are relatively homogeneous, which the population of Congo most definitely is not. The key problem within the
"people" category is the various bandit groups. I'm using the Russian term (bandits) for any of the armed groups that aren't part of a disciplined national army because it fits. I'd also applythe Russian solution.

As often stated here (and elsewhere) the job of the Army is to break things and kill people; if that's what you need done, or you need the potential on the ground to be able to do that, you send in the Army. Will we be sending Canada's troops there (or anywhere else) on that understanding? Not likely, especially considering the dirty bush war of extermination that we'd have to fight in the Congo in order to do the place any long-term good. The article I linked to for this shows the problem with the UN for this sort of work:

'When we talk about 1,400 civilians killed, these are not people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time or civilians caught in the crossfire. These were people deliberately killed, hacked to death by machetes, shot in the head at point blank range, beaten to death by clubs. And, in 2009, the United Nations human rights section didn't publish a single report about the events in Eastern Congo. It was seen as too controversial.'

The whole article is about the UN either standing aside while these things happen, or supporting certain groups to do various bits of dirty work. I have no problem with the need for "wet" work, but if you're there to improve the situation you need to keep close tabs on who's doing what and to whom. My rules of engagement would be simple: anyone belonging to one of those bandit groups is killed with extreme prejudice, full-stop. Don't concern yourself with "collaborators" and such; hunt and exterminate the two-legged monsters that go around hacking of limbs and raping women into incontinence and suicide (if they survive to do that).

"Search and Destroy" is the name of the game, and to avoid the civilian slaughter you need highly trained and motivated troops who are given a job to do and backed up with everything they need. Helicopters, supply and first-rate medical support will keep the troops in the bush, and strict observance of the Laws of Armed Conflict will allow them to do their job without nit-picking micromanagement from above. Freedom of action is NOT the same thing as carte blanche, so professional troops with effective leaders are a must to avoid (non-belligerent) massacres.

Of course, that won't happen. There will be interference all the way from Ottawa for the lowest level mission, and everyone will be thrown for a loop every time somebody makes any sort of allegation of wrongdoing by our troops. The solution to the problem of bad people with weapons is dead bad people, and the fact that the punk pointing an AK at me is 10 years old and high on coke doesn't change that equation.

Try selling THAT to the political and media class. When you can, then we should go to Congo.