#KonyFail?

The Washington Post reports that Ugandan and American troops have suspended their joint hunt for Lord's Resistance Army commander Joseph Kony due to the political turmoil in the Central African Repulic (i.e. rebel forces capturing the capital and sending the President into exile).

As I noted in Wanted Dead or Alive in my Foreign Affairs piece on the Kony manhunt, successful manhunts depend upon favorable human terrain more than physical terrain, and a key element of this variable is the cooperation of other nations that could potentially provide safe havens to the targeted individual. In other words, no matter how many Green Berets (or other SOF) or adavanced satellites and drones we deploy in pursuit of Kony and his associates, it will not matter if whatever government emerges from the chaos in the CAR refuses to cooperate.

This also reinforces a point I didn't have space to mention in the Foreign Affairs piece, specifically that although Joseph Kony is a monster who definitely deserves to meet justice either in the defendant's dock at the Hague or via the working end of an AK-47, his elimination will have little long-term effect on the various humanitarian crises that plague central Africa. The CAR coup/rebellion had nothing to do with the LRA, and reiterates the sad fact that that region's problems are deeply structural in nature, and will not be resolved simply by killing or capturing Joseph Kony.

Coincidentally, yesterday the State Department made a "previously planned" announcement of a $5 million reward for information leadeing to the arrest or conviction of Kony and two other LRA leaders, Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen. As I argued in the context of the hunt for Mommar Gaddafi in 2011, bounties rarely produce decisive results in strategic manhunts. People who are in a position to turn Kony in already have signficant incentives to do so (i.e. they are either past or potential victims of the LRA's atrocities, or are confederates seeking to avoid being indicted themselves by the International Criminal Court), and exhorbitant bounties tend to produce a flood of false leads that overwhelm the intelligence analysts attempting to track the targeted individuals (i.e. the "Elvis sightings" of Noriega, Muhammad Farah Aideed, and Saddam Hussein).

But again, given the difficulty of obtaining reliable assistance from regional allies such as the CAR, U.S. policymakers have disappointingly few arrows in their quiver with which to pursue the fugitive war criminal.

The Central African Republic is supposedly very nice this time of year . . .