U.S. advisors still helping Ugandan troops look for a warlord who might be a ghost but at least Invisible Children are happy

A Jeffrey Gettleman New York Times piece posted online yesterday updates the effort by Ugandan military forces and American advisors to track down the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and their leader, Joseph Kony, who featured in the insanely popular “KONY 2012” YouTube video released in March.

For Reason, I wrote about the interventionist propaganda that permeated the video shortly after advocacy NGO Invisible Children released it:

Like a campaign commercial, Kony 2012 provides rhetoric in lieu of substance, appeals to emotion instead of reason, and frames partisan decisions in the language of universality and collective purpose.

…

Invisible Children’s call for international intervention to bring Kony to justice clearly aligns with the decision of the Obama administration last October to send about 100 “advisors,” mostly special forces troops, to Central Africa to help track down the LRA.

Today’s Times piece quotes “one American official” acknowledging the connection between Invisible Children’s lobbying efforts and the U.S. intervention in Central Africa:

“Let’s be honest, there was some constituent pressure here. Did ‘Kony 2012’ have something to do with this? Absolutely.”

The “KONY 2012” video itself can’t have a lot to do with the decision to send advisors, since that happened last October. But, as the Times notes, groups including Invisible Children “pressured Congress to pass the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act in 2010, which paved the way for President Obama to send in the special forces late last year.”

For people who wondered, “What could be the harm in ‘raising awareness’ about the LRA through ‘KONY 2012?’”, the piece is just the latest to refer to a previous effort four years ago involving U.S. advisors trying to help stamp out the LRA, and the unintended consequences of that mission:

In December 2008, the new American military command for Africa, known by the acronym Africom, helped plan an attack on Mr. Kony’s camp in Congo, dispatching a team of military advisers to Uganda. But Mr. Kony escaped before the Ugandan helicopter gunships even took off — apparently he had been tipped off. Worse, his army slaughtered hundreds of nearby villagers in revenge, leaving behind scorched huts and crushed skulls.

Gettleman wasn’t the only reporter to follow troops around in the jungle in Central Africa in recent days. Ugandan journalist Rodney Muhumuza reports for the AP about how irrelevant and unnecessary all the hubbub over Kony and the LRA may be these days:

Ugandan army officials say the Lord’s Resistance Army leader is alive and hiding somewhere within the Central African Republic. Rank-and-file soldiers, however, say intelligence on Kony is so limited that if he dies, or is already dead, his foes might never know and could wind up chasing a ghost through this vast Central Africa jungle.

In interviews last week with an Associated Press reporter who trekked with them in the jungle, soldiers in one of many Kony-hunting squads said their task in the Central African Republic could no longer be described as a manhunt. The soldiers, who requested anonymity for fear of punishment, said for years there has been no LRA presence in the areas they patrol.

The soldiers are growing increasingly disillusioned, complaining of boredom and having to carry around heavy guns they never expect to use.

“Our commanders don’t want you to know the truth,” one of them said on the banks of the Vovodo river, his colleagues nodding in approval. “They want to keep us here, but up to now our squad has never come across any rebels.”

Another soldier said: “We are bored. We have nothing to do. We are mobile every day but we never see the enemy.”

Muhumuza’s piece also notes that Ugandan officials say the LRA comprises “no more than 200 men scattered in small groups all over Central Africa” and that Ugandan troops kill time by watching porn on cell phones and eating sour wild yams called abato.

On why Haiti is so poor

Why Nations Fail, a new book by MIT economist Darren Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist James Robinson, has garnered a lot of attention since its release. Francis Fukuyama, Paul Collier, and Bill Easterly have each reviewed it.

Acemoglu and Robinson focus on the importance of political and economic institutions to a given nation’s development, or lack thereof. In their words, so-called “inclusive” institutions, like well-enforced property rights and contract enforcement, create incentives for investment and development. “Extractive” ones, like kleptocracies, are antithetical to progress.

One criticism of the book is that its delineations of “inclusive” and “extractive” institutions are not robust. I’ve not read the book yet, but some reviewers claim that the authors dig through past centuries and examine whether countries did or did not develop, and then tell ex poste stories about why the countries that did develop had inclusive institutions, and vice versa.

Set that critique aside. Acemoglu and Robinson recently blogged about Haiti, asking, “Why is Haiti so poor?” An excerpt from the post:

Haitians shocked the world with a formidable slave revolt in 1791, ultimately leading to independence from France. But this revolt did not lead to the development of inclusive institutions. To start with, the fight against the French, who attempted to retake their prize colony several times, was protracted and costly. [Historian Laurent] Dubois, for example, argues that the fiscal needs imposed by this continued war made the abolition of slavery essentially impossible. It probably also stunted the subsequent political development of this new independent state by excessively militarizing its politics. But perhaps more important was the vicious circle of extractive institutions. There were insufficient constraints on the power of post-independence leaders such as Dessalines, Christoph [sic], or Petion, who set themselves up as the elite exploiting Haiti’s people through very much the same means as the French had done earlier …

As Dubois and the authors have pointed out, one legacy of the revolution was to “excessively militarize” Haitian politics. The Haitian revolution was bloody and costly and began 13 years before former slaves eventually won independence. Since the revolution, the surest way to take power in Haiti has perhaps most often been by force. The surest way to keep it—in rulers’ eyes, at least—has usually been to crush dissent or hints of dissent ruthlessly.

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Podcasting from Haiti: Boukannen Dlo

Today Jacob Kushner and I published the first episode of our new weekly podcast we’ll be doing from Port-au-Prince, Boukannen Dlo. We decided to start the podcast as a platform to tell Haitian stories from our perspective but also as a way, we hope, to give our families and friends a little bit more insight into what daily life is like for us here.

In Haitian Creole, Boukannen Dlo (boo-KAH-nay duh-LO) literally means to roast or to cook water, but it can also be used as a response when someone asks you how or what you’re doing. The interpretation varies depending on which Haitian you ask, but it roughly means either to be doing not much of anything or to be making the most out of what (little) you’ve got.

Our first episode shares the title and subject matter of a recent blog post of mine, “Haitian Politics at the Gym.” Here’s our description:

In our first episode, we introduce readers to Club Abner, a gym in our neighborhood where we go a few times a week to pump iron—and lift whatever other heavy scrap metal the owner can find to serve as weights. The guys at the gym love to talk politics, and the topic du jour is whether Haiti’s president, Michel Martelly, holds American citizenship—which would disqualify him from serving as president. The conversations highlight how important patriotism and sovereignty are to our fellow gym-goers and offer insight about why the debate over Martelly’s nationality continues to captivate Haitians and their elected leaders.

Listent to the episode here, where you can also (soon if not yet) subscribe via iTunes or subscribe to receive updates via email.

Nicholas Kristof is not impressed by your “KONY 2012” criticisms

Invisible Children’s P.R. campaign for it’s intervention-mongering, propaganda-ridden “KONY 2012” video really has been amazing. In addition to the roughly 100 million views the video has garnered, the group was able to “goad” Nicholas Kristof into dedicating his New York Times column today to Joseph Kony.

“If I were a Congolese villager,” Kristof writes, “I would welcome these uncertain efforts [about whether the I.C. campaign will make a difference] over the sneering scorn of do-nothing armchair cynics.”

Kristof doesn’t specify whether he counts angered and offended Ugandans who threw rocks at the screen from their seats at a screening of the film in Lira among the “do-nothing armchair cynics.”

Some of Kristof’s other issues with the backlash to “KONY 2012”:

When a warlord continues to kill and torture across a swath of Congo and Central African Republic, that’s not a white man’s burden. It’s a human burden.

To me, it feels repugnant to suggest that compassion should stop at a national boundary or color line. A common humanity binds us all, whatever the color of our skin—or passport.

Are a bunch of Western twenty-somethings really caught up in the “KONY 2012” mania because of compassion they feel for the LRA’s victims? Or because they watched a soul-crushing emotional video with a heart-wrenching soundtrack and then went back to updating their Facebook statuses?

Kristof:

Yes, the video glosses over details, but it has left the American public more informed. Last year, Rush Limbaugh defended the Lord’s Resistance Army because it sounded godly.

More informed, yes. Better informed, hardly. David Rieff summed up potential dangers of oversimplification and misinformation re the LRA’s activities:

In a film that treated its audience as adults … Russell would have had to pause to ask himself hard questions, such as: What might be the risks to Uganda’s civilian population if the U.S. government were to give aid and more advanced military equipment to the Ugandan military to track Kony, thus strengthening a regime in Kampala whose hands are anything but clean—as anyone who was in eastern Congo during the Ugandan intervention there in the late-1990s can attest? And as they say in the military, in war, the enemy gets a vote. At present—though one would never know this from Russell’s film—Kony and the LRA are a largely spent force. But if a new campaign against them were launched, what would their response be; what crimes would they commit? Russell can talk all he likes about “arresting” Kony, but what Invisible Children is actually calling for is “war”—without acknowledging that in war there are invariably unintended consequences.

Perhaps the attention that “KONY 2012” has drawn from viewers and Kristof and policymakers will lead the capture or death of Kony, despite failed attempts over previous decades to root out him and his jungle insurgency, despite the years and resources it took to kill world-famous Osama bin Laden, and despite the fact that the LRA poses no credible threat to U.S. interests at home or abroad.

But to call the video’s critics “do-nothing armchair cyincs” is as oversimplified and naive as the film itself.

The hollow bipartisanship and interventionist propaganda of “KONY 2012”

I have a piece up at Reason about the intervention-mongering of “KONY 2012” and its false narrative of bipartisanship. Just because “one thing we can all agree on” is that Kony is a scourge of humanity hardly means that everyone agrees on what the U.S. government or military should do about him, if anything (or, more accurately, any more than we already are doing).

An excerpt from the piece:

Invisible Children’s call for international intervention to bring Kony to justice clearly aligns with the decision of the Obama administration last October to send about 100 “advisors,” mostly special forces troops, to Central Africa to help track down the LRA. U.S. troops are now stationed in Uganda, Congo, South Sudan and Central African Republic.

Back in October, when the United States sent advisors, Sen. John McCain denounced the LRA as “one of the most horrible groups to ever inhabit the earth” but also provided words of warning about the intervention: “I remember Somalia. I remember Lebanon. We’ve got to be very careful about how we engage. This slippery slope thing could happen there.”

McCain has a point, as interventions to hunt down the LRA, like the one led by the Pentagon in 2008, have backfired horribly. Kony put children on the front lines; they wound up as casualties while he escaped unscathed. (Notably, however, McCain wants an intervention in Syria, a country backed by Russia, China, and Iran, where there is a much greater likelihood of seeing the United States drawn into a larger shooting war than there is in Central Africa.) A U.S. military offensive, even for a benign-sounding goal like “the arrest of Joseph Kony so that he can be tried by the International Criminal Court,” is redundant. There are already four national militaries engaging Kony’s forces. And there is no shortage of well-armed governments in the region that can lend a hand if apprehending Kony is truly an important international goal.

John McCain suddenly becoming a dove when it comes to boots on the ground abroad? Sure sounds bipartisan to me.

Read the entire thing here.

Haitian politics at the gym

I went to work out this morning, my second visit to a gym in the neighborhood. It’s a concrete slab ringed with a fence made out of corrugated tin and has a basic weight lifting setup—bench press, squat rack, dumbells, pulley machine, etc. A lot of the weights that you stack on the pulley machine to do lat pulldowns or tricep extensions or whatever are either flywheels from old clutches or gears of some sort or another.

Besides me and my American friend who’s been going there for months, it’s a bunch of jacked Haitian guys who flit around from one machine to another, holding padding for their hands fashioned from foam mattresses.

On my first visit, they talked mostly about politics—Preval this, Martelly that, etc. This is par for the course according to my friend.

Today, they were naturally discussing President Martelly’s press conference yesterday afternoon. Martelly told Haitians, most of whom were listening over the radio, that he was not and never had been an American citizen. His laugh line was when he said he was “natif natal, tèt kale”—native born, bald. Martelly has a shaved head, and tèt kale is his moniker and branding for his political party.

Dual nationality disqualifies Haitians from serving in certain senior government posts, including president. A handful of opposition senators have accused Martelly of holding dual (and possibly tri) citizenship over the past few months and opened an inquiry into the matter, despite the fact that Martelly was vetted by the electoral commission before the election.

Yesterday afternoon, the streets and Twitter were full of rumors about seemingly anything and everything—Martelly would resign, parliament would be dissolved, shit would hit the fan generally, etc. At about two-o’clock, people started saying that Martelly would give a press conference at 4:00 p.m. People started clearing the streets when the rumors started—kids went home from school, shops everywhere closed up and people went home or stayed inside to wait out whatever it was that was going to happen. Things were “cho“—hot.

One of the interesting points made this morning by the guys at the gym was about how quickly information spreads here. They were saying that for a country with shitty and scarce internet connections and no electricity for much of the day most every day, it’s pretty remarkable how quickly people become informed—whether with accurate information or speculation or misinformation deliberately disseminated.

They also lamented how, in their estimation, local journalists report and write about things before they really know what’s going on, pointing out that the press is supposed to be a sort of fourth branch of government and hold the others accountable. Pretty good political conversation while tossing around old flywheels.

Justice and impunity in Haiti, Baby Doc Duvalier et al.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—Yesterday, Port-au-Prince daily Le Nouvelliste published an open letter to Haitian President Michel Martelly urging against the “banalisation” of the father-son Duvalier dictatorship that ruled the country for nearly two decades. Twenty-three organizations and individuals, including human rights groups, journalist Michèle Montas, and filmmaker Raoul Peck, signed the letter urging the current administration not to trivialize the accusations against the former government.

The Washington Post recently reported that the latter Duvalier, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc,” is “thriving”—staying at his residence in the hills about Port-au-Prince, dining in nice Petionville restaurants, appearing at the government’s recent earthquake memorial ceremony that President Martelly and former U.S. President Clinton also attended—even as he’s being investigated by authorities for crimes against humanity committed during his reign. The investigating judge recently announced that by the end of January, he will rule on whether the case goes to trial.

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Brief impressions from Port-au-Prince on recovery, President Martelly

A great deal of rubble has been cleared since I was last here, which was just six months after the earthquake. While there are still many collapsed buildings and houses, I’ve yet to come across one street or even alley that’s impeded by rubble. It seems like I spent much of my last trip riding around corners that revealed 10-foot mounds of debris, then backtracking to find detours.

Despite all the news about slow recovery—about half-a-million people still live in tents, only about half of the initially pledged $4.6 billion in aid has been spent—many people still have faith in President Martelly, if not in “the Haitian government” as an institution.

Martelly was not a politician when he ran for office—most people would say that he still isn’t, or at least doesn’t yet know how to be, one. But as kompa singer “Sweet Micky,” he had been the most popular entertainer in the country for the past 20 years or so—more popular than even Wyclef, since Martelly was Haiti’s own in a way that internationally-renowned Wyclef couldn’t be. People even dubbed Martelly “prezidan” (or perhaps he proclaimed the nickname himself) years before he actually became Prezidan.

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Who will nudge the nudgers?

When Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler wrote Nudge a few years ago, it was hailed as a innovative work that would have wonderful ramifications for public policy. One reviewer called it “a must-read for anyone who wants to see both our minds and our society working better. It will improve your decisions and it will make the world a better place.”

The authors championed how policymakers and managers could use insights from behavioral economics (also known for hundreds of years as psychology) to nudge people into making better choices. People are not always rational, don’t have complete information, and suffer from cognitive biases and lack of willpower. So how can we be expected to make good decisions consistently? I know I shouldn’t have that bacon double cheeseburger, but I’m powerless in the presence of fatty strips of pig meat.

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