Quote Originally Posted by M-A Lagrange View Post
Stan, even Tom would have found this a little inappropriate. What’s going on?
I am sincerely not sure that increasing DRC governement military capacities will ease any of the SSR and JSR or even bring any peace in the Great Lakes.
The idea that dictatorship is better than weak democracy is just a stupid one. Look at the results in Ivory Coast and Senegal!
Hey M-A,
This is something that the USG doesn't seem to comprehend well. When we teach African military, there's no telling what they will do with that training. In this case, the soldiers there are for:

The U.S. military, Ham said, has focused on facilitating intelligence, and in a State Department-led effort, U.S. personnel trained a battalion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s armed forces. Ham said the U.S. government was looking to increase support to the counter-LRA efforts by increasing the number of military advisors and trainers and training another battalion.
What should happen, is the Department of State (via the Ambassador) turns off the training. That, is a little easier said than done.

This is one of the things Tom and I had to constantly deal with - our image and the right thing to do. But, communicating problems is not always good for one's career path