Tentative Guidelines for building partner armies post conflict

[Stan]

Hey Marc !

Hey Stan,

What can I say? I've been reading Tom Kratman's latest !

ps. Stan, wish you had been in Ottawa a couple of weeks back, Absolute kick-ass concert; Victoria 1605 Requiem, Allegri's Miserie mei, plus other "stuff". You would have loved it.

I hate you - As I pine away with a balmy 5 degrees of Estonian Spring listening to renditions of the Grateful Dead on the radio Sounds like something I would have indeed enjoyed ! Seems Tom Kratman (and Odom) has disappeared and no doubt on another journey.

Hey Colin,

Stan - voice with multiple years of rubber-hits-the-road experience in a very bad place welcome. My time in Kinshasa and Kisangani was limited to two weeks. Would like to go back some time. Question, for the East, is French or Swahili better? And where would be best, if Swahili is best, to learn Swahili?

As you already have French under your belt (and would have to be retaught Belgian French to comprehend the Zairois (and truly infuriate the real French) ), I would recommend Lingala over Swahili regardless of the region. Even in Rwanda I got by with Lingala. I learned Lingala mostly by default working with the military in Gbadolite and Kinshasa, but it came in handy all over. You may have also noticed that even with Lingala or Swahili, they still use much of the French language merely to borrow words especially during bartering. I know some humanitarian deminers that found they were lost with just French and began learning Lingala too.

BTW, a General in DIA call Zaire "one of the most inhospitable places on earth". I often referred to the country in message traffic as it was always known --- The Heart of Darkness.

I have read through the thread, but have we not missed those countries where post-conflict and post-intervention there has been a long term relationship between the West (generally) and the national military?

David's got a good point. We have some post-intervention success stories that rarely make the press. Makes me wonder what recipe we used then, that obviously aren't working now.