Tentative Guidelines for building partner armies post conflict

[marct]

Hey Stan,

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

Leaving that aside (totally unpaid advert, but The Lotus Eaters is worth it!), the idea that we can go in and "fix" a culture is just laughable to me. F&#k it up, yeah, but turn it into something like us? NFW. I just wish that some of my PC colleagues would realize that free will (and free choice) means that people can choose to live as they like rather than how some ideologue supposes that they should.

TTFN

Marc

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.

[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.

[Colin Robinson]

Thanks all.
David, the reason that I haven't been looking at those type of armies is my case restriction for the PhD - basically post 1990 and after UN and other intervention forces. My 14 + 1 case studies are: Zimbabwe 1980 -, Nambia (UNTAG) 1990, Mozambique (ONUMOZ) 1993 -, South Africa (nobody/BMATT), 1994 -, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1, MPRI, 2, Defence Reform Commission etc), 1996-, East Timor (INTERFET) 1999, Sierra Leone (British & UNAMSIL) around 1998-99 -, Afghanistan (OEF) (2002 - ), DR Congo (2003 - ) Iraq (2003 - ), Liberia (UNMIL) (2004-), S Sudan (2005-), Nepal (2006) -, and Kosovo (KFOR) (2008-). The key question is how to provide security for development, with an African bias because Africa is usually under-examined.

Thus places like Korea are not included because they're Cold War and now developed. That does not mean that there are not valuable lessons to draw.

Stan, thanks. But what about Lingala in N Kivu / S Kivu? Still applies? The thing is that if one goes as a English-language teacher / foreign language student, which is one of the things I'm idly considering, Tanzania is much easier and safer to learn Swahili in. Never mind, these possibilities are years away - but good to get views on the options.

[davidbfpo]

Colin,

Thanks for the clarification, which was what I suspected.

How about Rwanda? I am aware that the RPF was Uganda-based and after victory became the new RPA. I know the UK has been involved in SSR there, although without any details.

A long time ago the UK had a small BMATT in Uganda, IIRC after Idi Amin's fall and they may not have stayed for long - due to the lack of security.

What has been the impact on Kenya of a continuing UK military presence since independence? The presence is ostensibly for the training of UK troops and as the US Embassy attack showed there was a UK engineer capability available. I understand there is often an infantry battalion in country all year.

Another aspect is the deployment of 'new' armies in UN / AU peacekeeping, what impact does that have on a national military? Three African countries on your list have participated: Namibia, Zimbabwe and RSA (I include the DRC World War).

Just a few thoughts.

[Dayuhan]

Dayuhan, I hear what you are saying and all too often you are right. But what I mean by advice - and this is the way I practiced it as a civilian USG type, soldier, and free lance researcher - is that my advice to my counterparts was just my best guess as to what would work to achieve their goals. I never claimed to have a monopoly on truth and I always listened to their views. Sometimes their views would come out on top; sometimes mine; most often some amalgam of both brought out by mutually respectful discussion during which there was quite a bit of disagreement.

I agree that's the ideal way to do it... i just feel that our approach often makes that ideal more difficult to attain. The perception that "shared goals" are a precondition to US support creates an incentive for our partners to conceal goals that may not be shared and exaggerate those that are. At the same time, Americans often assume that our goals are universal and of self-evident virtue, and may not perceive that the other party may have divergent goals.

Disagreement, in these cases, is a good thing and one to be encouraged: it means that the goal divergences are out in the open and being discussed, and can likely be managed. If there's no disagreement, either everyone is on exactly the same page and pulling in exactly the same direction (yeah, right) or the goal divergences are not being recognized, which is not so good: they've a way of emerging to bite us on the ass at critical moments.

Of course there are times when there's outright manipulation. Lots of people wistfully remember the good old days (for them) when the word "communist" was the key to the US treasury. Then that stopped working, and all of a sudden here's the word "terrorist".... ka-ching. Of course that's not always the case, but it's something that we need to be alert to, and in general I'd say our people need to be more aware of the reality of divergent goals and the need to address and manage them.

If there's one piece of advice I'd give an adviser-to-be it would be this...

If you see people doing things that make no sense to you, don't assume they're stupid, irrational, or deranged. Assume that there is some factor in the picture that you don't see - because there always is.

A one year tour is simply too short to get a solid grounding in all the situational and personality quirks. Two years would be much better with, generally, return to the same area after going home for "reblueing."

With this I'd agree completely, but would add an additional concern with rapid turnover: Americans are typically comfortable with institutional relationships, but many of the cultures we work with think in more personal terms, and a relationship with one individual may not be inherited by a successor simply because they both represent the same institution. Of course rotation is inevitable, but we need to be more aware that a counterpart may see their relationship as one with an individual, not with the US Government, and this may take time to rebuild.

The key question is how to provide security for development, with an African bias because Africa is usually under-examined.

That of course brings us to the question of what development is, and how to provide it, which is often even thornier than the problem of achieving security! Hopefully you don't have to deal with that one...

[Tom Kratman]

Nah, I'm still around, but if I have nothing to say on a given subject then there's no sense saying it.

Hey Marc !



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,



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.



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.

[Stan]

Hey Tom,

Nah, I'm still around, but if I have nothing to say on a given subject then there's no sense saying it.

Jeez, for someone with nothing to say herein... can't wait for your interest to peak

Then there's always professional help available...

Well, it's all in the coding ! Sometimes, I just cheat and use wordpad....

Stan, thanks. But what about Lingala in N Kivu / S Kivu? Still applies? The thing is that if one goes as a English-language teacher / foreign language student, which is one of the things I'm idly considering, Tanzania is much easier and safer to learn Swahili in. Never mind, these possibilities are years away - but good to get views on the options.

Hi Colin,
I think there's more than 100 examples of Peace Corps workers doing the exact same thing in Kivu. For that matter, my time in Goma and Bukavu went relatively well with Lingala. Let's not forget that much like any trading border, there's little if any language barriers. In the late 80s I traveled to the bitter end of Lake Tanganyika with a bunch of Brits and Lingala worked much better than French (well, if you've ever heard a Brit speak French, you'd be inclined to learn Lingala too ).