United Nations and human rights officials criticized the combined Ugandan-Congolese force for bungling the operation and failing to protect civilians from Kony’s retribution. U.S. military officials defended their advisory role afterward, blaming Kony’s group for the atrocities.
Obama notified Congress of the deployment Friday as part of his legal obligation under the War Powers Act. He signed the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act last year, and White House officials have been studying how to support the measure since then.
In his letter to Congress, Obama wrote that the “combat-equipped U.S. forces” will help “regional forces that are working toward the removal of Joseph Kony from the battlefield.” That could mean killing or capturing the warlord.
Since 2008, the U.S. government has provided $40 million to Central African governments to be used against the LRA, as the movement is known.
The troop deployment comes with the consent of President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, who has blamed a lack of special forces and intelligence capability for his nation’s inability to defeat the relatively small LRA.
In his letter, Obama stated that the first troops will be based in Uganda, a U.S. ally in the region. They are primarily Special Operations Forces, Pentagon officials said, although they declined to say which branches of the armed services they were drawn from or to provide details about the kinds of training they will provide.
The officials said the U.S. military trainers will eventually work side by side with Ugandan and other African forces in the region as they pursue the Lord’s Resistance Army, but will stop short of engaging in direct combat, unless it is in self-defense. Obama wrote that future U.S. forces also will deploy in South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In an essay published last year in Foreign Policy magazine, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, argued that deploying U.S. troops to help arrest Kony “would reaffirm that mass murder cannot be committed with impunity.”
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