Before I get to why I think it is a mistake, there are a few good things to say about the decision to send 100 U.S. military advisors to Uganda to assist in combating the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). According to the letter the White House sent Congress, the advisors will have no combat role. The LRA is a monstrous organization, and there is nothing good to say about it. Paul Pillar makes an important point when he writes, “The LRA is a destroyer of order, not a provider of it.” Unlike most other interventions of the last two decades, a successful effort against the LRA might make several countries in central Africa more stable than they were before, and the U.S. is providing assistance to governments that have requested it. The usual concerns about meddling in the affairs of other states, ignoring their sovereignty, fueling regional instability, and trampling on international law do not seem to apply here.

The first and most important objection to this deployment is that it has absolutely nothing to do with American security. Contrary to the letter Obama sent to Congress, there is no reason to believe that the deployment “furthers U.S. national security interests.” I suppose the good news is that it does not obviously harm them. One can refer to combating the LRA as furthering U.S. national security interests only by expanding the definition of those interests until it ceases to mean anything. Technically, there is authorizing legislation from Congress. The bill in question was passed by unanimous consent and a voice vote, presumably because no one ever contemplated the possibility that it would ever lead to anything, so it’s not as if most members of Congress gave any thought to this measure when it passed. It is something of an exaggeration to say that the authorizing measure received Congressional approval. One of the main allied governments that the U.S. is assisting is the authoritarian government under Yoweri Museveni, whose government was partly responsible for plunging the Congo into catastrophic war from which it is still recovering. There is something more than a little perverse in aiding Museveni’s government in suppressing its enemies in the name of humanitarianism and regional stability when Museveni and his proxies have inflicted as much or more suffering on the people of the Congo and have done more to destabilize the region than the LRA ever has.

Peter Pham (via Joyner) makes the case for the deployment on strategic grounds as well, and here the case gets much weaker. Pham writes:

Third, the mission to reinforce the African militaries’ foreign internal defense capabilities in the face of a threat like the LRA goes to the raison d’être of AFRICOM, which has the mission to advance the “national security interests of the United States by strengthening the defense capabilities of African states and regional organizations…to provide a security environment conducive to good governance and development.” It also underscores—pace Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s off-the-cuff remark in Congressional testimony just last Thursday, that should automatic spending cuts be forced on the Pentagon by the budget impasse, Africa would be one of the areas where the cuts would come—the value of AFRICOM’s engagements across the continent as modest investments in terms of personnel, skills, and equipment which can reap large dividends and that, even in the current lean times, funds need to be found to maintain the readiness of America’s armed forces to carry out such missions.

This helps explain why reducing military spending is so difficult. Even when it comes to parts of the world that everyone acknowledges have little or nothing to do with U.S. security, “funds need to be found.” Funds always need to be found, don’t they? This mission doesn’t underscore the “value of AFRICOM’s engagements.” It is an effort to justify a significant U.S. role in Africa at a time when the U.S. cannot afford taking on problems there. If reinforcing African militaries’ capabilities is a major part of the raison d’etre of AFRICOM, the question isn’t whether this particular mission makes sense, but whether there is any reason for AFRICOM to exist. Instead of allies taking a greater share of the burden for regional security, the U.S. in this case is taking up some of the burden that allied governments should already be bearing on their own. Current “lean times” require that the government become better at setting priorities and making use of the resources that we have. If reducing U.S. involvement in Africa is part of what reduced military spending means, that requires the U.S. to take on fewer missions in Africa rather than adding on new ones.