The New Makers of Modern Strategy, page 144
31. Michelle Nichols, “North Korea Took $2 Billion in Cyberattacks to Fund Weapons Program: U.N. Report,” Reuters, August 5, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-cyber-un/north-korea-took-2-billion-in-cyberattacks-to-fund-weapons-program-u-n-report-idUSKCN1UV1ZX.
32. Central Intelligence Agency, “Real GDP Per Capita,” The World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/real-gdp-per-capita/country-comparison, accessed December 8, 2021.
CHAPTER 42
Strategies of Persistent Conflict
KABILA AND THE CONGO WARS
Jason K. Stearns
Wars are fought to be won. This seems to be a truth supported by popular culture and military history alike. Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that the objective of war is “the compulsory submission of the enemy to our will” finds expression in the strategies of most modern militaries.
But what if some wars are fought not to be won but as a means of governing, as an end in themselves? What if the parties fight each other on the battlefield, but are also locked in a sort of perverse symbiosis, in which none of them wants the war to end? This has increasingly become the case in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), as well as in other weak states. In these places, the political costs of conflict for the government are low; waging war becomes both a lifestyle and a fundamental tool of political survival, providing a means of managing dissent and doling out patronage.
In some ways this mode of violence resembles what Mary Kaldor famously, and controversially, has described as “new wars.”1 The lines between organized crime and armed groups are blurred, and financing for conflict has become transnational, spanning narcotics, diaspora remittances, and various forms of smuggling. There are few large, pitched battles, but the conflict is no less deadly for the local population. Most refugee and internally displaced people globally are arguably victims of this kind of warfare. In Colombia, the DRC, Myanmar, Syria, and other countries, much of the fighting is fragmented, with small irregular forces pitted against a weak state.
Many of these conflicts reveal a striking symbiosis between the government and its armed opponents. In all these cases, rebellion involves insurgents at the periphery interacting with political elites at the center of the state apparatus in a form of violent equilibrium.
Naturally, this understanding of war affects how we understand military strategy. It displaces the objective of fighting from victory on the battlefield—a definitive and achievable goal—to the management of political ambitions between different factions at the center of the state, more of a process than a finite solution. As such, it lies at the crossroads of the political, economic, and military spheres; conflict for belligerents is a means of governance, not a path to victory. In addition, it decenters and complicates agency. If conflict is systemic, exceeding the intentions of any of its participants, then military strategy is no longer something that is expressed in official documents and debated in war rooms; rather, there can be multiple, competing strategies developed in private by different factions of government and never expressed officially. The conflict in the DRC from 1996 until 2021 illustrates these dynamics, while also giving us insight into broader trends on the African continent.
I
The initial full-fledged war in the Congo (then Zaïre), which broke out around September 1996, followed the Clausewitzian model of trying to defeat the enemy and conquer territory. Three main factors set the stage for the war: a decrepit state that had been run into the ground over thirty-one years of clientelist rule by Mobutu Sese Seko; local power struggles in the eastern Congo that crystallized around notions over who had a right to Congolese citizenship; and regional tensions fueled by the presence of rebels from Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda on Congolese soil.
It was these rebel rear bases, especially those of the troops that had perpetrated the Rwandan genocide two years earlier, that triggered the First Congo War. Rwandan and Ugandan governments backed a small Congolese rebellion, the Alliance des forces démocratiques pour la libération du Congo-Zaire (AFDL), led by the mercurial Laurent-Désiré Kabila. While it is unclear whether this rebellion and its backers initially intended to overthrow Mobutu, this quickly became their goal after they broke up the rebel rear bases in the east. Garnering additional support from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Angola, and Tanzania, they toppled Mobutu in May 1997, putting Kabila in power.
Conquest of state power was initially also the goal during the Second Congo War, which lasted from August 1998 until June 2003. Triggered by a falling-out between President Kabila and his former Rwandan and Ugandan allies, by 1999 the war had ended up in a stalemate that divided the country into several main parts: the west controlled by Kabila’s government and backed by Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia; the east controlled by the Rwandan army and its rebel ally, the Rassemblement congolais pour la démocratie (RCD); and the north and northeast controlled by the Ugandan army and a variety of allied rebel groups, the most important of which was the Mouvement de libération du Congo (MLC).
It was during this stalemate of the second war that key dynamics began to transform the conflict and the strategies employed by most belligerents, from ones that saw conflict as a means to an end to treating conflict as an end in itself. The fighting shifted away from the frontlines towards remote, rural insurgency and counterinsurgency, particularly in the eastern Kivu and Ituri regions. The assorted belligerents became deeply invested in various forms of economic activity, a blend of racketeering, extortion, and taxation. This, combined with the rampant abuses of the local population, led to them losing most of their popular legitimacy.
Several shifts—military, political, and economic—are key in explaining why this was the case. The particular military situation played an important role. By the time the Lusaka cease-fire was signed in July 1999, it was clear that an outright military victory would be difficult, probably illusory, for all sides. The Rwandan and Ugandan advances had been stymied by the intervention of the much larger Angolan and Zimbabwean armies, who did not want to see Kinshasa fall to their regional rivals, but also did not want to suffer the casualties and financial losses that a conquest of the east would entail. Meanwhile, Western donors, upon whom the Ugandans and Rwandans were especially dependent, insisted upon a cease-fire. Following the blueprint for United Nations peace processes at the time, diplomats pushed for peace talks, which they hoped would be followed by a power-sharing agreement and the reunification of the country. A United Nations peacekeeping mission was deployed in 1999, initially to monitor the cease-fire and then eventually to broker peace talks, further demobilization, monitor human rights, facilitate humanitarian aid, and protect civilians in imminent danger.
This blueprint for peace processes in the post-Cold War world has influenced the trajectories of conflicts, shaping belligerents’ expectations. Some scholars go so far to argue that the penchant for power-sharing agreements by Western donors has inadvertently incentivized rebellions by making them an acceptable path to power and lowering the cost of insurgency.2 While this finding is contested, it is clear that international norms against protracted military conflict have made it more difficult to achieve military victories. This is in part due to the influence of Western donors in the global periphery, where their aid funding and political support constitute important sources of support for governments.
At the same time, important economic and social developments were taking place in the Congo, shaping the contours of the conflict. By the early 1990s, the Zairian state monopoly on mining had been broken as parastatal companies crumbled and artisanal mining began to flourish. This was encouraged by structural adjustment packages drafted by international financial institutions, as well as by the search for foreign investment by a cash-strapped and collapsing Zairian government. The growth of artisanal mining lured large numbers of young migrant men to mining areas across the eastern Congo. New trade networks were established, linking cities such as Guangzhou and Dubai with Goma, Butembo, and Bukavu in the eastern Congo. First gold, then bulkier minerals such as tin and tantalum were shipped out of the region, while electronics, motor vehicles, and construction materials flowed in. When armed groups proliferated following the AFDL invasion, this burgeoning private sector quickly became a source of revenue through smuggling, protection rackets, and illegal taxation.
At the same time, the agricultural sector, where seventy percent of Congolese made a living, mostly in subsistence farming, faced a downturn.3 The conflict-ridden east had previously been the country’s breadbasket, exporting an array of agricultural products—beef, beans, potatoes, palm oil, and sugar—to the rest of the country and the region. The war made large-scale agricultural production almost impossible, cutting off trade routes to the rest of the country, pillaging livestock, and preventing investment. The economy became increasingly focused on the mining sector, which in turn became extremely militarized. Meanwhile, employment opportunities shrank for the youth, making armed insurgency more attractive.
This war economy was the most pronounced in the Kivus region, occupied largely by the Rwandan army and its allies, who oriented much of their military and administrative apparatus towards extraction. Traders had to give a portion of their profits to the Rwandan ruling party in exchange for access to lucrative trade routes and mining sites. Companies created by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, including some operated by the Rwandan Ministry of Defense, had preferential access to mining areas. This sector became particularly lucrative between June 2000 and July 2001, when the world market price for tantalum, a derivative of coltan, shot from $10 to $380 per kilo. Some researchers estimate that net profits made by Rwandan companies from coltan alone could have been as high as $150 million during this period, while other researchers estimate total profits from the minerals trade at $250 million per annum throughout the occupation.4 While it is difficult to calculate a precise figure for this kind of clandestine activity, it is clear that for Rwanda, whose entire annual budget was $380 million at this time, such income made its expensive involvement in the Congo possible. President Kagame himself described his government’s involvement in the Congo as “self-sustaining.”5
II
The military stalemate was ended through a United Nations-led peace process that resulted in the formation of a transition government in which all major belligerents, as well as the political opposition and civil society, participated. The transition period lasted from 2003 to 2006 and was, in some ways, extremely successful. It reunited the country, drafted a new constitution, created new security services, and witnessed Congo’s first democratic elections in over forty years.
Joseph Kabila, who had succeeded his father in 2001, emerged victorious, beating several former rebel leaders and political opposition leaders. For a variety of reasons, linked to choices made by the young president—he was just 29 when he ascended to the presidency—as well as systemic factors beyond his control, the younger Kabila presided over what came to amount to a strategy of disorder.
The official war had come to an end, confirmed by the transformation of the United Nations peacekeeping mission into a stabilization mission. And yet, violence persisted and even escalated, confined almost entirely to the provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu, Tanganyika, and Ituri in the eastern Congo. This “post-conflict” period further entrenched conflict dynamics as war-making became a means of survival for political leaders, a source of patronage for military commanders, and a way for local strongmen to bolster their power. At the center of these dynamics was the newly formed Forces armées de la République démocratique du Congo (FARDC), which had been cobbled together out of half a dozen former belligerents. Around 120,000 strong, FARDC was a patchwork of loyalty and patronage networks, and included former rebel and government soldiers with varying degrees of training, education, and experience. Under the terms of the peace deal, senior positions were appointed largely based on political considerations, not competency or merit.
Joseph Kabila was in a tenuous position. He was anxious to ensure the loyalty of the thousands of former rebels who had been integrated into the FARDC and were now based within striking distance of the capital. His predecessor and father, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, had after all been assassinated by a member of his own army in the presidential palace. State reform and stability were much less of a priority than his own personal survival; Kabila’s army commanders and other security officials had a similar order of priorities.
The weakness of Kabila’s own army and state institutions was perhaps the key factor. During the war, Joseph Kabila had relied largely on Angolan and Zimbabwean support on the battlefield and had not been able to forge a cohesive or committed army. Given the dominance of foreign militaries in his security services, he and his father had never been able to—or felt the need to—forge a loyal, competent military or intelligence apparatus. Instead, Kabila’s army was a patchwork of competing patronage networks. Most experienced officers had been former members of Mobutu’s army and had questionable loyalty. The officers who had fought alongside Joseph Kabila during the two wars had little training or cohesion.
These dangers shaped Kabila and his advisors’ approach to the security sector. They concluded that it would be safer to manage a fragmented army in which they could cultivate independent networks of loyal officers, instead of trying to create a politically neutral and meritocratic army. A colonel who was in the general staff corps (état-major général) in Kinshasa at the time remembered:
Our weaknesses today are the result of decisions we took in 2003. The goal then was not to create a strong army but, to a certain extent, the opposite: We were trying to defuse the strength of our former adversaries, to dismantle their networks and prevent them from becoming too strong. That was the goal, not security.6
This tendency was reinforced by events that took place during the transition, in particular a 2004–9 rebellion launched by former RCD officers and backed by the Rwandan government in the east of the country, a botched coup attempt in Kinshasa in 2004 by senior army officers close to Kabila, and fighting in the capital between the army and former-MLC troops in 2006.
The rebellion launched by RCD dissidents, in particular, had long-term consequences. Almost immediately in the wake of the reunification of the country, senior military RCD commanders, led by General Laurent Nkunda and coming mostly from the Tutsi ethnic community, defected and launched a dissidence around the trade hub of Goma, on the eastern edge of the Congo. In contrast to the many smaller insurgencies that were largely restricted to rural backwaters and the confines of a single ethnicity, the Congrès national pour la défense du peuple (CNDP) was able to briefly conquer the major town of Bukavu in 2004, threatened Goma between 2004 and 2008, and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Given its backing by Rwanda, the Congolese government’s archrival in the region—the rebellion was conceived, in part, by Rwandan generals and received sporadic backing from across the border—the CNDP was perceived as an existential threat by the Kinshasa government.
The Congolese government launched a large offensive against the insurgency, sending over ten thousand troops to the east. Yet with only a weak, fledgling army at their disposal, Kabila’s generals decided to employ an array of militia to tie down the CNDP. This decision was both necessary and convenient for senior officers in the army, some of whom had close ties with local militias and were able to earn kickbacks from payments to these groups, as well as from some of the taxes that these groups extorted from traders, miners, and the local population. At the same time, pressures from local elites also fueled the conflict. Local strongmen such as Eugène Serufuli, the governor of North Kivu, saw the CNDP rebellion as a threat to their power base, and threw their weight behind armed groups.
Other unintended consequences of the peace process reinforced this tendency to use weakness and fragmentation as a means of governance, leading to the proliferation of armed groups across the eastern Congo. First, the merging of six different belligerents into the national army created many malcontents, some of whom then started new armed groups. The government failed to provide sufficient opportunities for many of the former combatants that it was merging into the FARDC. Even for a well-functioning and deep-pocketed state this would have been difficult, as tens of thousands of officers had to be kept happy and paid.
During this process, the government prioritized providing positions to those who had the greatest capacité de nuisance (potential to cause damage), as officials put it to me. Those individuals were often officers from remote rural militias, many of whom were called Mai-Mai, who lacked the connections or the required education to obtain good positions. Many of these officers returned to the bush and kept fighting; in some cases, the army supported some of them in operations against the CNDP, reinforcing these centrifugal dynamics.
Elections, which formed the core of the peace process, also inadvertently fed into armed-group politics. Some cynical politicians pushed the issue of citizenship for descendants of Rwandan immigrants into the limelight, using populist diatribes to garner voters’ sympathies. This exacerbated the fears of Rwandophones, a small minority in the eastern Congo, and made it easier for armed groups rooted in those communities to mobilize. For other candidates, armed mobilization was an easy way to curry favor and intimidate opponents. Elections also created losers, some of whom then resorted to violence. With few safeguards to prevent armed groups from stepping into the electoral arena, some candidates—a small but important minority—sought alliances with various armed groups to bolster their own statures and intimidate opponents.
These dynamics set the security services on a trajectory that became difficult to escape. The weak and disorganized army and the proliferation of armed groups were the products of a path-dependent evolution; it was not a predetermined outcome. For many entrepreneurs of violence and their backers in the eastern Congo, the end of violence would imply an end to the way they have made a living over the past decades. For political elites and military commanders in Kinshasa, bringing an end to conflict would require cracking down on entrenched patronage networks in the security services, which would constitute a dangerous realignment of interests.
