Well That Seems Like A Bad Idea
I’ve been waffling back and forth on whether the US or some coalition of powers should intervene in Darfur, but this Washington Post report detailing the level of anarchy gripping the region has almost turned me into a decisive opponent of intervention:
While the government and militia attacks on straw-hut villages that defined the earlier years of the conflict continue, Darfur is now home to semi-organized crime and warlordism, with marijuana-smoking rebels, disaffected government militias and anyone else with an AK-47 taking part, according to U.N. officials.
The situation is a symptom of how fragmented the conflict has become. There were two rebel groups, but now there are dozens, some of which include Arab militiamen who once sided with the government. The founding father of the rebellion lives in Paris. And the struggle in the desert these days is less about liberating oppressed Darfurians than about acquiring the means to power: money, land, trucks.
Though there are some swaths of calm in Darfur, fighting among rebels and among Arab tribes has uprooted more than 70,000 people this year, compared with about 60,000 displaced by government attacks on villages, according to U.N. figures.
Although powerful countries such as China, which is heavily invested in Sudan’s oil, have been criticized by human rights activists for not doing more to pressure the Sudanese government to end the conflict, some analysts say the breakdown of command lines on all sides has made the situation increasingly impervious to outside influence.
It’s not at all clear that there’s a specific group that an outside force to protect, and even more importantly, a specific group to go after. Sure, we could try to beef up the AU force and protect refugees, but beyond that, it seems just about impossible to actually identify the bad guys and kill them/drive them away from the innocent people they are trying to kill. So maybe I’m not against all forms of intervention, but I’m certainly against any type of offensive intervention that tries to proactively identify the bad guys and kill them. Also, regime change in Khartoum is a horrible, horrible idea. The place seems more and more like Somalia Redux.
