The Forever War Goes to Congo

There is no pretense that this has anything to do with U.S. security.

The forever war has now apparently expanded to the Congo:

US special operations forces have arrived in the east of the DR Congo to help in the fight against a feared jihadist militia enjoying "sanctuary" in the region's nature parks, US and Congolese sources said Wednesday.

The fight is against an insurgent group called the Allied Democratic Forces. One of the group’s factions has supposedly aligned itself with the Islamic State, and it is on this extremely shaky basis that the U.S. is sending troops to help fight them. Originally an Ugandan insurgent group committed to overthrowing the government in Kampala, it has carried out a number of deadly attacks in the DRC in the last decade. The group was added to the State Department’s foreign terrorist organization (FTO) list in March of this year under the designation of ISIS-DRC. As Jared Thompson noted in an analysis piece last month, “[State] did not provide extensive detail on the nature of the relationship between the ADF and the Islamic State.” There is no question that it is a brutal group that has killed many civilians, like many other armed groups that have operated in eastern Congo over the last twenty-plus years, but why are any U.S. forces involved in fighting them?

There is no pretense that this has anything to do with U.S. security. U.S. troops are being sent on a mission that Congress never approved to fight in a country against a group that cannot possibly threaten the United States as a favor to a government that we are not obliged to defend. The nature of the connection between this group and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is unclear. Thompson writes:

A June 2021 report from the UN Group of Experts on the DRC, meanwhile, could not substantiate “direct support or command and control of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” with respect to the ADF.

Daniel Fahey, the coordinator of the Group of Experts, and Judith Verweijen summarized the evidence surrounding the connection between the ADF and ISIS in piece for The Washington Post last year:

The Congolese army’s ongoing offensive against ADF has failed to turn up any documents, testimony or items that substantiate an organizational connection to the Islamic State.

It seems that ISIS claims credit for ADF attacks, but it is not at all clear that they actually have anything to do with those attacks beyond using them for propaganda purposes. Fahey and Verweijen suggest that some analysts and researchers have amplified the propaganda claims by taking the connection between the two at face value. Thompson also notes that “states like Uganda have previously overstated the ADF’s relationship with transnational Salafi-jihadist networks like al Qaeda in order to receive counterterrorism assistance and justify a militarized posture,” so this may be a case where the local government, in this case the DRC, is exaggerating the group’s connection with ISIS to gain U.S. military support. Thompson warns that “overemphasizing the ADF’s relationship to the Islamic State could be appropriated to justify security responses to the insurgency that exacerbate the conflict and facilitate human rights abuses.” This seems to be a good example of how local armed groups are “linked” to better-known terrorist organizations based on the most tenuous of ties, and then that “link” is cited as a reason to take military action against them.

U.S. involvement in this conflict may be on a small scale, but there doesn’t appear to be any good reason why our forces are involved at all. There doesn’t appear to be any legal authorization for this mission, and if the administration is relying on the 2001 AUMF that is one more reason why that authorization needs to be revoked.