opinion
By Col Shaban Bantariza
At university, we were taught in the political science classes that war is “politics by other means”.
We believed this as students until we grew up to find ourselves confronted with some wars that didn’t seem to clearly reflect the political content in them. The Allied Democratic Forces of Jamil Mukulu and the Lord’s Resistance Army of Joseph Kony are homegrown examples of wars whose political purposes and motives were hazy at best and nonexistent at worst.
The reason why such wars had no clear political motives was lack of a professed motive, a political programme or political demands. And even some of their ‘advocates’ hid their clear connection and purpose, especially because the means and methods used to recruit combatants and mobilize support were anti-people and unpopular.
We all know that the LRA and ADF had common external backers as individuals or political entities. But how could anyone pronounce themselves as a backer to an organization like LRA which, after failing to get local support, chose to recruit by force, including maiming people, abducting children? The ADF, too, threw bombs in taxi parks or planted them in public transport vehicles.
The LRA and ADF, however, were right not to have a political programme and political demands put to the government of Uganda. Reason: these were proxy war machines for an external force that had political and ideological contradictions with the Ugandan government and people.
In politics, we also know that there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies; there are only permanent interests. So, I won’t mention the external founders and backers of ADF and LRA, since we have now mended fences and ceased hostility between us as polities.
But if we go back to our earlier definition of an ideology (in an earlier article) as being a “political philosophy (plus) an action programme”, the LRA and ADF backers had the philosophy and action programme, and the fighting groups were the backers’ strategy and tactics. The backers’ action programme was causing regime change in Uganda.
No wonder, therefore, it was difficult to identify the cause of the fighting groups because they did not share the ideological intent with their backers. The rest of the supporters within Uganda and outside were political opportunists using lame excuses of “marginalization” of northern Uganda, some indiscipline from NRA/UPDF soldiers, the failed Nairobi peace talks between Gen Tito Lutwa and NRA’s Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, blah blah.
But those of us who were involved in the fight to roll back these retrogressive anti-people fighting machines knew that there was an ideological cause foreign to Uganda’s interests. LRA was just a northern front and ADF a western one meant to overstretch and overwhelm Uganda’s army, bring down the state, and the foreign ideologically-based cause make Uganda a springboard of what is now referred to as terrorism, which is again an ideological war, at the global level this time.
Of course someone out there will attack me for saying that terrorism is an ‘ideological war’! But wait. Terrorists have a philosophy, although demented because it uses indiscriminate violence as its strategy to achieve its intended mission. But demented as it may be, an ideology is like a religion; that is why it creates cadres, who, when they internalize it, can use it in any situation, convincingly-interpret its perceived benefits to individuals and groups, and that is how it becomes easy to use it to recruit members, supporters and sympahasisers across the board.
Communism, as an ideology, recruited across the world. Liberal capitalist democracy has cadres willing to kill or die for it worldwide; colonialism and imperialism caused the first and second world wars!
Indeed, capitalist liberal democracy had to infiltrate communism, develop cadres within the system, hence undermine it from within and from without, till the 1990s when the system, which had its systemic weaknesses, was brought down under the guise of ‘perestroika and glasnost’; meaning restructuring and democracy.
Is there anybody who thinks that the cold war was not an ideological war, just like the so-called Islamic State terrorism in the Middle East, and now in North Africa? Infiltrating into Eastern Africa can take us back to school.
You can’t fight an ideological war without ideological cadres and fighters. If Christian Vs Islamic crusades of our history were not ideological wars, based on theological philosophies with intent to convert or proselytize as many Christian and Muslim cadres and fighters for Allah and Christ as possible, then someone may call those wars fantasy films of Hollywood and Nollywood!
The world today is united against terrorism as a common enemy; but unless and until we understand their demented ideology and fighting doctrine, and design appropriate ‘ideological weaponry’ (cadreship), this war will take longer to defeat with mere superiority of arms!
The author is the deputy executive director of the Uganda Media Centre.
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