Irrational Decisions: Explaining the Failure of the anti-Kabila War of 1998-2003

By: Osita G. Afoaku, Ph.D.
School of Public & Environmental Affairs
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47505
Phone: 812-855-4944 w/812-345-9754 cell
Email: osafoaku@indiana.edu

Fundamentally, the anti-Kabila revolt which began in August 1998 was prompted by the late President Laurent Désiré Kabila’s failure to institute democratic reform in the Congo after his AFDL rebel coalition successfully ousted the Mobutu dictatorship in May 1997 with external military backing from Rwanda and Uganda. Furthermore, the decision by Kabila’s erstwhile AFDL compatriots and regional allies to embark on military invasion against his fledging dictatorship was centered on the assumption that it was feasible to replicate the military success achieved by the AFDL. Sadly, what was expected to be a lightening move to dismantle the Kabila regime turned out to be ‘Africa’s Third World War’ which, in the course of the most brutal five year period in post-colonial African politics, pitted multiple national armies and armed rebel factions on both sides against each other.

Against this backdrop, the main objective of my paper is to use rational choice theory, as a point of departure, to show that the anti-Kabila revolt was anchored on a series of political and military miscalculations which inevitably culminated in failure. Essentially, the decision to embark on war was based on the perception (or misperception) that, like its predecessor, the Kabila regime was politically too isolated and militarily too fragile to survive the combined fire power of the Congo rebels and their regional backers. On the contrary, at the inception of the war in early August 1998, it was evident that a growing segment of the Congolese public was not in the mood to tolerate the use of force as a method of resolving political differences in the country. Furthermore, the perception in and outside the Congo that the anti-Kabila revolt was the brainchild of Rwanda and Uganda, the growing suspicion among the Congolese that both neighboring countries harbored ‘colonial’ designs against their resource-rich country, and especially the fact that the Congo rebels and their regional allies were implicated in gross human rights abuses, helped to turn the tide of domestic and international public opinion against the architects of the 1998 revolt. In conclusion, I hope to point out some lessons in strategic decision-making from the failure of the anti-Kabila war.