The Foreign Service Journal, April 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2023 35 and then fighters under the Wagner brand. Wagner was easy to underestimate initially; its first fighters were lightly equipped and short on professionalism. For Touadéra, however, Wagner’s willingness to deploy directly with the FACA gave him the military relevance the rest of the international community had denied him. And for that, he was willing to overlook Wagner’s disdain for civilian protection rules, its steadily increasing demands for payment (mainly in the form of lucrative mining concessions), its growing reach inside his own government (a Russian “national security adviser” sits in the presi- dency), and its pervasive social media disinformation (targeting the French for especially ugly attacks). All of this caught the rest of the international community flat- footed. The Russians may have been brazen, brutal, and menda- cious, but they were also politically nimble. Largely self-funded (both directly by the Central African government and indirectly by their local “businesses”), the Russians could be extremely opportunistic. Moreover, their hybrid official/commercial model also allowed the Russian government to shrug off Wagner’s most egregious actions as just a private business affair. Burdened by ponderous, headquarters-driven decision- making and unprepared for this kind of political competition, the rest of the international community was simply outmatched. Even the French, despite deep ties to most of the Central African elite, found themselves outmaneuvered. After struggling for months to fight back against Russian disinformation, and finding their complaints ignored by Touadéra, the French finally just gave up. By the end of 2021, France—the one external actor with the means to challenge Russia politically—had begun to pull out of CAR. A Bleak Future Today we are a long way from the hopeful days of MINUSCA’s inception. A considerably strengthened Wagner has made the Touadéra government a force to be reckoned with in the country- side, but the armed groups still flourish. Indeed, a loose coalition of armed groups that includes the former president, François Bozizé, even talks provocatively of mounting an attack on Bangui itself. In the meantime, most of the population live in a state of low-level but unpredictable violence. At the same time, Touadéra’s relationship with the Russians has proved a Faustian bargain, and his margin for acting independently is increasingly thin. For the moment, his presence is sufficiently useful to them that they are heavily supporting a constitutional amendment to allow him a third term. However, the Russians have so cleverly entrenched themselves among the Bangui political elite that they could just as easily arrange for him to be deposed. The international community, therefore, now finds itself in a quandary: Prospects for peace are dismal, and its relationship with the government has been largely supplanted by Russia. In response, the international community has cut off much-needed budgetary support. Yet just “pulling out” security and humani- tarian presence would likely unleash even more instability and greater violence. What the international community should do now in CAR and what an effective stabilization policy generally would look like are complex questions that do not have simple answers. Certainly, the problemwas not and is not a lack of courage and commitment at the level of individual members of the various multilateral and bilateral missions in CAR. I will always remain in awe of the many who each day coolly calculate the risks before them, and then set off to work. The “International Community” as an Actor But as an actor, the “international community” has some dis- tinct disadvantages, especially when it comes to the need to devise and implement policies based on the integration of economic, military, and political tools. In the CAR effort, the international community was hardly united, either in terms of grand strategy or day-to-day operations. There were certainly regular coordination meetings, but coordination is not integration. Each institution, each government, and each subgovernmental agency pursued independent strategies, with separate funding streams, based heavily on internal bureaucratic constraints. A case in point is the U.S. government’s own inconsistent atten- tion to the crisis. Given the U.S. role as lead contributor to U.N. peacekeeping and the international financial institutions, as well as its dominant presence in humanitarian funding, the American government was the single-largest funder to stabilization efforts in CAR, at least indirectly. (Indeed, the American taxpayers’ spending on CAR probably added up to $2-3 billion over the decade, but it is hard to know for sure because it is nobody’s job to do themath.) Without enforcing a cessation of hostilities at the local “granular” level, time was never going to be on the side of peace.