Have fun storming the castle:
South Africa's air force showed off its military might on Thursday with precision bombing and helicopter gunships firing fusillades of rockets just days ahead of an unprecedented "peace enforcing" deployment to eastern Congo.
Two months after 13 troops were killed by rebels in Central African Republic in South Africa's heaviest military losses since the end of apartheid, Pretoria is gearing up to send 1,000 soldiers to Democratic Republic of Congo's volatile border with Rwanda and Uganda.
The force, supported by similar-sized detachments from Malawi and Tanzania, was approved by the United Nations in March for "targeted security operations" as part of U.N. peacekeeping in the region. Its mission is to neutralize rebel groups, including the well-armed M23 rebel movement and other militias.
A thousand troops in a huge territory (I won't dignify the place by calling it a "country") with a large population is a drop in the bucket no matter how good they are at firing fusillades of whup ass. And the international community, so called, cares about the Democratic Republic of Congo only enough to want to keep the massacres down to a low roar insufficient to justify interrupting routine coverage of trials of hot female murderers or spikes in shark attacks.
As an aside, given the state of South Africa's armed forces, if those 1,000 troops are as good as the article implies, they are the only South African troops who are that good.
Anyway, despite the situation, South Africa took that job. Good luck with that. Thank you, of course. But good luck would be more useful. And my personal thanks might be the peak of appreciation from the international community.
