President Barack Obama
 has repeatedly said that he is against “boots on the ground” in Iraq, 
robustly ruled out airstrikes, and reluctantly dispatched some 300 
advisers into that war-torn land. As Iraq crisis worsens, the president 
demands a primarily political solution—even as Islamist forces surge to 
the Baghdad suburbs.
In Africa, that same president is, 
fortunately, far more active. Elite U.S. Army units are killing and 
capturing terrorists in North Africa (including the so-called Butcher of
 Benghazi). Hundreds of
 other counter-terrorism trainers are helping African nations (Libya, 
Niger, Mauritania, and Mali) to field commando teams to combat Islamist 
forces in Africa, which have Islamist ideologies nearly 
indistinguishable from the predators devouring Iraq. These new native 
units are vital for beating back the Islamist threat to the region. 
Hundreds of U.S. Special Forces have been sent to hunt the Lord’s 
Resistance Army, a murderous band of militants, in the wilds of Uganda. 
Djibouti, on Africa’s Red Sea coast, remains an active U.S. military 
base and America’s spies and soldiers help fight Islamists in Somalia 
and Kenya. Drones are roaming Nigeria, searching for missing 
schoolgirls. And, of course, the Obama administration’s longest war was 
fought in North Africa, in the skies and streets of Libya.
When military might matters, Obama seems to have one rule for Africa and another for Asia (especially Iraq).
Perhaps
 the most dramatic case of the Obama Administration’s efforts in Africa 
is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The onetime Belgian colony 
(known in the 1970s and 1980s as Zaire) is a failed state, riddled with 
strategic minerals, riven by ethnic factions, and ravaged by a civil war
 that killed, United Nations and human-rights advocates estimate, 
somewhere between 900,000 to 5.4 million Congolese since 1997. Causality
 estimates vary because international observers fear to go into the 
field. Most of the death toll stems from starvation and disease caused 
by driving millions of families from their homes into the malarial 
rainforests. Many others were slain by foreigners with ethnic, 
ideological or monetary motives. (Neighboring nations covet Congo’s vast
 mineral wealth, estimated as high as $24 trillion in diamonds, cobalt, 
copper and gold.) Still more Congolese have been murdered by locals, 
often hired by
 outsiders to commit atrocities. Congo is also the rape capital of the 
world.
Yet in 
Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Obama Administration talks mainly 
about restoring democracy—something it rarely mentions outside Africa. 
The DRC is ruled by a man, Joseph Kabila, who is hinting that he won’t 
leave office when his final constitutional term ends in 2016.
Kabila
 is a one-man summary of what ails Africa. He inherited the presidency 
following the assassination of his father, who himself had seized power 
with blood and chaos. Joseph Kabila recently gave himself another 
five-year term “in elections that were criticized by everyone from the 
European Union to the country’s Roman Catholic bishops,” notes J. Peter 
Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council.
Like
 Africa’s worst, Kabila seems to have stolen aid money—meant for some of the poorest people on Earth—on a gargantuan scale. He
 seems to have amassed some $15 billion over the past decade in offshore
 banks in the British Virgin Islands and elsewhere, according to 
accounts in French and German-language media outlets.  By contrast, Mobutu Sese Seko,
 a dictator who ruled Congo for 32 years, piled up $5 billion. (A 
European court recently let Mobutu’s heirs keep their nest egg, finding 
that the statute of limitations of colossal theft had run out.) Kabila 
controls lucrative offshore drilling and fishing concessions and access 
to some of richest onshore mineral claims in the world.
Like his predecessor, Kabila has turned kleptocracy into a family affair, according to Western expatriates and
 African experts. His brother, Soulemane Kabila, is believed to have diverted some $300 million from the DRC’s treasury.
 Meanwhile, exporters, who are legally entitled to a rebate on the 
value-added tax, say that they have been denied millions in 
refunds—discouraging foreign investors.
Meanwhile,
 Kabila’s brother and sister, both of whom are members of that nation’s 
parliament, apparently own a firm that has been awarded a monopoly 
contract to print all government documents. Congo’s recent switch to a 
high-tech biometric passport makes this government printing monopoly 
even more lucrative. After all, requiring every Congolese with enough 
money to travel to replace their passport certainly adds to the bottom 
line for the only outfit that can print those new passports.
Now
 Kabila seems to want to defy the Congo constitution’s term limits
 and stay in power beyond 2016. President for life. Just like the 
bloodstained men that have ruled Congo since its independence from 
Belgium in 1960.
America’s response has 
been unambiguous. The president’s envoy, former U.S. Senator Russ 
Feingold, said: “Africa doesn’t need strong men, it needs strong 
institutions.” He is right.
Feingold is equally 
direct in calling for military strikes against rebel groups that fail to
 immediately disarm. “If this drags on through the summer, there’s no 
excuse not to take strong action,” he told the New York Times. “People
 involved in genocide, who are included in this group, are not entitled 
to dialogue.” While Feingold is talking about military strikes carried 
out by a
 multi-national military force organized under the United Nations, which
 has been in the DRC for years, it is clear that there is steel in his 
words.
Clearly, Kabila should leave office when his 
term expires. The greatest gift he can bestow on his country is the 
start of a tradition of peaceful and constitutional transfers of power. A
 new history can begin with him.
If not, the U.S. and
 European Union should target his assets. Kabila’s ill-gotten gains 
should not be shielded in his offshore accounts, but seized for the 
people of his ravaged and weary nation—if he fails to leave office when 
his term expires. Bribing would-be dictators, with their own money, to 
leave office would be a refreshing change.
And
 the Obama Administration
 could make a fresh start as well. Upholding American ideals of law and 
order, multi-party democracy and social tolerance—and backing those 
ideals with international and military action—is a policy that could be 
extended far beyond the Congo.
If not, the Obama doctrine dissolves into a contradictory cacophony that knows only what it is against, not what it is for.  The Middle East needs an American policy as clear and consistent as the one designed for the Congo.