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Originally Posted by Solumina

The influx of arms and possibly troops that I was talking about would not have been for a strike force to take these guys down but to police and offer protection, after all it becomes pretty damn hard to build an army of children soldiers if the children are well protected against kidnappers.

Alright, so Iraq isn't the be allegory to make. How about Afghanistan?

The Taliban were:

a.) Relatively small group
b.) Using force more than politics (I'm going to argue that it was to the same degree the LRA did)
c.) In relatively the same status as the LRA is today (leader made irrelevant, largely booted from the country)

Even with the Afghani national police receiving arms, training and a good deal of money; the Taliban are still a threat to most of the country. Even with additional police and protection, you still have massacres, you still have attacks and atrocities. You might make it more difficult for them to operate, but you'll never have a solution until you address the core issue of a strong internal government. I still don't see how this could have been improved.

Originally Posted by Solumina

Now I realize that I grew up in a nice county, especially our schools were well above what would be a basic expectation but still 312,311 people when Uganda has about 115 time that amount of people (35,873,253 according to the CIA factbook) and lacks a lot of basic infrastructure so that money can only be expected to go so far even if someone made a perfect plan for exactly how to spend every dollar and that plan was flawlessly carried through.

I get that $1b might not sound like a lot, but it actually is. Take in to consideration that $1b is in addition to the $17b usd that Uganda has in GDP, which is on par with stable countries like Nepal (who has a population of 25m).

However, even if I accept all of your premises, you still have answered the question: exactly how much more monetary support is necessary? Are you expecting another billion? 10 billion? If so, where does that money come from?

Originally Posted by Solumina

See above, you are talking as though these numbers are quite large but as a response to the actual situation they are essentially token gestures so that people can say that they did something or show support but it isn't really meaningful.

It isn't a token gesture though. You can't expect countries with the capability to provide aid to believe that if they gave aid and it didn't make a difference, then the solution to the problem must be more aid.

Also, keep in mind that this "token gesture" virtually doubled or contributed 1/3 to the country's budget (the budget is $2b, but I don't know if that's $2b with or without aid). Are you really saying that was a token gesture?

I'm going to address the idea that money isn't enough in the next paragraph.

Originally Posted by Solumina

The well being and stability of a country (and its people) is not a short term goal that you can just check off when it is completed. It requires time, effort, and commitment.

I'm not arguing that there's a tangible difference between just giving money to a country and providing actual aid. However, there have been over 3,500 NGOs in Uganda since this whole ordeal. For us to truly say that there wasn't actual aid provided, we must believe that:

a.) The majority of these NGOs were ineffective in producing real change for reasons other than having a difficult situation to deal with.
b.) The majority of these NGOs did not have specific plans on how they were going to assist Uganda.
c.) The majority of these NGOs were ill funded.

I don't buy these premises. As far as I can tell, there were well funded organizations who had boots on the ground attempting to make real change in Uganada, and it didn't meet the necessary change.

Originally Posted by Solumina

Do you want something quantitative like a dollar amount or do you want something qualitative?

Either will work, because what I'm trying to find out is that if the criticism of "privileged people" is that they didn't contribute enough, then what should they have contributed?

My worry is that we're running in to circular logic. The argument, to me, sounds like this:

1. Privileged people didn't contribute enough support to Uganda as they should have.
2. We know they didn't contribute enough support because a qualitative difference in Uganada didn't happen until just recently.
3. Therefore it is valid to criticise privileged people for their lack of support.

The problem is that I don't think we've justified premise 2. I think that we can agree that it's not reasonable to expect other countries to provide support indefinitely.

Originally Posted by Solumina

You don't have to occupy a place to assist in putting in infrastructure. It is all about taking things one step at a time and showing a progression toward stability, a large part of the process is psychological, there has to be definitive improvement. It doesn't all have to happen at once (and frequently trying to do that makes any real progress impossible as everything gets stretched way too thin to make a difference in any area so people just go "look at how much money we sank into this with no result").

The thing is, I don't see where this didn't happen. As far as I can tell, you had people attempting to assist putting infrastructure in to place and it didn't work. Again, as far as I can tell you also had organizations who tried taking things one step at a time (addressing food supply routes or medical deficiencies) and that didn't work either. The whole problem I have is that I don't see an indication that everything was stretched too thin, and yet it still didn't make a difference. Maybe my perceiption is wrong, but I still haven't see any evidence of that.