Cameron Hudson’s view
When Sudan’s army recaptured the Republican Palace in the capital Khartoum last month, the Sudanese people hoped it would signal the start of the final phase in the country’s war, which enters its third year this week. Sadly, there will be no return to normalcy anytime soon for some of the 13 million displaced civilians who have started returning to their homes. Jubilant scenes of celebration are being tempered by the horror of discovering mass graves and wanton destruction.
As the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) now consolidates its control over Khartoum, it faces not only a turning point but a decision point in the war. On the one hand it could pursue the retreating Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary back to the North Darfur capital of El Fasher in the hopes of eliminating the militia once and for all. The other approach would be to use its tactical and strategic gains to seek a final political victory and the legal dismantlement of the RSF through an internationally-recognized settlement. Both choices are fraught.
If the SAF doesn’t choose the path of peace, more people will suffer, the war will drag on for years, and its forces could end up disintegrating. This would create the conditions for Sudan to become the region’s next failed state.
The appeal of hunting down the RSF is high among the SAF leadership and much of the public. Bolstered by the hubris that comes from reclaiming the capital, and the acquisition of sophisticated Turkish drones, the army is riding high. But its track-record of fighting in Darfur is mixed. Indeed, the RSF’s predecessor, the Janjaweed, was created because the SAF’s conventional tactics were ill-suited to fight a counter-insurgency campaign there. This remains true.
Coupled with the challenges that will come from having to maintain its own attenuated supply lines across a vast desert, the SAF could well be relinquishing many of the tactical and strategic advantages it currently enjoys if it goes to Darfur, setting up a potential Waterloo moment. But the SAF is likely also motivated by its own belief that an international peace deal risks giving the RSF a victory at the negotiating table it didn’t earn on the battlefield. Moreover, the army feels betrayed by international actors who have supported the RSF against them and treated the two sides as equally culpable for the war and its crimes.
For its part, the international community has done little to establish a track record of consistent and even-handed diplomacy that the army can trust. Viewed from the barracks, inviting in the international community to help end the war would be an act of political suicide, and perhaps trigger an even greater threat from more hardline, Islamist elements the military has employed to help turn the war’s tide.
With no one to trust internally or externally, the military believes its only choice is to open a new front in Darfur in the hopes of vanquishing an existential threat, which also justifies the army’s continued hold on power. But it sets the stage for a new era of military rule paid for by the Sudanese people, whose losses of blood and treasure will be but an afterthought in the country’s perennial state of war.
Cameron Hudson is a senior fellow in the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. He previously served on the staff of the National Security Council under former US President George W. Bush.