So the niggling question is why the Ugandan military has so far failed to snuff the movement out. The LRA has hidden amid alien corn for years now, and because Obo remembers the “tonga-tonga” speech, the rebels can trust no one there. For foreign observers, like the Nato forces trying to wage counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan, the least appetising inference to draw from the LRA’s continued survival is that the business of counterinsurgency is even tougher than it looks. Even when the population is on your side, and your enemy reduced to Neolithic weaponry, the fight continues.