Joseph Kony 2012: an unwelcome spotlight on the shadowy hunt for a war lord "Last time Ugandan forces were in the DRC it was as an invading army," said J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Centre at the Atlantic Council. The sovereignty of these country is too young, too new and too fragile to allow foreign armies to gallivant through, even in pursuit of a common enemy. The majority of the US forces are embedded with Ugandan army, while the remainder are spread between the militaries of the DRC, the Central African Republic and the new nation of South Sudan. While their mission is to gather intelligence and help their host militaries plan operations and training, they also face a subtle political task: finding a way marshal these suspicious allies against the LRA. Whatever tacit agreements may have been struck to allow Uganda's military to cross into the DRC and deliver a hammer blow to Kony's troops may wither under the glare of the viral global campaign, Mr Pham told the Daily Telegraph. [DRC president] Joseph Kabila was already weakened by last year's disputed elections and dependent on the military to stay in power. He can't be seen to be allowing the Ugandans back into the country and Kony2012 is complicating that even further. The publicity is also unwelcome for the secretive American troops operating in a region still sensitive to accusations of colonialism by the West. Now you have put a spot light on the issue, the US needs to be more circumspect. If they were operating in the shadows before they going to have to slink even further into the dark now," Mr Pham said. The campaign, designed to apply pressure to Congress to support the mission against Kony, is also a solution to a problem that wasn't there. The Senate unanimously passed legislation supporting the defeat of the LRA in 2010 and the White House responded last October with the deployment of soldiers and a broader strategy for ending the LRA's threat. Even in the run up to a presidential election, Mitt Romney, the leading Republican contender for the White House, came out in support of Mr Obama's decision. "They had everything they wanted - everything was perfectly aligned," Mr Pham said. The capture or killing of Joseph Kony was "probably months, if not weeks away" as the African militaries slowly closed the net, he concluded. Now, with this glare of publicity, it's much harder to say.