“Quite simply, it’s marketing,” Linder said later. “You’re essentially teaching psy-ops marketing. The message is: ‘You don’t have to be L.R.A. War is over. Life doesn’t have to suck.’ It’s about removing combatants from the battlefield. That’s what we did in the Philippines.”

Col. Kevin Leahy, a dry-witted Irish American from northern New Jersey, commands the mission against the L.R.A. and every other Central African crisis that comes across his desk, including the effort to rescue the more than 200 schoolgirls who remain in captivity after 57 managed to escape. One night at his base in Entebbe, Uganda, he spoke about the L.R.A.: “We’ll take every opportunity to engage them without killing anybody, because every time you engage the L.R.A. directly, children get killed.” As for Kabango’s critiques, Leahy said: “These guys can drink out of puddles in the bush and not get sick, and that’s pretty impressive. But what we bring to the table when we’re out there with them is the ability to manage intelligence assets, communications, and to know instantly where people are.” The L.R.A.’s small numbers were part of the challenge. “When it gets down to this 250, 200, 150, and they’re in these smaller groups, they get really hard to find.”

For Leahy, the most important operations fall under what in today’s special warfare are called influence operations. His team was dropping harmless grenade simulators to herd the L.R.A. and create the kind of chaos that allowed defectors the chance to escape and got the others thinking. “I’ll try anything,” he said. With the help of the State Department, he recently commissioned a “Come Home” song by a Ugandan pop star named Jose Chameleone. He reached out to Chuck Norris to create a “come home” message. The group’s members, it turned out, were big fans of ’80s action movies. In more than one raided camp, there were DVDs of Chuck Norris films. “We’ve gotten some feedback from his agent,” Leahy said.

In keeping with Africom’s mandate, Leahy stressed that this was an African-led mission. “We give a lot of advice, but at the end of the day, it’s their commanders who call the shots.” He went on, “We can’t bring the entire Death Star in and set it up.” Besides, as always, there was the question of Where’s Joseph Kony? “He could be dead,” Leahy said. Most of the defectors coming out of the bush hadn’t seen him or even heard him giving commands by radio in a long time. So either Kony was gone or he was in the disputed area of Kafia Kingi or farther north in Sudan, where his old sponsors in the Sudanese government continue to grant him haven. “Without the support of Sudan over the last 20 years, there would be no L.R.A.,” Leahy said.

The Lord’s Resistance Army continued to fade from view as events nearby overtook the story of a tiny, straggling band of abductees wandering around in the woods. Civil war battered South Sudan. A potential genocide unfolded in the Central African Republic. But it was the abduction of the schoolgirls that caused an international outcry.

In early May, Leahy traveled to Nigeria to lead the military component of the interagency team charged with locating the abducted girls. The team included representatives of the F.B.I., the State Department, U.S.A.I.D. and Africom. “We’ve never worked so effectively with other components of the U.S. government,” Leahy said. That didn’t mean the task was easy. His role was to incorporate U.S. intelligence into what the Nigerians already knew. The political challenges have been well documented: corruption within the Nigerian military, poor equipment and weak troops, to name a few. As for more practical challenges, Leahy declined to name them for fear of giving Boko Haram information they didn’t already have. “The Nigerian government is in a very difficult position and is trying to figure out a solution while dealing with constant Boko Haram attacks,” Leahy said. Since the girls were taken, Boko Haram has killed at least 220 more people.

Nigeria could well prove a test case for the “Obama Doctrine.” Whether the United States government can solve the crisis of the abducted schoolgirls is inextricably linked to whether the Nigerians are capable of addressing the societal ills that led to the rise of Boko Haram. For its part, Special Operations was preparing to train three battalions of elite Nigerian forces to confront Boko Haram. But given the Nigerian military’s record on human rights violations, its lack of professionalism and its history of either running away from Boko Haram or killing innocent civilians, this was going to be a matter of sink or swim. It would take the highest level of American engagement. As Linder said, “We’re going to get in the pool with them.”