The president's deployment of military advisers to the region is a significant step. But the ultimate success of that mission will depend not only on how our advisers carry out their assignment or on whether key leaders of the LRA are caught once and for all, but also on whether the United States pursues other policies critical to sustainably solving the problem at hand. We can't end the threat that the LRA poses solely by the barrel of the gun. The U.S. will also have to scale up equally important diplomatic and development initiatives throughout the region.

In 2009, I introduced legislation with former Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas that laid out just such a strategy. That bill, the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, passed Congress with bipartisan support, and was signed into law by President Obama last year and, in October, cited as the strategic foundation of the recent deployment.

While our bill authorized a comprehensive set of policies necessary both to help remove the threat of the LRA and address the conditions out of which the LRA emerged, it also gave the administration discretion to determine the most effective way forward.

The mission that the president has assigned our military personnel will be challenging. The traditional, binary, all-or-nothing approach to military missions is based on bitter experience. But this mission is different. Even though U.S. military forces will be forward deployed with regional African militaries, their focus will be on facilitating better information-sharing among the African forces. In doing so, the hope is not only to stop the LRA but to also encourage greater protection of innocent civilians who might otherwise be attacked.

There are good reasons to be reluctant about limiting the engagement of military personnel when we assign them a task, and the current deployment to central Africa will be a test of whether we are capable undertaking this kind of alternative mission. Located in difficult and remote terrain, it is likely to be a difficult undertaking. But the strategic rewards for our country -- of being able to use our military in this non-traditional way and in a manner that supports greater protection of civilians -- can be enormous in other areas, especially in addressing our highest national security priority, namely the threat of terrorist networks.

To achieve a long-term, sustainable solution, though, we will need to do more. It is essential that the Ugandan government address the conditions out of which the LRA emerged and which could give rise to future conflict if unchanged, including progress on basic development needs and addressing historic problems of marginalization. Other governments in the region must begin to fix the lack of governance and weak security infrastructure that has enabled the LRA to thrive within their borders. In each country, this means focusing on the core rule of law institutions, reforming the security apparatus, and genuinely addressing political and economic grievances.