The only way to achieve this is to build an effective military and police force to ensure order and security across the country. This is unlikely to happen when the international community subsidizes Mr. Kabila’s incompetence and fights his wars.

In defeating M23 and establishing a semblance of peace, the international community has achieved a short-term humanitarian objective — an end to one rebellion. But it is a partial victory at best. It won’t end the myriad other rebellions raging across the country. And it hasn’t given Congolese elites any incentive to build a more robust state that defends its citizens against violent insurgents or seek political accommodation with them.

The defeat of M23 has created an artificial winner and an artificial loser. Mr. Kabila knows he has won because of external intervention. Fighters from M23 know they lost for a similar reason. In the future, Mr. Kabila will likely always seek to lean on his external benefactors to resolve internal conflicts. That, in turn, will make M23 and other groups wait for Mr. Kabila’s external benefactors to leave so that they can relaunch their rebellions.

Foreign intervention is helping Congolese leaders in Kinshasa look outside for a solution to a problem that can only be solved by internal political reform. It is liberating Mr. Kabila and his government from the necessary internal military and political bargains that can secure a lasting peace. And so Congo will remain a fragile state.

The most likely outcome will be to force the international community to continue babysitting the government in Kinshasa in the naïve hope that it will be able to defend itself against its internal competitors in the future. But as the experience of South Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan show, this is likely to become an open-ended commitment.

To solve the problems of Congo, the United Nations and other African countries may need to allow the belligerents to fight until one secures a decisive military victory or all sides get exhausted by war and find working together more attractive than further fighting.

Anyone with capacity to organize an army, mobilize resources and pacify the country should be given a chance to prove this on the battlefield. If no one can secure a military victory, they may then seek political accommodation. Indeed, this is the path Mr. Kabila had begun in 2009, when he co-opted various belligerents into the political process, thus turning enemies into strategic allies.