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Unadulterated ignorance, if not prevarication.
Not only are we required to vet the HN personnel for Human Rights violations before any training, but one of the first classes the we teach is Human Rights.
The Malian culture, as is typical of such fourth (or fifth) world paradises, is one of graft, corruption, and laziness. The US troops they meet are probably the only professional military personnel they have ever met who are not corrupt, and they will be there only a few months, at most.
The ones we have trained have suffered from poor / inadequate equipment, lack of maintenance, inadequate facilities, inconsistent leadership, absence of strategic, operational, and tactical guidance, tribalism, religious conflicts, greed, corruption, and dedication to a plethora of requirements other than training, as are the majority of JCETs we conduct. The HN purpose of these events seems, in most cases, to be to extract the maximum financial benefit from the training that we will tolerate.
This is what has affected their fighting abilities, and more importantly, their morale. Not Human Rights and ethics classes. Assuming that mandatory training would change their behavior (and that is a very far stretch), the people who are exhibiting serious ethical problems such as graft and corruption are far senior to the troops we have been interacting with. Maybe a senior US official needs to come train the senior HN leadership on ethics. They are not going to learn it from a US Army Captain who meets them only at graduation (maybe).
I suspect that it is difficult to be a motivated soldier when your leadership is feathering their nests as best they can and looking out for themselves first, foremost, and always.
Just my .02, YMMV.
TR
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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - President Theodore Roosevelt, 1910
De Oppresso Liber 01/20/2025
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