Right from when the talks began in July 2006, observers expected them to be taxing. Distrust between the LRA and the government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni runs deep, and all previous peace talks have failed. Secondly, the International Criminal Court in The Hague just indicted LRA leader Joseph Kony and several of his cohorts for crimes against humanity. Kony and co. weren’t happy about this.

The LRA, with its macabre brew of superstition and fundamentalist Biblical philosophy, has abducted thousands of children and sowed terror by chopping off the ears, noses, mouths, and hands of hundreds of people. Partly because of this, influential constituencies inside Uganda have developed a hardline opposition to any political deal with the LRA.

Yet many Ugandans are also tired of war. The conflict has already sent nearly 1.6 million into squalid camps. Estimates of people killed over the last 20 years range from 100,000 to an improbable one million. In the north, parts of which have been plunged into medieval conditions by the conflict, no price for peace seems to high.

But there were bigger political imperatives for talks – or at least for a time out. Though government forces had managed to push the LRA deep inside southern Sudan, the warring sides actually fought each other to a draw to a draw.

Though Uganda has made impressive progress in the 21 years of Museveni’s rule (going from a country once synonymous with economic collapse through the 70s and 80s to become Africa’s “economic success story” in the 90s), successes were always overshadowed by the war, dragging down the country’s image. Then, by choosing the tactics of terrorizing civilians, the LRA forced the government to occupy as much ground as possible, stringing out the army well into southern Sudan. In cold military terms, Uganda got little in return for the deployment of such vast resources. For Kony, the end formal end of one-party rule in 2006 siphoned away LRA supporters in the Diaspora who once gave respectability to their campaign. It was left to the dynamics inside southern Sudan, following the Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the Khartoum government, to force Museveni and Kony’s hands.

With an autonomous Government of Southern Sudan in power, and the real prospect that the region will vote to secede in the 2011 referendum, it became politically untenable for Ugandan troops -- which were allowed to enter Sudan nearly six years ago by Khartoum to pursue the LRA -- to stay on. The secessionists can’t credibly portray the Arab regime as northern occupiers, while at the same time allowing the Ugandan army to maintain bases. Both parties, therefore, are seeking to salvage whatever they can before the doors close on them in southern Sudan.

That the talks have been rocky suggests the belligerents are trying to achieve at the negotiating table what they couldn’t on the battlefield -- a clear victory. But that charade cannot go on forever.

Onyango-Obbo is former editor of The Monitor, the main independent daily in Uganda. He is currently Managing Editor for Media Convergence and New Products for the Nation Media Group in Nairobi, Kenya, and a columnist for several of the group’s newspapers. He will be joining the PostGlobal panel this month.