It’s high time KDF rethinks the Somalia mission

It is a picture to break the heart. In the pale light of night at Wilson Airport, a gaggle of grim-faced soldiers carry aloft four flag-draped caskets bearing the first batch of the bodies of their many colleagues killed in an Al-Shabaab attack on a KDF camp at El-Adde in Somalia.

Since then, the KDF’s has sharply escalated the hunt for Al-Shabaab, bombing and strafing their positions and killing their leader.

An angry nation is fully behind this strategy and wants even more punishing sorties to be made.

Yet times of great emotion like this should give pause to the wise: why are Kenyan soldiers dying in Somalia?

The KDF’s mission as the military described it when it blitzed into Somalia on October 16, 2011 was to cripple Al-Shabaab’s capacity to attack Kenya.

It is now over four years since we claimed victory.

Yet KDF is still in Jubaland and the ‘defeated’ Al-Shabaab has become more brazen and lethal, terrorising and killing more Kenyans than it had done ever before 2011.

The truth is that this mission has failed. Here is why.

The first problem is that even though we are engaged in an unconventional conflict, we have defined the mission in conventional terms: the military defeat of Al-Shabaab.

This has had two consequences: one strategic and the other tactical. The strategic point has to do with the nature of asymmetric war against insurgents.

As Henry Kissinger once said, speaking of the US debacle in Vietnam, insurgents win every time they don’t lose and armies lose every time they don’t win.

Even if we kill its leaders, all Al-Shabaab need do to win is hurt Kenyans. Every time it does that KDF loses.

ELUSIVE TASK

Tactically, every time Al-Shabaab has attacked Kenya, the military response has been to scale-up its efforts in pursuit of the original mission rather than re-group to rethink the mission. They have done the same thing, again.

There won’t be victory down that path: having defined the wrong mission, we have also chosen the wrong friends in Somalia.

The parallels with the US wars against terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq are uncanny and show what we must now do differently.

In early May 2003, President George Bush announced victory in the Iraq war.

More American soldiers died in the insurgencies that followed this victory than had died during the actual combat.

America had defined a clear military mission: overthrow Saddam but they had forgotten to define a more important political mission for the post-Saddam period.

The instability that then followed the mismanaged transition is one of the factors that gave rise to the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL), the most dangerous terrorist group in the world today.

In Afghanistan, the military mission was to destroy Al-Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban.

Yet as the Taliban fled American bombs, they got free passage from Pakistan, America’s ally.

They were then allowed to operate and regroup in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan where they continued their toxic indoctrination of Afghan youth in madrassas funded by yet another American ally, Saudi Arabia.

Thanks to its allies, the Taliban survived to fight another day and to continue to destabilise Afghanistan.

That too is Kenya’s story in Somalia. As an insurgency, Al-Shabaab can melt into the population and evade conventional attacks.

WAR PROFITEERING

By refusing to define an exit strategy from the onset, KDF has morphed into an occupation force, a case of dangerous mission creep that has now drawn Kenya into the clan politics of Jubaland.

History does not help: The North-Eastern Province of Kenya was hived off from Jubaland by the colonial government in 1925, so clan identities overlap across borders.

A Kenyan Somali, Mohammed Yusuf Haji, was the Minister for Defence when Kenya invaded Somalia in 2011.

That has fed conspiracy theories since then, that the Kenya Somali elite engineered the invasion to profit from commercial opportunities in Jubaland.

These initial problems were then compounded by Kenyan meddling in local politics and engineering the election of their ally, Sheikh Ahmed Mohamed Islam “Madobe” as President of Jubaland.

The federal government does not like this and clearly feels arm-twisted.

In June last year, two months before the re-election of Madobe, the Federal Parliament passed a vote of no confidence against the Juba Regional Assembly.

These goings-on suggest that our interests are not aligned with those of the Somali government.

Late last year, the federal parliament voted for KDF to leave Somalia.

Thus, we are now fighting an insurgency in a country where the government does not want us, the terrorists’ ability to hurt us has not diminished and we don’t know whether the civilians even want us.

The second problem is that KDF has been accused of war profiteering.

A 2015 report by Journalists for Justice, said that KDF, its Jubaland allies and Al-Shabaab are benefiting from a $200 to $400 million illegal sugar trade routed Kismayu.

Since the border with Somalia is officially closed, the Kenya Revenue Authority is not allowed to custom goods entering Kenya from Somalia: No goods should enter through a closed border.

Claims of KDF involvement in contraband trade have persisted for long.

In 2014, the UN Monitoring Group for Somalia and Eritrea claimed that KDF was not only involved in a lucrative but illegal charcoal trade in Kismayu but that some of the resulting profits were going to Al-Shabaab.

The report lamented, “Al-Shabaab continues to benefit from the revenue generated, on a scale greater than when it controlled Kismayu.”

SELF-PROBING

KDF denies these claims and has launched an investigation.

But when the military investigates its own wrong-doing, its findings are famously deceptive.

Examples abound: an infamous US army investigation into a friendly fire incident that killed 18 Americans at the start of the Iraq war, brazenly concluded that most were killed by enemy fire and that only one person among the wounded had been hit by friendly fire.

There is a third problem: States should never contribute troops to peace-keeping operations in neighbouring countries.

Often, there is a festering grievance between neighbours.

If there is none, the conduct of the peace-keepers – especially if they inter-meddle in local politics as KDF has – will inevitably create one.

Where, as here, ethnic identities spill across borders, the peacekeepers eventually come to be seen as an occupying force.

It is clear that KDF meant to create a buffer between the insurgents and Kenya’s borders.

Yet with Al-Shabaab able to strike deep inside Kenya, such a buffer seems foolish.

What should be done? We must accept two things. One, Al-Shabaab will not be militarily defeated.

Two, only a strong, politically legitimate Somali government can erode the conditions that create Al-Shabaab-like groups, namely the weak, inept and famously corrupt administrations that followed the collapse of Siad Barre regime.

These conditions strengthened religious purists who then offered the alternative of public virtue and effective administration, such as the Islamic Courts and later Al-Shabaab.

As is, a weak federal government with an even weaker grip on the country strengthens extremists, if not Al-Shabaab then some other future group.

If Kenya means to help Somalia, the investments it is making in military assets should be gradually scaled back and invested in the political process.

A SMART SOLUTION
There is also a need for a change in military doctrine.

KDF’s see the war in Somalia as if it is an inter-state war rather than as the insurgency embedded in the population that it is.

As Phillip Bobbit says in his excellent book, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty First Century, in interstate war an invading army either holds territory or destroys the enemy or both.

In fighting insurgency, however, armies must prepare for high intensity combat, counter-insurgency, peace support and reconstruction. And they must do all these things simultaneously.

This means invasion must combine soldiers, police and even civilians to defeat the enemy, stabilise the country and rebuild a legitimate state.

If KDF rethinks its role in Somalia this way, then it would see its mission less as killing Al-Shabaab terrorists and more as protecting Somalis.

Killing insurgents without protecting civilians merely inflames the insurgency without increasing public support, a precondition for mission success.

After the initial KDF victory, Somalia needed not the KDF but the General Service Unit, that is, policing not occupation.

If KDF re-thinks its mission, Kenya can negotiate for its troops in Somalia to be gradually replaced by those of a nation that has no historical ties with Somalia.

And then KDF can draw down its forces.

If, however, our Somalia involvement is driven by testosterone and wounded egos rather than national interest, we shall continue to send our soldiers to die for a mission that cannot be accomplished in a place they are not wanted. A classical case of Greek tragedy.

Maina is a constitutional lawyer