Why State is losing war on terror and how citizens can win it

What you need to know:

  • Somalia has been a failed state for two decades. Outsiders cannot fix a failed state. Only Somalis can and we do not know whether they will do it in five years or 50.
  • The civil response would have been to beef up our security, including strengthening our naval capability to patrol our territorial waters close to Somalia.
  • Not too long ago we were promised a state-of-the-art digital security infrastructure. We saw a menacing President on TV telling criminals and terrorists to be very afraid. Forget analogue.

The proximate cause of the current wave of terrorism in the country is radicalisation of youths. It stands to reason that the primary focus of counterterrorism should be prevention of radicalisation. This is not a job for soldiers, police officers or spies, writes David Ndii.

There are some events you witness or go through that remain vivid in your memory for the rest of your life. I was driving into Westgate when the terrorist attack occurred. Staring death in the face is a life-changing experience — but that is a story for another day.

I was working at home with the TV tuned to CNN when the attacks on the World Trade Center in the United States on September 11, 2001, took place.

I sat there glued to the TV late into the night, watching the entire horror unfold. One of the events of the day was an announcement by the Pentagon, four hours after the first plane struck, that it was deploying several warships, including aircraft carriers, to protect the East Coast from further attacks.

I was intrigued. By then it was already clear that the events of the day were an audacious terrorist attack. One of terrorism’s key weapons is the element of surprise. The attackers had used it devastatingly. I am no security expert but I felt certain that the attack was over. An enraged US military took out its frustration on Iraq.

In so doing, it played into Al-Qaeda’s hands, money and troops flowing in. A decade-and-a-half later, governments and their security establishments are still playing catch up.

Al-Qaeda has grown into a thriving global franchise, spawning ISIS along the way. Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab are now household names. Add to that lone rangers with automatic rifles.

SECURITY MACHINE
The state security machinery comprises three institutions — the military, the police and the intelligence unit. The military’s training and capabilities have been developed to fight the armies of other states.

The intelligence services’ capabilities have been developed to spy on other states. An example is the recent scandal of the US National Security Agency snooping on the German chancellor and the Brazilian president. Police capabilities are for deterring ordinary criminals and investigating crimes committed by civilians.

None of these capabilities are up to the task of responding to the scourge of international terrorism that we are facing today. Jihadi terrorists are neither rival military formations nor brigands.

The term “asymmetric warfare” is an attempt by the security establishment to fit the phenomenon in their existing security paradigm. It does not fit.

The proximate cause of the current wave of terrorism is radicalisation. It stands to reason that the primary focus of counter-terrorism should be prevention of radicalisation. This is not a job for soldiers or policemen or spies.

Lighting is always followed by thunder. Without knowledge of the science, we would mistakenly interpret the perfect correlation as causation. Is the relationship between Islam and terrorism correlation or causation?

The Arab world is the crucible of global terrorism. It is also rich in oil. Oil is the ultimate harbinger of the so-called resource curse. It creates jobless wealth — what economists call the “Dutch disease”. It also nurtures authoritarian regimes. Rulers with oil wells do not need taxes or foreign finance to do what they want.

The Arab world combines some of the world’s highest youth unemployment rates and unresponsive governments — that is what the Arab Spring was about. Add to that scores of very wealthy idle people, “Osamas”, looking for something to live for.

Would Islamic fundamentalism on its own without these variables be sufficient? I would argue not. Turkey is an oil-less Islamic democracy with a dynamic industrial economy — it does not export terrorism.

But would this cocktail of variables be sufficient to explain terrorism without Islamic fundamentalism? We cannot be sure but I would argue that they would be sufficient. We know from our own Mungiki that religious extremism can just as easily be invented. In fact, extremism needs not be religious.

The Nazis, the Khmer Rouge and Hutu extremists did not need religion to perpetrate genocides. If people want to do evil, they will develop an ideology to rationalise it.

For quite some time in the run-up to the 2002 elections, there was uncertainty as to whether President Daniel arap Moi would respect the term limit or he would attempt to subvert the constitution and cling on to power like some other African presidents.

I asked one of the top generals what the military would do if Mr Moi sought to cling to power. He was unequivocal. The military would respect the constitution. Sure enough, a few months before the election, the military invited Mr Moi to Lang’ata Barracks, gave him a wheelbarrow and wheeled him out in an open top Land Rover. The message could not have been clearer.

Since then, we have witnessed a creeping politicisation of the military. We hear of partisan political involvement of the military’s top brass in both the 2007 and 2013 presidential elections.

Politicisation of the military leads to militarisation of politics. I am of the view that it is militarisation of politics that led us to invade Somalia. What do I mean by that?

Somalia has been a failed state for two decades. Outsiders cannot fix a failed state. Only Somalis can and we do not know whether they will do it in five years or 50.

Our strategy before was political engagement, including helping to establish and hosting a Somali government that was resident here for quite a while. Somali insurgents started making forays into the country, including kidnapping of a few tourists.

The civil response would have been to beef up our security, including strengthening our naval capability to patrol our territorial waters close to Somalia.

The idea that an offensive against the adversary is a solution is military logic. Soldiers are trained to fight, so they think war is a solution to political problems.

The militarisation of our politics is responsible for bungling of both the Westgate and Garissa attacks. I need not belabour the Westgate debacle. We were promised an inquiry. We did not get one. Since there was no inquiry, there was no accountability.

It also tells us who is calling the shots in our security policy. We bungled Garissa as we did not learn lessons from Westgate and because there was no accountability.

More fundamentally, it is 17 years since the terrorist attack on the US embassy in Nairobi. There is no other country I can think of that has been a victim of successive attacks of the magnitude that we have been.

One would expect that by now, we would have world class counter-terrorism capability. After the Mumbai hotel attack, we should have seen Westgate coming. As one diplomat put it, the surprise was not that the Westgate attack happened but that it was so long in coming.
DEMANDED REPONSE PLAN

A president who knows his job would have demanded from the security services a response plan for every high risk target. If we had such plans, and even if the Garissa University College was not among the high risk targets, we would not have taken hours to find an aircraft.

It stands to reason that given its location, the military facility in Garissa would be one of the sites where such capability would be located. In the meantime, our security budget had grown threefold over the last decade, from Sh30 billion to Sh94 billion last year. As terrorists have a walk in the park, there are people making hay, and not just from burning charcoal.

When typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines, it elicited the biggest international relief effort since the Asian Tsunami. I have to admit, I was amazed by America’s response. The US government donated $37 million (Sh3.3 billion) but this pales in significance compared with the size of its relief operation.

It deployed a flotilla of warships, including aircraft carrier USS George Washington. It also sent over 40 aircraft, including 19 large military transport planes (C-130 Hercules) and 13,000 soldiers. The UK government dispatched two warships and a donation of £80 million (Sh7.2 billion). When you need help, that is when you know who your friends are.

China initially gave $200,000 (Sh18.2 million), less than the American rock band Journey’s donation of $350,000 (Sh31.8 million). Embarrassed by the generosity of others, it later increased this to $1.4 million (Sh127 million) and deployed a hospital warship.

Our historic pro-western foreign policy was aligned with our economic and security interests. It is worth noting that despite his testy relationship with the Western powers during the transition to multiparty politics in the early 90s, Mr Moi kept the security ties intact. We now need to ask whether our “look East” foreign policy has compromised our security interests.

As I argued in a previous column, in today’s globalised economy, this East-West game we are playing is actually a false dichotomy. The US and China are the world’s biggest trading partners. China is the largest destination for US foreign investment, and is, in turn, the single largest holder of US government debt.

It is worth observing that we did not float our sovereign bond in Shanghai.

That said, looking eastwards economically does not require that we shake fists at Western powers. We are, after all, an Indian Ocean Rim country.

RECENT EBOLA CRISIS

In this post-cold war era, it is perfectly in order for us to strengthen economic ties with the East as well as our historic political and security ties with the West. Our partners expect us to pursue our national interests, not theirs. We need to grow up.

I wrote some time ago that State failure can go on unnoticed for a long time until a crisis comes along, and then it becomes painfully manifest.

We saw this during the recent Ebola crisis in West Africa. You would not have known by visiting their capitals or attending their international investment conferences, or reading glowing economic growth reports, that the affected countries did not have basic infectious disease control capabilities.

Not too long ago we were promised a state-of-the-art digital security infrastructure. We saw a menacing President on TV telling criminals and terrorists to be very afraid. Forget analogue.

We are now talking medieval solutions — fortifications. We are understandably having a hard time believing it, but it is now painfully evident that as far as security goes, this emerging African economic lion, this Silicon Savannah, is a sham.

So here is the low down. We are on our own. But this is a challenge we can rise to. On security, the State fails us all the time. We do not hang around whining, we do something about it. We fortify our neighbourhoods, form vigilante groups, lynch suspects and so on. That is what we have to do.

The means is in our hands; it’s called a mobile phone. We can share information on suspicious people in our midst, on our youths who have disappeared whom we suspect of being radicalised, on every rumour we hear about a possible attack.

We can build ourselves a crowd-sourced national digital Nyumba Kumi. Sure enough, we will react to false alarms, but we will also disrupt many terrorists’ plans. Over to you techies.

David Ndii is the managing director of Africa Economics. ([email protected])