I confess I have been writing saucy war headlines. We journalists and our soulmates in certain sections of society, mainly MPs, talking heads and other armchair jockeys, are in the grip of a bloodlust which started with Migingo and followed the Tana westwards.We probably need to come down a little from our armchair balloons and take a second look at this war proposition.There are two issues. One, is war itself; the second is the so-called enemy, the machinegun-toting, pickup riding, suicide attack-threatening, gentlemen of al-Shabaab.
War. It’s a nasty, expensive business. One soldier told me that armies don’t go to war (they just do the shooting), countries do. When you go to war, you throw everything into it. You open your treasury to the military and you close it to everything else. No CDF, no roads, no digital villages, no undersea cables. Just bullets and MREs.
I was surprised when a Saudi I recently met in London told me his wealthy kingdom is basically broke after Gulf War One. One of the biggest beefs in Saudi Arabia, he told me, is that few Saudis can afford to live in their own houses.
The government has no money to build them houses or give them soft loans because all the money went into paying for that war. So war is expensive even for people who shower in crude. Then of course many, many of your people are killed. In a sense, when a country goes to a serious war, it gambles its very survival. It is not the kind of thing you want to do too often.
And (this is the enemy part of the argument) for what? To teach 2,000 Somali tribesmen a lesson? Would they even get it?
Conventional military reasoning is that al-Shabaab is not an army; it is a group of thugs, a militia which is guided by no ideology, no coherent policy other than a misreading of religion, bravado and the commercial interests of the warlords who pay, train and arm them.
It’s not capable of waging war, not in the conventional sense. It is only capable of committing criminal acts, including serious ones such as terrorism. In that sense, al-Shabaab is a problem to be dealt with by the Rapid Response Unit of the Administration Police, rather than the 78 Tank Battalion.
The Somali state is in an unprecedented condition of collapse. Without a government for 28 years, it is not just law and order which no longer exists. It is a society without organised healthcare, education system or infrastructure. A military victory over al-Shabaab will not solve the problem of state collapse..more..http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/-/440808/616150/-/4lcux1/-/index.html
Kenya must decide whether to stop al-Shabaab or let them be
I have been getting quite amused by a line of local argument that Kenya does not have what it takes to invade Somalia. There is a lot of idle chatter in this country on everything, which I find best to ignore.
But with al-Shabaab making daily mincemeat of Somalia’s pathetic Transitional Federal Government (TFG), and causing massive constipation to the Kenyan authorities in the process, it is time to put a few facts straight.
Fact 1: Kenya has indisputably the most professional military in our region and is, indeed, among the best in Africa. It is superbly trained and equipped, by sub-Saharan Africa standards of course. Doubting this by pointing at Migingo is neither here nor there. You don’t use a hammer to swat a fly, as lawyer P.L.O. Lumumba likes to say.We also forget Kenya is the sole country in East Africa with a functional air force. Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and even the Democratic Republic of Congo only read about jet fighters in foreign military manuals like Jane’s Defence Weekly.Ethiopia used to rival us in this sphere, but the MiGs it inherited from the Soviet Union are barely serviceable these days. They make do with helicopter gunships, which they used with devastating effect when they intervened in Somalia in 2006.
Fact 2: The Defence Staff College in Karen, Nairobi, does not just train Kenya’s top military brass. It also trains those of the neighbouring states, and many others in Africa besides.
Fact 3: The al-Shabaab are not an army. They are a militia, rough and unruly. To imagine they are a match to Kenya’s armoured military is wishful thinking. If Kenyan soldiers simply wanted to march to Mogadishu, nothing would stop them...more...http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/-/440808/616182/-/4lcv0q/-/index.html
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