Secure Northern Kenya to win war on terror

The terror attack in Mandera County in which 14 people were killed shows insecurity is one of the most daunting challenges facing us.

It is disturbing that the terrorists struck and disappeared without any response from the police.
The deadly strike occurred barely a month since another daring attack on a military base in Lamu. Perhaps the little comfort we can draw from the incident is that the KDF gunned down 11 terrorists.

This is unlike past attacks such as Mpekotoni a year ago where the killers disappeared into the thin air after committing unspeakable atrocities. And the reaction from security agents was to say the least appalling.
The Lamu incident shows when there is heightened alertness coupled with swift and organised response, terrorists will not get away with their heinous activities. Despite this bright spot of our security forces, we have a long way to go before finding the right strategy to effectively neuter the ubiquitous militant groups. Before the Lamu strike, there had been a series of incidents over the recent past where armed groups struck isolated and remote areas of North Eastern, especially Marsabit and Wajir, breaching law and order with mindboggling ease.

It is an indictment against the state security machinery when militants infiltrate the country and hold a village to ransom for hours. To rub salt into injury, they usually walk back briskly and triumphantly across the borders. We have also witnessed as foreign troops stray several times into our borders, defiling our sovereignty with impunity.

The State must decisively act with, as Martin Luther King Jr would say, “the urgency of now” to fulfill its constitutional mandate of securing Kenyans and their property in these forsaken places.
Terrorists mainly target North Eastern because a vast of its landmass is not policed. However, with government paying special attention to security, it is expected that this will change. The move by the Treasury to allocate Sh215 billion in the national budget to security is laudable. A fair share should go into reversing the dire insecurity situation in North Eastern. It is no longer tenable to pay scant attention to this region. A secure north means a secure country.
While security has been Jubilee administration’s Achilles Heels, it can turn this into an advantage by pioneering novel and ingenious methods to deal with the menace. It has an opportunity to lay the foundation on how to handle security in an environment where extremism is disconcertingly growing.

This is by no means an easy task. Terrorism is giving sleepless nights to even developed nations like the US, UK and France notwithstanding their much-vaunted watertight security strategies and sophisticated technology. One of those killed in the Lamu attack was a bloodthirsty Briton, who inexplicably chose to give up the comfort of a good life to embark on a killing mission in the horn of Africa. It is said some towns in the UK are fishing grounds for terror networks to swell their ranks, besides being dens in which attacks are plotted. Yet this is a developed country supposed to be the best policed and served by topnotch intelligence. This underscores the complexity and scope of the challenge. Fighting terrorism is a veritable minefield we must learn to navigate with dexterity, grit, resolve and resilience. We are dealing with a formless enemy. It is an enemy you cannot annihilate, whatever formidable firepower you unleash against them. KDF have been in Somalia for a while now and the attacks seem not to abet. This is not to say defeating terrorists is beyond us. We only need to change tack, be proactive and engage more aggressively at international level, especially with countries which have amassed a wealth of experience and developed advanced technology to deal with the existential threat of terrorism that hangs all over the globe like a sword of Damocles.

The presence of foreign fighters in Somalia points to a complex problem that will not lend itself to simplistic solutions. New strategic partnerships, particularly with UK and US should, therefore, be pursued vigorously. They are key to dismantling the intricate web of terror networks across the world. Kenya can leverage on the fact that terrorism is a global problem and countries, especially those which have been hit hard, need no persuasion to join an anti-terror bandwagon.