The Somalia dilemma: Should Kenya pull out troops or not?

Kenya Defence Forces launch artilley shells into Al-Shabaab hideouts in Fafadun, Somalia, during the fight to reclaim the port of Kismayu in 2012. [PHOTO: FILE/ STANDARD]

Withdrawing the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) troops from Somalia could unleash a wave of unprecedented instability in the region, security experts now warn.

Mr Richard Tuta, a former police officer and a scholar in criminal and security matters, says withdrawing Kenyan troops is a populist move that will hand ‘victory’ to Al-Shabaab.

“Any terrorist group should be on the run, not on the move. Removing our troops means they will have time to regroup...they will easily overrun the current government in Somalia and then we will be back to where we started. The whole region will be in danger,” he said.

The government and the opposition have been sparring about the fate of Kenyan troops in Somalia, especially after Al-Shabaab militants massacred 148 people in Garissa early this month. The opposition says the solution to such attacks is to pull out KDF from Somalia, a suggestion the government has dismissed outrightly.

“Our main challenge is not being in Somalia,” said Mr George Musamali, a former General Service Unit (GSU) officer and now a consultant on security and terrorism. “It is people crossing over from Somalia to come and hit us at home. There are no grenades being lobbed into Kenya from Somalia. These attacks are being carried out by our own boys,” he said.

In the wake of the Garissa attack, carried out by four Kenyan-born militants, the government initiated measures to deal with the Al-Shabaab threat. First, it has commenced construction of a wall along the Kenya-Somalia border to curb the inflow of militants.

It also gave a 10-day amnesty to Kenyan Al-Shabaab recruits to surrender.

While praising some of these moves, Tuta said they should be viewed as components of a greater plan to contain Al-Shabaab, not the ultimate solution.

“The government ought to employ soft and hard power in its approach. Soft power can be seen in the amnesty incentive and hard power should be the application of more punitive laws,” he said.

But Musamali criticised the amnesty offer, saying: “We offered amnesty to Mungiki and the Sabaot Land Defence Forces (SLDF) and I don’t remember any of them coming forward. What about terrorists who have been thoroughly indoctrinated?”

While hosting a group of visiting US senators for dinner last week, CORD leader Raila Odinga called on the delegation to ask President Barack Obama to prevail on President Kenyatta to pull out the troops.

However, Musamali says “Kenya does not have a unilateral say about its troops there” since KDF troops are now part of the African Mission in Somalia (Amisom).

Those supporting KDF withdrawal say this is the most logical option that even far much greater powers than Kenya have taken when faced with intractable conflicts. They say the Union of Soviet Social Republics (USSR) army had to withdraw from Afghanistan in shame in 1989 after 10 years of misadventure that served as test run for global Islamic jihadism.

Pyrrhic victory

They point out that the US simply declared Pyrrhic victory and withdrew from the Vietnam War in the 1960s and the recent ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But these comparisons with the Kenyan situation are erroneous in many ways. In the case of the US, it does not share a border with any of the three countries it has directly intervened in militarily. Kenya does in the case of Somalia.

In Kenya’s case, the head of the enemy, in the words of one security official, is in Nairobi, while the tail can be traced all the way to Somalia.

The most appropriate comparison would be to compare the success of US interventions against drug lords operating from its neighbour Mexico, with whom it shares a 3,000km border.

Despite the billions of dollars the US has expended in constructing electric fences and putting up sophisticated surveillance and intelligence mechanism, the drug lords always manage to beat the system. In April 2014, US federal agents uncovered two drug-smuggling tunnels equipped with rails underneath the US-Mexico border in California.

Mandera Senator Billow Kerrow, whose county has been hit hard by a series of daring Al-Shabaab attacks, takes a middle ground on the issue.

“I support the withdrawal of our troops from Kismayu to our borders. From here they can create a buffer zone of about 50 kilometres inside Somalia,” he said.

When KDF rolled into southern Somalia in October 2011, its aim was to push the militants and create a buffer zone known as Jubaland.

However, the abilities of the Jubaland government, headed by former Kismayu governor Ahmed Mohammed Islam popularly known as Sheikh Madobe, has been called in to question. Mr Tuta said the Jubaland administration lacks the capability to battle Al-Shabab fighters, a situation made even more complex by the pull of Somali’s intricate clan ties.

Every time it hits Kenya, Al-Shabaab has claimed it is doing so to pressure the government to withdraw troops. Whether Al-Shabaab will live by its word not to attack Kenya any more should it remove the troops, is largely a matter of conjecture.

But one can make an educated guess by analysing how the group has evolved since it came to international attention about 10 years ago. Since its formation, Al-Shabaab has been defined by two strong impulses — the nationalistic impulse to fight for political power in Somalia and the impulse to be a full-fledged terrorist outfit.

Al-Shabaab was the military wing of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) that toppled the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of President Abdullahi Yusuf in June 2006. It came to power on the back of Islamic agenda and introduced sharia law as a way of restoring the much desired law and order and to fight entrenched graft.

The overthrow of the TFG government greatly alarmed Somalia’s traditional enemy, its neighbour Ethiopia, about the presence of Islamists on its borders. Ethiopian troops moved in against the Islamists in December 2006 and in a lighting strike, dislodged them from the capital within a few days and restored the TFG.

The moderates of ICU went to exile in neighbouring countries and the Al-Shabaab fighters sought sanctuary in central and southern Somalia from the invading Ethiopian forces. Here, they denounced the Ethiopian forces as Christian imperialists and called upon Somalis and Muslims throughout the world to join hands and wage war against them.

Hundreds of Somalis answered the call to jihad, the holy war against the Christian invaders. From the UK, Denmark and the US, hundreds of young Somalis and Arab fighters allied to Al-Qaeda swelled Al-Shabaab’s ranks against the Ethiopians.

The Ethiopian invasion “transformed the group from a small, relatively unimportant part of a more moderate Islamic movement into the most powerful and radical armed faction in the country,” writes Rob Wise, a counter-terrorism expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Ethiopian forces withdrew from Somalia in January 2009. Al-Shabaab declared Pyrrhic victory and trained its guns on the weak TFG. However, in reality, the group’s future looked bleak, especially to its foreign fighters. Ethiopia’s withdrawal deprived the group of their object of hate.

But from their hideouts in Pakistan, former Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden exhorted the Al-Shabaab to fight on until sharia law is established in all of Somalia. For years, Al-Qaeda’s cell in East Africa led by planners of the August 1998 attacks in Nairobi and Tanzania, Nabhan Saleh and Fazul Mohammed, had operated safely out of Somalia.

Historically, the greater Somalia comprises Somalia and regions inhabited by Somali people in neighbouring countries – Ogadenia in Ethiopia and Kenya’s former North Eastern province.

When Kenya invaded Somalia in 2011, the terrorists made another call to fight the “Christian crusaders” just as it did with Ethiopia.

Cables released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks indicate that this was precisely one of the concerns US officials had about Kenya’s intention to invade Somalia. However, Kenyan officials robustly argued that the invasion was necessary after Al-Shabaab started proselytising in Kenyan towns such as Mandera, Wajir and Garissa. It also worried that the militants were using the port of Kismayu to raise money and bring in drugs and contraband goods thus damaging the Kenyan economy.

In many ways, the Kenyan invasion was justified but staying in Somalia for so long, Tuta said, has made Kenya to be seen as occupying power just like Ethiopia before. In propaganda videos it released after the Westgate Mall and Mpeketoni attacks, the group claims to be liberating traditional Muslim lands.

Exit strategy

“If Al-Shabaab was fighting for a political cause, it would have been easy to deal with them. But the aim of Islamic extremists is to create a caliphate in the lands they occupy. If we pull out, it will be their first step into a thousand mile journey into the new caliphate,” said Tuta.

Government officials say withdrawing KDF will give fresh impetus for a group that has been on the back foot for long and whose demise is nigh.

However, predictions of Al-Shabaab’s death have been going on for as long as the group has existed, especially after its leaders who were ideologically inclined to Al-Qaeda was decimated in unrelenting US drone strikes

Ahmed Godane, its charismatic but brutal leader, was killed in September last year in a drone attack while the planner of Westgate Mall attack, Adan Garar, was killed in a rain of hellfire missiles in March this year.

His successor, Ahmad Umar, was misjudged as colourless and largely interested in pursing Al-Shabaab’s original nationalistic causes rather than international terrorism.

But with the Garissa attacks, he has not only announced himself the supreme leader of Al-Shabaab, he has also showcased his organisational and strategic abilities.

The attack will be a magnet to attract international funding and for recruiting local and international fighters which can only complicate the war against it.

President Kenyatta has said that KDF troops will remain in Somalia until it stabilises, suggesting that Kenya’s mission in Somalia is open-ended.

Tuta said the government should outline a long term exit strategy out of Somalia. “The government should say, for example, that in the next three years we shall pull out so that the Somali government can start preparing to take charge of their security situation,” he said.