We admire them; we don't love them.

There are few men alive who do not love stories of derring-do. There are many men who have read David Morrell's First Blood and many more who watched the movie adaptation, Sylvester Stallone's Rambo: First Blood. Then came the police procedurals and action movies and TV shows. And if that was not enough, there are millions of men who are fascinated by the near mythical descriptions of the very British Special Air Service, the French Foreign Legion, the Israeli Mossad, the All American Delta Forces, Navy Seals and LAPD SWAT. Kenya has to make do with the brutally effective General Service Unit - Reconnoitering Squad, the GSU-Recce. Oh yeah, and the newly minted Special Forces.

What makes the celebration of the West's SASs, Foreign Legions, Mossads and the like is that even when they wipe out entire villages of innocents, they tend to do it overseas and not at home. When the GSU was first deployed by Jomo Kenyatta, its targets were the men and women who would dare to challenge Mzee's rule, university students - and their lecturers. "Running battles" is now a trite phrase, but in the eighties and nineties, it meant that every time university students took to the streets, death inevitably followed. Bloodshed was guaranteed. Lives were shattered. We may pretend to admire the GSU and GSU-Recce, but we will never love them the way the British, the French, the Israelis, or the Americans seem to love their special forces.

The late John Njoroge Michuki, as Minister for Internal Affairs, was the last true friend of the security establishment, though he seemed to favour one branch: the Provincial Administration. It might be because he came from that part of the security establishment during the dying days of the colonial government. If Maina Kiai and John Githongo are to be believed, the ruthlessness that Mr Michuki displayed in dealing with the criminal elements of the nation he could only have learnt at the lap of the brutal colonial government in its scorched-earth war with the Land and Freedom Armies of Central Province, the Mau Mau. Mr Michuki's, and Dr Murungaru's, his predecessor's, love for the Provincial Administration saw it get modern equipment but sadly, its recruitment and training policies remained largely unmodified.

And that is the sad sate of the Kenyan security establishment, bar perhaps the secretive National Intelligence Service. It is effective as a blunt weapon and every now and then it is surgical in the precision of its interventions, but so long as it is deployed in overwhelming strength against the people, it will never be loved and as a result it will never be venerated in books, music or film. If it is ever depicted in any form in the arts, it will be as a weapon of destruction not as saviour of lives. There will never be a Kenyan David Morrell writing an ode in the style of First Blood in celebration the skills of members of the security forces. There will always be malcontents such as Maina Kiai and John Githongo or organisations such as the Independent Medico-Legal Unit highlighting the "human rights abuses" of Kenya's security forces.