Symptoms and maladies.

Afghanistan was a ho-hum former Cold War battlefield when the Sudan decided it had had enough of Usama Bin Laden, UBL, and expelled him from Khartoum, together with his army-looking-for-a-war. UBL made it to the comfortable hearth of Mullah Omar, the cyclops leading the former madrassa students of Afghanistan, sweeping away any vestigial remains of communism - or the CIA. That visit set off a chain reaction whose ramifications will reverberate for generations.

One of them could not possibly have been foreseen, except by those willing to learn the proper lessons of history. Iraq's Saddam Hussein was bloodthirsty tyrannical mad man. He killed everyone he suspected had even thought of becoming Iraq's next president. He used guns, bombs, mines, missiles and poison gas - to kill those he ruled with the proverbial iron fist. He was a mad bad man through and through. Yet, ironically, despite all his fulminations against the United States, Israel and all his other enemies, he never did plot their downfall, he never paid for it, and he didn't acquire the weapons to fight his Mother of All Battles.

So when the United States and its Coalition of the Willing, in response to an outrage of epic proportions, toppled UBL's hosts in Afghanistan and established, in effect, the greatest narco-state in history, and followed it up with the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the destruction of his Republican Guard and Ba'ath BParty, little did they know that what would rise up to fill the blood-drenched shoes of the Taleban and Sadam Hussein would be the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Iraq and Afghanistan became the training grounds for modern-day mujahideen. The world will never be the same again.

The United States panicked, made up stories, invaded countries, toppled stable governments and bequeathed to the world the Islamic State. Kenya is at its 9/11 moment. It's reaction has been exactly the same as that of the United States, right down to the rhetoric and the panic-as-legislation style of problem solving. The outcome of United States' hegemony is the Islamic State. What will be the outcome of Kenya's tough-on-terror stance?

al Shabaab and its ilk are not regular armies. They do not have regular chains of command. They do not communicate like regular armies do. They don't even do it the way special forces usually do. They do not fight for a nation in the sense of a geographical territory that belongs to them and them only. They have no interest in controlling political institutions. Their political ambitions have little to do with modern concepts of government, except in Vatican City - and Iran. Their message is simple and devastating.  The answer to their venom, violence and danger is not counter-venom, counter-violence or counter-danger. 

This message seems to have escaped the securocracy, determined to "fight back" with every weapon in its arsenal, even weapons outlawed by the Constitution. What thy will bequeath Kenya is a sizable population of young men and women with designs on a nation of their own based on religious ideals that have been pared down to the essentials: we are good; "everyone else must die." This path we are on leads only to an outcome similar to the Islamic State. al Shabaab is the symptom; Islamic State is the outcome if we misdiagnose our true maladies.