More honesty, less jingoism

I had an interesting conversation with two acquaintances last night about the thirty new Armoured Personnel Carriers acquired for the National Police Service for use in patrolling the frontier districts of Kenya through which so many terrorists seem to saunter through. It was illuminating.

When I was a student in India, I remember that the Government of India had a Border Security Force, tasked, in the wake of the 1965 invasion by the People's Republic of China, with patrolling the borders of India to prevent such a calamity ever happening again. It is unclear who the equivalent of a Border Security Force in Kenya are or what their mandate is. In the President's telling, the APCs will be used by the National Police Service to patrol the border and deter terrorists from crossing over into Kenya.

I get the impression that we still don't have a conceptual appreciation of what terrorism is and how to counter it. Al Shabaab is not a standing military force. Neither was al Qaeda. When they struck, they did not do so in massed ranks, such as armies are trained to repulse. They infiltrated what they considered enemy territory, acting covertly, and committed their dastardly deeds before (a) blowing themselves up or (b) attempting to get away without detection. What they demonstrated in 1998 with the co-ordinated bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and Westgate in 2013 is the depth of intelligence preparation by Kenya and its partners in the war on terror.

I do not claim that APCs are of no use; when police were ambushed in Kapedo and Baragoi, APCs would have come in handy. However, what distinguishes the 1998 bombings and the Westgate attack from the Kapedo and Baragoi ambushes is that in Kapedo and Baragoi the ostensible reason for the ambush was that one community feared that the National Police Service favoured one ethnic community over another in an ongoing ethnic conflict that goes back decades, while at Westgate, al Shabaab had nothing against ethnic communities in Kenya, but against the Government of Kenya and its policies in Somalia. In Kapedo and Baragoi, policing policy failed. At Westgate, national intelligence failed.

If we are to prevail against al Shabaab and its supporters, it is time we had an honest discussion of what it is, what it wants, how it operates and what we need to prevail. The last Director-General of the National Intelligence Service resigned because he failed to anticipate where and when al Shabaab would strike. He didn't need APCs to gather that intelligence. Even if the National Police had APC when the Westgate siege began, APCs would have been of use only after the attack began, not before. The National Police's network of criminal informants should have been the first line of defence against al Shabaab by informing the National Police of suspicious activities among the suspect class. A rational assessment of the APCs value will accept that they will be useless against terrorists, unless it is a combat situation in the field of battle.

What few appreciate is that APCs are massive vehicles, designed to keep its dismount squad safe as it approaches a target area. They are not nimble nor fast, just what a guerrilla force is. They are not impenetrable either. It is the oldest story of war: someone builds a shield so someone else fashions a harder spear. APCs can be taken down. And unless they are crashing through doors, they cannot fight inside buildings, nor can they ride up multiple floors in multistorey buildings.

If you remember the Westgate siege, the National Police Service, after a false start, acquitted itself admirably. When the Reconnaissance Company of the General Service Unit, they did what they were trained to do: urban combat in confined spaces. The Kenya Defence Force's Special Forces, when they took over from the GSU, did not acquit itself well. Army commandos might be trained in CQB, but this is always in support of a larger military exercise, which is why when they were deployed at Westgate, they brought with them HMMWVs and Soviet-era BTR-80s and ultimately bombarded the mall, setting it on fire.

We have a Directorate of Criminal Investigations and a National Intelligence Service.  These are the principal agencies responsible for detecting and disrupting terror plots. APCs cannot solve an intelligence problem. We should stop saying that we bought them for anti-terror operations. We should admit that they have been purchased to fight those perennial wars between ethnic communities that have fought each other since Independence. It would be more honest, less jingoistic.