Why Kenya Invaded Somalia
The Opening of an Aggressive New Chapter
Article Summary and Author Biography
Nairobi sent troops into Somalia last month ostensibly to root out Islamist militants. But the real reason Kenya went to war has more to do with the restless ambitions of its own military, which is eager to abandon the country's largely peaceful history.
DANIEL BRANCH is Associate Professor of African History at the University of Warwick. His is the author, most recently, of Kenya: Between Hope and Despair 1963-2011.
Snapshot
Americans should not have been surprised by Obama's recent announcement that he would send a small number of troops to Uganda. This is only the latest chapter in a feeble, decades-long U.S. attempt to take out Joseph Kony and his militia.
When Kenya dispatched some 2,000 troops across the border into Somalia on October 16, officials in Nairobi argued that they'd had little choice. After a series of cross-border raids by the Somalia-based Islamist militant group al Shabaab, Kenya's internal security minister, George Saitoti, said, "Kenya has been and remains an island of peace, and we shall not allow criminals from Somalia, which has been fighting for over two decades, to destabilize our peace." A recent spate of kidnappings of tourists and aid workers inside Kenya, Saitoti and others said, was the final straw. With its largely peaceful post-independence history, Kenya has built itself into a regional economic powerhouse, and a serious threat to that prosperity would have to be countered. Accordingly, Nairobi invaded its neighbor to secure its eastern border and to create a buffer zone inside Somalia.
But this case for war is less than convincing, as it is difficult to argue that the threat from al Shabaab is substantially worse than it has been in years past. Kenyan troops have armed, trained, and organized proxy forces to fight al Shabaab on the border since at least 2009, albeit to no great effect. For at least three years, al Shabaab has threatened armed attacks on Kenya; cross-border raids by al Shabaab fighters have been a fact of life in northeastern Kenya for some time. In fact, by some estimates, the overall threat from al Shabaab has declined in recent months: the UN's envoy to Somalia said in August that Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers had actually weakened the al Qaeda-affiliated militants...
