After attack, military influence has increased

One consequence of the Westgate terrorist attack appears to be an increasingly influential role for the military in domestic security issues.

Under President Uhuru Kenyatta, the Chief of Defence Forces, General Julius Karangi, seems to have gained a visibility and influence at the very centre of government policy-making far beyond that enjoyed by any of his predecessors.

President Kenyatta seems to implicitly trust Gen Karangi, in the process relegating his counterparts in other security agencies, notably Inspector-General of Police David Kimaiyo, to the periphery when it comes to both operations and policy formulation.

The civilian heads of the security sector, the Cabinet Secretaries for Defence and Interior Raychelle Omamo and Joseph ole Lenku, respectively, also seem to play second fiddle to Gen Karangi when it comes to catching the President’s ear.

Post-Westgate, a lot of the initiatives geared to beefing up national security in view of the terrorist threat seem to bear Gen Karangi’s imprint insofar as they enhance the role of the military.

This includes the plans announced for formation of a new Nairobi Metropolitan Command, in addition to the existing Western and Eastern Commands, that indicated a direct role for the military in anti-terrorist and routine crime-fighting operations.

Announced by President Kenyatta last December, less than three months after the Westgate attack, the new military command was formed in response to “the current threats in the country emerging from terrorism, drug trafficking, proliferation of small arms, and crime among others, that tend to flourish in highly urbanised areas like Nairobi”.

EXPRESSED CONCERN

Civil society groups immediately expressed concern that the military was being drafted in to take charge of ordinary policing and crime-fighting duties.

The police leadership, unofficially, also expressed concern that its functions were being taken over by the military in a fashion that would create room for serious jurisdictional conflicts.

Contacted by the media at the time, the Kenya Defence Forces leadership and the Ministry of Defence remained evasive on the real duties and mandate of the new command.

Although Ms Omamo sought to allay fears that the new command would take over ordinary policing duties, promised clarifications by her office and the Kenya Defence Forces headquarters never materialised.

Concerns were accentuated later when Ms Omamo later published a notice in the Kenya Gazette authorising military deployment in large swathes of Kenya, including all the main highways out of Nairobi and Mombasa cities and other key roads to the coastal, eastern and northern border regions.

Although the Gazette notice published in May this year allowing the military to engage in domestic operations cited as justification the security situation in Mandera County, where 30 people had been killed in clan violence, the long list included roads well outside the clash-torn area.

The list suggested that the idea was to involve the military in policing against infiltration of Al-Shabaab militants from Somalia.

Roads set for military deployment included the entire northern highway starting from the Thika Superhighway out of Nairobi to Moyale on the Ethiopian border.

There was also the branch-off east from Thika to Garissa town onto the Somalia border, together with roads linking Garissa to other major towns in north-eastern Kenya.

Also covered was the entire Nairobi-Mombasa highway, and from there onwards along the Coast to Lamu via Malindi.

RAISED EYEBROWS

The spectre of the military mounting security patrols, manning road blocks and knocking on doors, rather than only being called out to supplement the police at a time of emergency, raised quite a few eyebrows.

Interestingly, nothing more has been publicly revealed about the actual formation on the new command.

A series of announcements on promotions and postings in the Kenya Defence Forces since last December have not included any information on appointment of a commander for the Nairobi Metropolitan Command.

Since then the military has been called in to take charge of security operations where major conflicts have broken out.

Notable has been the continuing clan warfare in Mandera, endemic security and terrorist threats in Garissa County, Wajir and other parts of north-eastern Kenya bordering lawless Somalia, northern parts of the Rift Valley prone to banditry, cattle-rustling and clan and ethnic warfare, and the attacks in Lamu county and the adjacent Tana River county where over 60 people were killed in July.

Kenyans, generally, have been supportive of military deployment in such areas where the Kenya Police Service and its specialised units, including the paramilitary General Service Unit, the Anti-Stock Theft Unit, and the Border Patrol and Rapid Deployment units of the Administration Police, have often been unable to cope.

However, there are still concerns that frequent insertion of the Kenya Defence Forces into areas which should be ordinary security operations may lead to creeping militarisation of the country.

President Kenyatta’s implicit faith in Gen Karangi has given the military boss unparalleled influence for a military commander.

Thus when Major-General Michael Gichangi was forced out as director-general of the National Intelligence Service, it was taken for granted in security circles that Gen Karangi would have his pick for the next spy chief.

True to prediction, President Kenyatta picked Military Intelligence boss, Maj-General Philip Kameru, as the third NIS boss to come straight out of the military.

The presumption now is that Maj-Gen Kameru will owe fealty to Gen Karangi, unlike Maj-Gen Gichangi who was already well entrenched in the top civilian spy agency job and saw no need as head of an autonomous agency to be subservient to his fellow Kenya Air Force flier.

BADLY BUNGLED MISSION

President Kenyatta’s trust in the military was evident early on in the Westgate siege when he announced that the army would be in charge of the operation, although emphasising several times that overall operational command lay with the Inspector-General of Police.

However, saying that command lay with the Inspector-General was just intended to placate the police in view of the drama that had already occurred at Westgate, when the military barged in to forcefully take over, and badly bungled a mission that the GSU and other units already had under control.

In any case the military is conditioned to answer to nobody outside its own command structure, and derisively considers the police as mere civilians.

Therefore, the announcement that Mr Kimaiyo was in charge meant nothing, because it was the military in control.

The amazing thing is that the President was putting his faith in the military at a time it was already clear that the rescue mission had been badly jeopardised by inter-agency infighting.

The bungled military operation might also have been what led to the Westgate siege that could have ended on day one stretching out for four long days, and eventually leading to inexplicable demolition of the mall by suspected anti-tank weapons.

Some of the events around Westgate might cause President Kenyatta’s faith in the military to be called into question. Instead of trying to unearth the truth, it has been one long attempt at official cover-up.

Soon after Westgate, President Kenyatta promised an official inquiry, but the proposal was later abandoned, presumably because it would expose military blunders.

Then there was the report by a joint parliamentary committee that was thrown out by lawmakers.

House Majority leader Aden Duale, the government’s point-man in the National Assembly, led the onslaught against the report submitted in December by the joint committee on Administration and National Security, chaired by Mr Asman Kamama, and the Defence and Foreign Relations team headed by Ndung’u Gethenji.

Mr Duale accused the committee of doing shoddy work and coming up with nonsensical or unworkable recommendations.

He was particularly irked by the recommendation that all refugee camps hosting Somalis be shut down and the occupants repatriated back to their country in the light of information that the Westgate attack was planned in the camps that had become havens for Al-Shabaab cells.

KDF FAILINGS

However, it appears that one of the key reasons the government orchestrated an assault against the Parliamentary reports is that they exposed part of what went wrong at Westgate, and particularly the KDF failings.

While some members of the committee, notably Mr Gethenji, went out of their way to try and whitewash the military, even calling a press conference in the middle of the hearings to give KDF the all clear, enough still seeped-in through the report to reveal that something serious had gone wrong.

The report itself was a mass of contradictions and warped logic, full of findings and recommendations diametrically opposed to each other, but it conceded at various points that the first day of the siege was marked by uncoordinated response, conflicting command, and a firefight between the GSU and the army that saw casualties on both sides and badly compromised the security operation.

It conceded that the army came in and messed up a situation that was already under control of the GSU.

Therein lies the one lesson from Westgate that should not be swept under the carpet: While the Kenya Defence Forces may perform with valour taking the battle to Al-Shabaab in Somalia, guarding porous borders against terrorist infiltration, or even intervening in serious domestic conflicts such as Tana River, Samburu and Mandera, they are generally ill-suited for civilian police work and should only be deployed as a last resort.

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