"....Got it? For Americans to be 100 percent safe on American soil, the U.S. government has to get more deeply involved in the local politics and national security problems of this troubled East African region -- using the FBI, CIA, special operations forces, drones, whatever -- in order to root out bad guys wherever they might be.
There are two obvious problems with this line of reasoning. First, it fails to ask whether America's repeated interference in this and other parts of the world is one of the reasons groups like al Qaeda and al-Shabab sometimes decide to come after us. Indeed, to the extent that the United States might face a threat from al-Shabab, it might be because Washington has been blundering around in Somali politics since the early 1990s and usually making things worse. The same goes for Kenya too. Al-Shabab attacked the mall because Kenya sent troops into Somalia in 2011 and their intervention had undermined al-Shabab's position in that troubled country. Kenya may have had its own good reasons for intervening; my point is simply that the tragic attack it suffered wasn't a random act. On the contrary, it was a direct consequence of Kenya's own policy decisions. To say that in no way justifies this heinous attack -- it merely identifies cause and effect.
Ditto al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden didn't get up one day and decide he wanted to launch a few terrorist attacks, pull out his atlas, and pick the United States at random. His decision to attack U.S. military forces and government installations, and then to attack the United States directly, was reprehensible and an obvious threat, but it didn't come out of nowhere. On the contrary, the emergence of al Qaeda was a direct response to various aspects of America's Middle East policy (e.g., blanket support for Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia and the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf through the 1990s). As I've noted before, the United States has devoted most of its energy and effort since then to chasing down bad guys and killing them, but hardly any time trying to act in ways that would make the terrorists' message less appealing to potential recruits.
So before we declare the Kenyan bombing a direct threat to the United States and get more directly involved in a set of regional dynamics that we don't understand very well, we ought to ask ourselves if this will make the terrorism danger that we face worse or better. ...."
1 comment:
'The same goes for Kenya too. Al-Shabab attacked the mall because Kenya sent troops into Somalia in 2011' Kenya did not just wake up one day and enter Somali to fight Al shabaab. Al shabaab got into Kenyan territory way back and were killing humanitarian personnel and Kenyan police along the Kenya Somali border and Kidnapping Kenyan tourists or those coming to Kenya by coast and asking for ransom money (remember when Alshabaab pirates were kidnapping and killing Americans and Europeans etc). What country lets that happen without trying to eliminate the visible threat to their economy? Alshabaab is an ambitious group that aimed to control the Indian ocean coast. There's no way they were going to sit in Somalia quiet and peaceful, they would have kept coming and pushing into Kenya to try control the region.
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