The armed attack on the college in Kenya is apparently over, and the death toll is devastatingly high. Via the NYT:
NAIROBI, Kenya — Gunmen attacked a university campus in northeastern Kenya early Thursday, clashing with guards, forcing their way into dormitories, taking hostages and singling out non-Muslims, the authorities said.
Kenya’s interior minister, Joseph Nkaissery, said that 147 people had been killed, including four attackers. He contended that the deadly siege at the university had ended, and that security forces were carefully sweeping the campus for any remaining threats.
[snip]The Shabab, an extremist group based in Somalia and affiliated with Al Qaeda, issued a statement through a radio station it controls claiming responsibility for the attack.
It said its fighters attacked the university early Thursday morning, began separating Muslims from non-Muslims and started an “operation against the infidels.”
The article goes onto say that the Kenyan government had crossed into Somalia a few years back to drive this group away from its border after the group attacked some targets in Kenya, which led the terrorists to step up reprisal attacks.
Serious question: What the hell can be done to prevent these horrific attacks? I’m pretty sure “moar gunz!” isn’t the answer, but damned if I know what is. Maybe politely asking our “allies” in Saudi Arabia to quit funding radicalization efforts worldwide would be a start, but it may be too late for that. Thoughts?
David Koch
–
schrodinger's cat
They do seem to hate education, don’t they. First the Pakistani school and now this.
celticdragonchick
Beats me. Religious insanity has been going for all of recorded history, and machinegun wielding Islamists are just the latest iteration.
Belafon
The answer, in this case, is more guns, a highly coordinated global effort, involving military on a global scale. So many people will oppose this, it will not happen.
And I’m serious. The last of these higly coordinated global effors ended Germany and Japan’s thirst for conquering.
Belafon
@Belafon: It would also help if we (re)build Africa. That’s not going to happen either.
Cervantes
@schrodinger’s cat:
The dead students are mostly Christians.
The leader of the attack used to be the principal of the local Islamic school.
Cacti
Bomb Iran!
Isn’t that the neocon answer for everything these days?
jl
@Cervantes: They hate free competition of ideas. Which if I remember my (translated into English) Koran correctly, is a very unIslamic idea.
But maybe Khalid can chime in on that, if he happens by.
Betty Cracker
@Belafon: Even if there was a globally orchestrated military effort to crush these groups, I’m not sure it would make a difference since they are stateless actors who can melt back into the population. It would be like the never-ending war to root out the Taliban in Afghanistan on a global scale.
mai naem
Al Shabaab’s been involved in Kenyan terror stuff for several years because Kenya’s been involved in the Somali peace process and they’ve even sent troops in. The problem is that this stuff used to be aimed more around the Garissa area and basically in the northeast part but after the Westgate attack last year, Nairobi to outsiders doesn’t look safe and Kenya depends heavily on tourist trade. This on top of Tanzania and Botswana doing a better job with their safari offerings. Used to be that Kenya would get the giants share of people going on safaris. etc. This is really sad. Nairobi used to have a peaceful mix of Christians, Hindus, Muslims and even a few Buddhists and Jews. Al Shabaab is just another bunch of crazy religious whackjobs. I read somewhere that Al Shabaab requires women to fear the full hijab in Somalia(it never had this version of Islam) not because they want women covered but because women then have to spend more money on fabric because they need more fabric.
mai naem
@Belafon: You have to get rid of corruption and that is very tough to get rid of. because there’s so much poverty. The Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta is just an old fashioned corrupt crook a la Batista/Mugabe/Duvalier.
BTW, on my twitter feed, they said the Kenyan govt had gotten intelligence about an impending attack on universities and there were only 2 police officers in front of this university.
Just Some Fuckhead
Bomb Iran. That’s the only thing that’s going to work. When it stops working, we’ll find something else to bomb.
burnspbesq
Asymmetrical wars are really hard for the established party to fight. The bad guys don’t wear uniforms, melt into the civilian population when it is convenient to do so, and come together ad hoc (aided by modern communications technology) to accomplish specific objectives. You need really good intel (including, but not limited to, universal monitoring of cell phones and the internet), and the ability to act on that intel in near real time (yay drones and air-mobile special operations troops, which the US has pretty close to a monopoly on).
In short, any country that is trying to fight a non-state actor like ISIS or Shabab, without giving up democratic principles and basic civil liberties, is fucked. A few years ago, somebody wrote in the Economist that democracies fight terror with one hand tied behind their back, because that’s what it means to be a democracy. At times like this, I wouldn’t blame Kenya for wondering whether democracy is worth it.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Cacti: I see GMTA.
Seanly
Abandoning all religions would probably help against some of this…
hahahaha, we’d just find some other excuse to destroy each other.
jharp
Good grief. Sounds frighteningly awful.
socraticsilence
Honestly, we probably should have seriously looked into attacking the KSA in the aftermath of 9-11, arguably the Saudi government had far more impactful links to Al Queda (though less direct) than the Taliban did but we basically gave the Kingdom a free freaking pass.
scav
@Seanly: Pretty much. And as they’re PR aware (have to be, to properly terrorize especially on the global stage), children and religious minorities el alia are high value targets. Number counts help. Because capturing the media always requires more. bigger, flashier.
PaulW
1) we need to be more aggressive stopping illegal gun sales – the movie Lord of War is not a fictional story – between nations. All the major powers – US, Russia, France, England, China – need to stop selling weapons and aiding terror groups like this regardless of ideology.
2) we need to be more successful shutting down their financial backing. If Saudi princes are funding these terrorists, to hell with alliances, they are already violating any good-faith arrangements with us in the first place. Shut them down.
Keith G
I would be interested in finding and leafing through some type of (cross-referenced) compendium of these groups. Before we get to the remedy stage, it would be nice to know the whos, hows and whys of each of these fine groups. I assume that they are not monolithic, therefore there can not be a single-notion answer to this. Some of these seem to be personality cults pure and simple, while some others seem to be associated with a type of Islamic Apocalypticism.
And I am sure others are rooted in some form of reaction to economic repression. And there are some that have mixed origins.
How to confront them them will in part depend on how they are motivated.
Nonetheless, for the time being, we are going to have to kill some or many of those who have already joined up as true believers.
PaulW
the terrorists are going after schools for very good reasons: they are easy targets to find, any form of education is something the extremists view with disdain to begin with, and they are bound to kill enough people to make the news and get their Propaganda of the Deed out there. Universities are good for killing victims, the terrorists kidnap younger kids at other schools for conversion or slave labor (and like those poor girls in Nigeria taken by Boko Haram, raped and scarred forever).
Davis X. Machina
@schrodinger’s cat: Schools in Nigeria are targets all the time for Al Shabaab’s ideological fellow travelers.
srv
AFRICOM will not be happy until Kenya and Ethiopia look like Libya.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Kenya used to be a nice country. Shouldn’t say “used to be”, it still is, but the Shabab people could really fuck it up for them.
Hey, you kick ’em out of Somalia (and Somalia will be thrilled when they’re gone) they’re going to go somewhere unless you kill ’em all. So they’re going to Kenya.
Fucking shame.
Violet
@Belafon:
The Chinese are doing that. They’re building strong relationships in every country they can on the African continent. They build things the country wants–roads, stadiums, hospitals, whatever. Been happening for 30 years.
Baud
@Violet:
We won’t even invest in our own country.
Redshift
@Belafon: Since statistics show that more than 95% of suicide terrorism is in response to military occupation, I find it extremely dubious that it can be solved by an even greater foreign military presence.
Similarly, “kill them all” has about the same balance of emotional satisfaction and complete lack of results as the neocons desire to bomb Iran. It presumes that there are a relatively fixed number of “them” that will not be increased by collateral damage from efforts to kill them all.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not as simple as either of those.
(Interestingly, the research on military occupation seems to it’s specifically occupation, not military action; so if there aren’t troops on the ground, while it still has the same drawbacks as any other “kill them all” strategy, it doesn’t have that drawbacks of occupation.)
oldster
God, the damage this did to the university.
Scott Walker must be so jealous.
bargal20
It all goes back to Saudi money. They fund Wahhabi “schools” all over the world that are little more than extremist indoctrination centers. Grateful parents are promised a free education for their kids but that education is nothing but years of slavish memorization of the Koran and ingestion of bilious hatred for anything “un-Islamic”.
The same thing happened in Indonesia, where graduates of Saudi-financed Wahhabi madrassas have killed thousands in attacks across the archipelago.
But Saudi Arabia is our great ally, because.
Violet
@bargal20:
Wondering how the new agreement with Iran and the potential for their oil is going to affect the relationship with Saudi Arabia.
fuckwit
@Violet: Hopefully a lot. And fast.
fuckwit
@bargal20: Did they learn this from Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and all, or did those good ol’ boys learn it from the Wahabbis? Where did the grift of “free education” that is really just extremist religious doctrination come from?
Aleta
Would be great if universities here would offer placement and financial aid to surviving Kenyan students.
kc
That is just horrifying. Those poor people.
kc
@fuckwit:
Dude, I hate those televangelists but please.
Do let me know the next time graduates of Oral Roberts or Liberty U go on a mass killing spree.
Mandalay
@Violet:
Yes they are, and in Central and South America as well. And China generally practices what it preaches about not interfering in other people’s business, so shady regimes love doing business with them.
Because there’s nothing that makes the headlines apart from the odd announcement of a new trade deal, it’s a greatly under-reported story, but the level and diversity of Chinese investment in the developing world is astounding. I know who I think will be calling all the shots fifty years from now, and it’s not the United States.
fuckwit
@Belafon: That’s bleak, but there’s some truth to the idea that some lessons can only be learned through bloodshed. People here often mention the Thirty Years War. Europe was awash with the blood of religious hatred for hundreds of years. And ideological and ethnic hatreds. Now, after all that and two world wars, they’re by and large pretty secular and moderate. Growing up in the Cold War era, I never thought I’d see a nearly borderless political Eurpean Union with a single currency, but there it is. Maybe at some point a sufficient amount of blood will be shed in the Islamic world for it to settle into some kind of peaceful, modern life.
NCSteve
Because if there’s one thing that pleases God, it’s the wanton slaughter of innocents.
Kropadope
Today just seems to be a day for horrific events at universities.
fuckwit
@kc: I could probably nutpick abortion clinic bombings, or argue that the Iraq War was a huge bombing spree enabled by those evangelical graduates infiltrated all into government and thinktanks, but I have to concede that the islamic evangelical whackjobs are at a completely different level of violence than christian evangelical whackjobs, true.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Violet: They are building things, this is true. They also basically enslave the local population while paying off their leaders (this is SOP for almost every foreign country working in Africa today) to do the building, so it’s not exactly a win-win situation for all concerned. Just some of them.
But they are putting the locals to work and building stuff. No one can deny that.
@Violet: Probably not at all. The Iranians are not exactly flush with oil. They have enough for their population now and some exports, but that’s really about it.
Adam L Silverman
Betty,
Let me recommend the strategy research paper (SRP) at the link below:
http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=ADA589056
It was written by my former student who is a colonel in the Kenyan Army as partial fulfillment of his degree and certification. It was his unit that responded to the mall attack a couple of years back. Please keep in mind that Godfrey’s first language is Swahili, so while his formal written English is good, it’s not the same as a native speaker. I think you’ll find the background sections to be a good primer on the problem set.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@CONGRATULATIONS!: HAHA I’m so wrong. The Iranians have a shitload of oil. #2 or #3 in the world. I’ll bet the Saudis aren’t happy about this at all.
bargal20
@fuckwit: Oh, I have no doubt vouchers and charter schools are specifically designed to facilitate publicly-funded Christian right “education” in America. But they probably got their ideas by looking jealously at the Australian system, developed in the 1970s, of funding religious schools from the government purse.
It’s interesting to see how this is is panning out in Australia. Originally, government funding of private education in Australia was a sop by the Australian Labor Party to Catholics, to stop their drift to the right. There was a very large underfunded Catholic school system that ran in parallel to the public school system.
However, as the Australian Constitution prevents the government from favoring one religion, it was forced to fund all private schools. This means that in today’s multicultural Australia, the government is funding private Christian schools that teach creationism, Steiner schools that use all sorts of new age gobbligook in their curriculums, and now Islamic schools where children are taught that Israel organized 9-11.
kc
@fuckwit:
Actually I doubt any of the main enablers of the Iraq invasion were grads of Liberty or the like (tho Bush did seed the government with them). Weren’t they for the most part Ivy grads? And not all evangelicals (or even Christians) to boot?
mdblanche
@bargal20:
the spice must flow.
bargal20
@mdblanche:
Beer is the mind killer (burp).
fuckwit
@kc: Yeah, it’d be a weak argument, which is why I decided to concede your point instead. There was quite a large swath of fail involved in pushing that war, and the zombie fundamentalist grads were probably very low on the list.
fuckwit
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Yep, it could be a game-changer. I hope it is. There will be much butthurt in KSA, Moscow, and Texas, for sure.
sparrow
@Redshift: Bingo. The answer is: give desperate people a relatively better way out of a hellish existence than what these guys are offering. It really shouldn’t be that hard, but it would probably involve not bombing people in the first place…
Cervantes
@Adam L Silverman:
I was a bit taken aback to see immediately in the abstract, and then consistently throughout the paper, that the colonel rendered Siad Barre’s name “Said Barre.” How did that slip by?
Anyhow, thanks for the cite; I’ll keep reading despite my initial misgivings!
rp
This probably won’t be a popular opinion, but I think a big part of the answer is the liberal use of assassinations. Using conventional military force against groups like this never works. Better for everyone to take out the leaders of these orgs whenever possible.
Keith G
@Adam L Silverman: That was very easy to read and an informative introduction. Thanks.
scav
I’m rather enjoying this public display of the basic roots of publically justified Xianist / traditional values. Some of the recent takes on Indiana are basically a paraphrase of “Hell yeah I beat my wife — but not as bad as my neighbor so STFU bitch, appreciate me, and bring me my lunch.” Cotton Christianity. Brooks just wants the rabble to STFU and be polite while waiting for their betters to decide to trickle crumbs of tolerence upon them. So long as there is a single violent Muslim, or black, or Ivy-league war-monger, there shalt be no criticism of Fundamentalist Christian, or white, or Police tendencies toward violence. ‘merka! So long as it’s theoretically better than the worst individual example anywhere, it’s exceptional and thus improvements are to be stringently avoided and ignored.
kc
@fuckwit:
I win! J/k.
I have some thoughts on how much influence* the fundies actually have the federal level, but I’ll save them for a more suitable thread.
*any influence by them is too much, but you know what I mean.
kc
Surprised I’m not seeing more commentary about this horrific event on Twitter.
David Koch
@kc: nothing either on leading True Progressive™ news clearinghouse Dkos
Keith G
@sparrow:
Actually it will be quite fucking hard as long as the hellish existence than what these guys are offering” is enforced with no holds barred violence. As long as the enemy has the leadership and capability to essentially wipe out the “beach heads” of that relatively better way out, they have a strong hand to play.
I do not know what the answer could be, but it might include getting Kenya the type of funding and military support that we give to Israel. I think Keya’s future is much more in question.
Mandalay
O/T, but since this is a “Religious Nuts, Sociopaths” thread….while everyone is discussing pizza weddings, this happened in Indiana on Monday.
It is just mind numbing that this is happening in the United States in 2015.
Adam L Silverman
@Cervantes: it happened because the verdammt template program (macro) that the students are required to use locked up on him just as he was uploading it for submission. It locked the whole thing up and ate his SRP within two hours of the deadline. Tech support was, of course, of no help. This happened in my office and if you’ve never seen a 1) Kenyan special forces colonel and 2) who is also a tribal warrior on the verge of tears, this is how you get it to happen! Anyhow, we took what we thought was the final proofed version, transferred it to my desktop workstation, and I spent the next ninety minutes with him reformatting it into a new, blank template. If this is the only major error that resulted from that, then I’ve got a clear conscience!
fuckwit
@bargal20: The Fairness Doctrine run amok? Ugh. Since you mentioned catholic schools I expect the roots of education-as-religious-indoctrination predate both American fundamentalists and the middle-eastern kind. It’s probably at least a thousand years old, if not more.
Calouste
@sparrow: Quite. I remember reading an interview with a young Algerian man in the early 90s, around the time the Islamists there started gaining influence. He was talking about the situation of him and others like him, where the economic situation prevented them from getting a place of their own and getting married. And when they are stuck with their parents and unable to get laid, a lot of guys in their late teens or twenties are interested in anything that promises to get them out of that situation.
Adam L Silverman
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Congratulations,
OPEC limits both Iranian and Iraqi output so that neither can out produce the other in any given year. The justification I’ve seen for this was to limit what would otherwise be a contributing issue to the longstanding grievances between the two countries.
One of the major issues with this is that no one really has a good handle on Iraqi reserves. This has to do with how the petroleum rights were handled under King Faisal and how the seven sisters oil companies handled their parcels. Essentially, Iraq has always been considered a strategic petroleum reserve. If you look where the wells are, they’re not where we know the biggest reserves are, which are out along the border with Saudi. The Seven Sisters, OPEC, even the old US strategic plans for what to do should the USSR invade into the Caspian and Iran (this scenario was the basis for Tom Clancy’s novel Red Storm Rising) intended that Iraq be used as a strategic reserve. And since Saudi Arabia controls OPEC, they control how much Iran (and Iraq) can produce in a given a year.
Pogonip
Has anyone tried declaring a jihad against these mass murderers? If so, was there any response?
Cervantes
@Adam L Silverman:
A sadly familiar tale!
(Reading the paper now.)
Svensker
@fuckwit:
Well, the religious were always organizing schools. And the schools and the monasteries (in the West) were often the repository of much learning. Often, if the religious weren’t offering schools, there were no schools.
WaterGirl
@Mandalay: I would have gone with enraging, myself.
Heliopause
Short term, options are limited.
Long term, I would expect to see fewer of these awful movements in the Islamic world if the West would ever end its ongoing program of colonization, invasion, assassination, and proxy control through brutal despots.
Cervantes
@Adam L Silverman:
Many thoughts, obviously, and too many to discuss — but here are some re a basic question: the genesis of Al Shabaab:
In other words, the ICU was providing the kind of stability Somalia had lacked for decades — the kind of stability the Transitional Federal Government, its warlords supported by the West, had not been able to provide.
Is that a fair re-statement?
A couple of things are elided here (not deliberately, I’m sure).
1. “The situation then escalated.” That’s short for the following: The TFG and its warlords were losing the battle for Somalia. The Bush Administration sent special forces in to help the TFG — and to help the Ethiopians, who then mounted an invasion of Somalia.
A fair re-statement?
2. Al Shabaab served as the military wing of the ICU That’s short for the following: Before the US-and-TFG-supported Ethiopian invasion, the ICU (Islamic Courts Union) was a group of entities, with a range of views, that had managed to stabilize part of Somalia to the relief of many, many long-suffering Somalis. While we will never know what might have happened to the ICU had the invasion not occurred, it’s possible that some of its moderate elements would have allied with the TFG in some way, marginalizing the more radicalized elements. But during and after the military invasion, the moderate elements in the ICU were naturally and predictably marginalized and the more radicalized elements empowered. These latter elements, who had been arguing that the West had declared war on Islam, took power and became what we know today as Al Shabaab.
Again, a fair re-statement?
As for that last sentence:
The foreign invaders were called “foreign invaders” because they were foreign invaders. This was not a dastardly rhetorical trick perpetrated by the ICU (or even Al Shabaab).
Cervantes
@Keith G:
Or it might not.
Have the decades of “funding and military support that we give to Israel” worked out well for that neighborhood?
Cervantes
@rp:
Perhaps you could argue the point?
With examples? (Iran, maybe?)
Keith G
@Cervantes: Al Shabaab seem to want to extend its influence into parts of Kenya. Colonel Buluma, it seems, would like to see “Kenya and regional partners…build a secure and prosperous region”. That takes the smart application of cash – everything from funding refugee support to helping Kenya and it’s neighbors strengthen and mobilize the type of civil brain power needed to help the Somalis help themselves.
Cervantes
@Keith G:
That’s quite different from “the type of funding and military support that we give to Israel.”
Steve
At least they didn’t threaten to burn down a pizzeria that would refuse to provide pizza at a same sex wedding based upon religious convictions. Killing Christians for their beliefs is so much more tolerant.
Matt McIrvin
@burnspbesq: So why don’t these terrorist groups already rule the entire world?
Keith G
@Cervantes: That’s part of it, maybe an big part of it, arguably an important part. If Kenya is an ally, it is an ally in the front line of a zone of significant conflict.
Interesting rhetorical gambit, but just words unless you want to put forward the rough outline of an alternative plan. Some things work out; some things do not. Sometimes we learn from a previous process/policy and design a better process/process for the next time.
PIGL
@burnspbesq: imposing a protectorate on Somalia would be allot easier than WW3
PIGL
@PaulW: the Saudi princelings needed a good sound whacking 25 yrs ago. The damage is done.
PIGL
@kc: and yes, it is. I am prone to violent thoughts (some of you may have noticed) and have a long ” better dead” list of my own. It does not include random children of the wrong religion. I can’t grasp the level of misdirected hatred required to do what these killers have done.0
PIGL
@Adam L Silverman: thank you, sir, for bringing this to our attention. I am reading it tonight.
Keith G
@Cervantes: In case you come back….Bedtime. Nite.
Adam L Silverman
@Keith G: Cervantes and Keith G,
Please remember that Colonel Buluma is writing from a Kenyan perspective.
Adam L Silverman
@Cervantes: Cervantes,
I think that most of these are fair restatements. As for eliding material, all the SRPs have an upper page limit as part of the parameters of the project. Unfortunately this makes the students make hard choices over what to include and what to exclude. Or at least that was the case through last June when I went off my civilian mobilization orders as the cultural advisor there.
priscianus jr
@CONGRATULATIONS!: “Wondering how the new agreement with Iran and the potential for their oil is going to affect the relationship with Saudi Arabia.”
I think it’s going to affect the Saudis a lot, not because of oil, but because of the 5+1 normalizing (relatively speaking) relations with their hated enemy.
xenos
@burnspbesq: ad an example, look to South Korea. They were able to transition to a reasonably democratic system in spite of constant destabilisation, but needed a lor of support. How to support Kenya is a tough question.
Cervantes
@Adam L Silverman:
Thanks much for sharing the paper.
I presume you keep in touch with many of your students. Is the colonel one of them? And if so, how is he doing in the aftermath of the recent attack? (Too early still for an aftermath, I know, but it’s the word that came to mind.)
Sherparick
@rp: Drones and special ops at least keep these guys focused a great deal on just staying alive; there are always going to be some bad actors, we humans being human, that I am afraid just need killing. However, the overall disintegration of Governments in the South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa post-cold war and colonialism means that are millions of alienated, “frustrated” young men looking for a cause that will enable to tell themselves the lie that they are something special. (This sense of frustration is a “spiritual” poverty, not particularly due to economic or class circumstances.”)
“Man would fain be great and sees that he is little; would fain be happy and sees that he is miserable; would fain be perfect and sees that he is full of imperfections; would fain be the object of the love and esteem of men, and sees that his faults merit only their aversion and contempt. The embarrassment wherein he finds himself produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults.” Pascal, Pensees, as quoted by Eric Hoffer, in “The True Believer.”http://evelynbrooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/The_True_Believer_-_Eric_Hoffer.pdf
To cut off this reservoir of manpower, another more positive vision will have to be created to attract the frustrated and cure the self-contempt that leads to such insane acts of rage.
Adam L Silverman
@Cervantes: I do, he is, and Ive emailed to check on him and the other Kenyan officer I’ve worked with. Still waiting to hear back.
Cervantes
@Adam L Silverman:
Thanks. Let me know.
Also curious about his (and your) take on Kenya’s retaliatory strikes in Somalia.