“The war on terror” I am yet to buy the notion that fighting terror is act of war per se for the definition of war in an old-fashioned dictionary I have with me reads as “A state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties”. Now, we can have a heated argument of what constitutes a conflict, a nation, a state, or an actor until cows come home but my point is that not all confrontations, however, bloody they may be, fit into the frame of war. If however, we resign to framing the fight of terror as “war on terror” then we will need to borrow heavily from the book The Art of War by Sun Tzu. It partly reads “the supreme act of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”. This might ring a bell with the security agencies in any country including Kenya particularly the intelligence sector which works in tandem with the police force. The crux of the matter is diffusing a potential threat before a trigger comes to be. The limitation of these in Kenya is that a greater section of the population is at home with a misplaced perception that peace and security only benefits the rich and the mighty and the job as just a preoccupation of some civil servants. The benefits of peace and security are an investment environment for the investor and hence eventual profits and employment opportunities for the unemployed and there is no way conflict on one hand and economic gain, power and prestige on the other hand can be placed a sunder. In a nutshell, security agencies cannot work effectively without the support of the common man and thus the job is not the preserve of the agencies alone, there is something each and every citizen can do to contribute to “subduing the enemy without fighting” and this has nothing to do with which creed you belong to. By extension, it will be the height of folly by the government to resort to extra-judicial killings of suspects of terror as the same will be a reflection of failed security machinery. For those hell-bent to cause terror, the book reads “Know your enemy, know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster”. I do not know what felony shoppers at Westgate or a church in Mombasa had committed against the perpetrators of such terror. Yes, we certainly cannot divorce global nature of events as they happen in far-flung corners of the universe from those happening in Kenya but those causing terror need to need to select their enemies appropriately. Certainly, there is the issue venting anger especially for the immediate victims and supporters but this calls for sobriety and picking the enemy appropriately within the sphere of law. It is worse when such acts are cloaked in some faith and much worse when victims resign to particular faithful as their enemy. Besides, people of various creed met their sudden demise at the Westgate, Muslim or otherwise. Those who the accusing fingers are pointed to are the same group who slaughter their kith and kin in Somalia and far beyond and so faith in this case is used by such terror groups the same way Kenyan politician use ethnicity to reach their goal. Here faith and ethnicity are the vehicles but not the destination. Verdict: Both the public and the security machinery is failing. There is need to pick up the pieces and join hands to fight terror. Terror feeds and thrives loose social fabric and where the economic gulf of the haves and have nots is wide. Let us join hands.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Oct 2013 07:53:29 +0000
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