Kenya, by all means, should send police officers to confront, arrest or otherwise dismantle the gangs that have rendered Haiti ungovernable.
I am probably one of a handful of people in the whole country—apart from MPs who just voted to authorise the mission, the officers taking part, government people—to think that this is a good idea.
My reasons, however, are different. First, we must never put the lives of our young people at risk unless it is totally unavoidable.
But I’m assuming that Kenya is sending highly trained, properly prepared and armed professional troops from the Kenya Police Service to do this job—not cooks, drivers and relatives of big cats from the Rift Valley chasing salaries.
I think you people are joking. To say that the police do not have troops that can fight those Haitian gangs means two things: One, you haven’t been paying attention to what has happened to policing since the advent of terrorism in East Africa.
Since 1998, Kenya Police has felt the cold, wet hand of the CIA on its shoulder—the result of which some of its units have received the best training and weapons.
Secondly, police, in your head, refers to a woman with a generous stomach and a Kawira hair-do squeezing bribes out of you over your expired insurance. Officers are deployed depending on the threat level. The fact that you only come into contact with the big lady means you present the same threat level as a wet tissue.
By design, if you receive the attention of the General Service Unit, for example, unless you are a hostage being rescued, you are guaranteed to acquire two things: One, a comprehensively reorganized dental formula or, two, a large hole in the head. Rioters, such as you and me, get the former; the latter is for assassins and terrorists.
The GSU is made up of about 10,000 troops, a full 20 companies, and have been fighting for 75 years. Two companies are of interest—Recce and ‘G’ —because they are some of the best-trained and -armed. ‘G’ is a protection force for the President and other big people.
Recce Squad are the “reel bad mon”—and this is not a question of lionising jokers. There aren’t many of them, about 500, but they are very good, very well trained and very well armed.
According to my friend, Mr Internet, they are deployed in three units: Sky Marshalls, who fly with you undercover with orders to stop hijackings; Crisis Response Unit, the guys you should call when terrorists hit, like Dusit; and another team with various names, from Radiation Unit to Rendition Unit but probably more accurately, Rapid Response Unit, very closely associated with spooks, both Karura and wet hand.
If you send 20 of these people, spooks to spy on the gangs, AP muscle and a few regular cops to arrest the survivors, you should be able to contain the gangs.
If, however, you include in your package some cooks and drunks from blue-eyed tribes and relatives of cabinet secretaries, then they will come back, if at all, in a very poor state and weaken the mission.
But why would a pacifist, liberal-minded fellow like me support such an unpopular and violent decision? Well, how do you make a warrior? You send him to war.
There is no substitute for the ordeal of battle. If you are fully and well trained—weapons, strategy, propaganda and all those other things soldiers are trained in—and have not dipped your toe in the river of combat, you are still not a warrior. You are a scholar.
Have you noticed the difference between Kenya Defence Forces before and after they went to Somalia? They drove into Somalia in 2008 in Humvees, most probably corruptly acquired soft-body Chinese APCs which tipped over at corners, field pieces which looked like donkey-drawn howitzers and the very best last-century hand-me-down Jordanian F-5 museum piece collectibles.
Fighting consisted in identifying the enemy from a distance—preferably 50 klicks—and blasting the bejesus out of them, from cover, and taking to heels any time Al-Shabaab were sighted at close quarters.
But a transformation has taken place. KDF soldiers have an air of competence about them. They manoeuvre in stout technicals, relying on their skills, courage and their mates—not Chinese steel—to keep them alive, and they hunt. They look for bad folks and chase them away. Ha ha. These are warriors, not scholars.
I say recruit and train—with US help—300 of our best to establish a conveyor to rotate fighters in what is likely to be a long campaign. Kenya should aim at having thousands of hardened fighters ready for an uncertain future.
A second reason is the material benefits of this kind of situation. I think the commander should go in not with the objective of stealing the troops’ per diem but building a large, highly mobile and deadly force with every piece of equipment and weapon imaginable—vehicles, helicopter gunships, heavy equipment...maybe even a C-17 cargo to get their kit around in.
If they don’t give you the stuff, jack the buggers and bring the goods home.
