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8:16 AM
have been half expecting: al-Qaeda gunmen
attack a shopping mall, take hostages, leave
behind carnage and a sickening repeat question:
"Why us?"
Over the weekend, that scenario happened. Not
in America, but in the country where President
Obama's father was born: Kenya. A glittering,
up-market mall in the capital, Nairobi, has
looked like a violent, blood-spattered Hollywood
movie: heavily armed, well-trained gunmen
dressed in black on a rampage; hostages;
hundreds dead and injured; an utterly
overwhelmed police force.
The same theme and grievances as 9/11 are
woven through this horror. The gunmen are not
from al-Qaeda; they are from a group known as
al-Shabaab in Somalia, the country that
neighbors Kenya. But the groups are affiliated.
They could almost be clones. Al-Shabaab for
years has ruled and terrorized much of Somalia,
meting out such sharia law punishment as
beheadings and stoning women to death for
adultery, even if the women had been raped.
Kenyan forces have spearheaded outside efforts
to restore some order in Somalia and drive al-
Shabaab out. They've been fairly successful.
That is why Kenya is now under the al-Shabaab
attack. This is just the latest among horrors that
have included torching Christian churches and
killing tourists.
President Obama's most effective and dramatic
move would be to go to Nairobi. He is half-
Kenyan. He has the status of a near-God there.
His influence is incalculable. He could say what
needs to be said to Kenyans, to al-Shabaab, to
Americans and to the world: Kenyans need to
stay strong and to keep forces in Somalia, not
withdraw them as the attackers want; such
attacks are painful and cowardly; the only way
to fight them is by standing firm.
Somalia next Afghanistan?
Just as important: The fight is not just a Kenyan,
or African, fight. Somalia could be the new
Afghanistan. A lawless, fundamentalist Somalia
could incubate a Somali Osama bin Laden and
new attacks on the USA, just as Afghanistan
protected and nurtured bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
For a decade and a half, the warning signs have
been growing. Al-Qaeda blew up the U.S.
Embassy in Nairobi in 1998. The truck bomb
killed more than 200, and there was a
simultaneous attack on the U.S. Embassy in
neighboring Tanzania. An Israeli hotel on the
tourist beaches of the Indian Ocean was
attacked more than a decade ago.
I grew up in the region in the dying days of the
colonial empire and already sensed back then
the religious and tribal forces that could be
unleashed. An imaginative future al-Shabaab
attack on the U.S. is even the premise of a novel
I am finishing.
There is a catch to an Obama Kenya trip. A
Catch-22.
Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta is accused of
war crimes for allegedly inciting violence after
elections in 2007, in which more than 1,000
people died. His trial at the International
Criminal Court is set for November. An Obama
trip could be seen as supporting Kenyatta,
undermining the charges.
Benefits of Obama visit
The benefit, though, would outweigh this risk.
Obama could focus attention on the charges,
too, and underscore how volatile and difficult the
whole region is, and how much the U.S. needs to
focus on it. Kenya has long been considered an
oasis of stability on a violent continent. Kenyatta
is the son of the revered first post-colonial
president, Jomo Kenyatta.
The Nairobi shopping mall attack is
heartbreaking. The stories could so easily be
American stories. A popular radio host killed
where she had earlier posted photos onto her
Instagram account. A respected, elderly poet
and professor from Ghana was also gunned
down. As the days go by, there will be more
victims identified, more grief at lives ended too
violently, too soon, as they were on 9/11.
The message of the
imagined in an attack, say, on the Mall of the
America. The attackers even called for Muslims
to run away. As on 9/11, they are attacking a
modern, democratic way of life. After 9/11, the
French newspaper Le Monde famously carried a
headline: We Are All Americans.
After the Nairobi attack, the message should be
"We Are All Kenyans." Not just in our sympathy.
But also in going all out to prevent another
terrorist attack.
Leaving Somalia to al-Shabab is not an option.
Author and journalist Louise Branson is a former
USA TODAY editorial writer and London Sunday
Times foreign correspondent. She is writing an
international thriller.
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