Bombing Boni forest is not the solution

Coast Regional Coordinator Nelson Marwa is a fine (albeit too intense) man whose top blows whenever the name Ali Hassan Joho is mentioned. Sometimes I fear he could get a coronary if he doesn't go slow on Joho, drug addicts roaming the Coast region and now, the sneaky Al Shabaab scallywags hiding somewhere in the Boni forest. In his infinite wisdom, Marwa believes bombing Boni forest is the magic wand that will make Kenyans sleep easy and live happily thereafter. But that is being sentimental to the point of missing the bigger picture.

Boni forest in Garissa County covers 517 square miles and is a classified national reserve. It occasionally provides sanctuary to elephants and is home to buffalo, warthogs, bush pigs and a host of other wild animals. And there are human beings too, who depend on the forest for livelihood. Blinded by misplaced patriotic fervour, Marwa sees only the Al Shabaab, wants to exterminate them, and everything else, including the lives of the innocent Boni people, is collateral damage.

Napalm

If KDF were to buy Marwa's idea of eliminating the Al Shabaab, using conventional bombs might not be the ideal thing. The Vietcong war has the answer; napalm. American forces used napalm to flush out Vietnamese guerrillas from forests because napalm, as the American's say, packs quite a punch.

It is an incendiary substance that if sparked, it is documented, generates temperatures between 1,500 and 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists teach that water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Try dipping your finger in a pot of boiling water to get the feel. If there is anything the human being fears more than anything else, it is fire. But what demented person would want to start a fire in a forest? What impact would setting the Boni Forest aflame have on the environment when Kenya must improve its diminishing forest cover?

The flea

In one of Wilbur Smith's fictional writings, he refers to guerrilla warfare, which the Al Shabaab has employed successfully against Kenya, as the 'sting of the flea'. Those of us with a taste of the village life know that by the time you feel the sting of a flea, it will be long gone.

Al Shabaab have proven to be quite a handful for our security forces judging by their grim achievements and ease with which they walk into Kenya, destroy communication masts, lay siege to police stations for hours, murder a few innocent civilians and leave the police to play catch-up, clean the grisly mess while promising to leave no stones unturned; looking for what they have been embarrassingly been unable to find. KDF walking into Somalia in 2011 has not registered much because Al Shabaab has proven too elusive.

Marwa's outburst was an inadvertent admission of the hopeless situation our security forces find themselves in. Conventional forces waging war against a guerrilla outfit is a clear mismatch. While guerrillas follow no particular set of rules, only responding to that which ensures survival, the conventional army is predictable, and gets bogged down by the rules of engagement. You can always know where an army is, not so the guerrillas. That is why it is so easy for the Al Shabaab to raid military installations, set up landmines and succeed in claiming the lives of soldiers and policemen going about their duty of defending their motherland.

Reverse psychology

What did Operation Linda Boni, launched in September 2015 by Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Nkaiserry, achieve? It was reported that the Kenya Defence Forces had bombed five Al Shabaab camps in the forest. Because the army does not broadcast its failures, what assurance do we have that the camps had not been deserted by the time KDF went calling?

An expose on the difficult lives of security officers sent to Boni Forest was swiftly rubbished by the Government, yet the soldiers themselves gave an account of their miserable lives in the forests where they had no tents, and communication with their controllers was a hit and miss affair atop a specific tree which Al Shabaab also knew about.

Enemy's strategy

The war on Al Shabaab requires intelligence first, and force later. The guerrillas have infiltrated our society and know everything crucial to their continued existence. Reverse psychology must be used here. Sun Tzu, a Chinese military strategist argued that what matters in war is to attack the enemy's strategy, and that the opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy themselves. KDF should by now have studied and devised a strategy counter to the one employed by Al Shabaab.

One way of getting the guerrillas in Boni forest would be to incorporate the Boni people who live in, and understand the ways of the forest. They know where the enemy is likely to lurk or can find routes to their rear than an army would. The army could train infiltrators and plant them in the midst of Al Shabaab.

Mr Chagema is a correspondent at The [email protected]