AFRICAN AFFAIRS : Kenya’s Somali Contradiction

The attack that killed more than 70 people at Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall last week was, according to al-Shabaab, the Somali Islamist militant group that carried it out, retribution for Kenya’s intervention in Somalia. That raises a simple question: What is Kenya doing in Somalia, and is it worth the price?

Since Kenya’s army invaded its northeasternneighbor two years ago, the government has told Kenyans that they were going to war against al-Shabaab. But, as with most official pronouncements in Kenya, that story was only partly true.

On the night of October 15, 2011, I lay awake listening to the Kenyan military convoys passing through the border town of Dadaab on their way to Somalia to launch the first foreign military campaign in Kenya’s history. The proximate cause was the abduction of two Spanish aid workers from the vast refugee camps that encircle Dadaab. For the Kenyan authorities, it was the final straw after a series of abductions of Westerners by al-Shabaab; to stop the incursions, they launched what military leaders believed would be a quick campaign.

Over the last two years, some progress has ostensibly been made. The two Spanish aid workers were released last July, and al-Shabaab has attempted only one abduction since. Moreover, the rebels have been dislodged from the southern Somali port of Kismayo, which was once their main base. But al-Shabaab retains control of the majority of Somalia and remains capable of striking Mogadishu, the capital, as well as Nairobi.

Given this, if the Kenyan government’s aim was, as it claimed, to destroy al-Shabaab, the intervention has been a spectacular failure. But there is much more to the story. In fact, retaliation against the militant group was little more than a convenient excuse to launch the so-called Jubaland Initiative, a plan to protect Kenya’s security and economic interests by carving out a semi-autonomous client state in southern Somalia.

While knowledge of the plan was initially confined largely to Kenyan government officials, it was not long before its contours began to be revealed. Kenya has installed a client regime in Kismayo, and has supported the new government in its quest to make Jubaland a semi-autonomous region, along the lines of Puntland, Somaliland, and the many other self-declared proto-states that have emerged as Somalia has unraveled.

Beyond preventing Somalia’s violence from spilling over into Kenya and undermining its security and its tourist-driven economy, such a buffer state could be forced to absorb the half-million Somali refugees who now live in Dadaab’s refugee camps. In this sense, the Jubaland Initiative is a policy of stunning racial profiling—and a gift to al-Shabaab recruiters in Kenya.

Furthermore, contrary to claims that securing Kismayo put al-Shabaab at a disadvantage, the United Nations Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea reported in July that the Kenyan Defense Forces have actually gone into business with al-Shabaab. The group’s profits from illicit charcoal (and possibly ivory) exported from Kismayo have grown since Kenya took control.

This highlights a fundamental problem: the Kenyan state’s endemic corruption constantly undermines its policymakers’ goals. Indeed, in Kismayo, Kenyan officials have reverted to their default occupation—the pursuit of private profit. Instead of working to achieve the diplomatic objective of defeating al-Shabaab, Kenya’s military, politicians, and well-connected businessmen have been lining their own pockets.

Moreover, Kenya’s desire to carve out a buffer state conflicts with the Somali government’s goal of uniting the country. Indeed, the last thing the government in Mogadishu wants is another semi-autonomous region challenging its authority—or another country annexing southern Somalia for its own purposes.

The United States and the European Union—which are bankrolling the African Union’s intervention in Somalia to support the Mogadishu-based government—have attempted to paper over the disagreement with Kenya over the Jubaland Initiative, despite its potential to fuel further conflict. In fact, Kenya-backed Jubaland forces clashed with Somali government troops in Kismayo earlier this year.

The Westgate attack should spur Kenya’s leaders to re-think their approach toward Somalia. A more coherent strategy would involve cutting off al-Shabaab’s funding and addressing the grievances—such as human-rights abuses against Somalis, discrimination against Muslims, foreign meddling in Somalia, and corruption—that motivate its recruits. In a bizarre twist, al-Shabaab even called on Kenyans to prosecute their leaders for post-election bloodletting in 2007-2008.

Given these intractable grievances—and, more important, the weakness and corruption of the Kenyan state—the cycle of violence will be very difficult to break. That is why the attack on the Westgate mall is unlikely to be the last such tragedy.

Ben Rawlence, an Open Society Fellow, is the author of Radio Congo: Signals of Hope from Africa’s Deadliest War 

MIND, MATTER & POLITICS : Snowden and the Pope

Pope Francis increasingly resembles a gust of fresh air blowing through the musty chambers of the Catholic Church. He looks and behaves like a normal human being. He wears shoes instead of red velvet slippers. He has good taste in books: Dostoevsky, Cervantes. And he has a more humane attitude toward homosexuals, even if he has not opposed church doctrine on sexual behavior.

But the most astonishing thing that Francis has said, in a recent letter to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, concerns non-believers. A non-believer is safe from the fires of Hell, the pope assures us, as long as the non-believer listens to his or her own conscience. These are his exact words: “Listening [to] and obeying [one’s conscience] means deciding about what is perceived to be good or to be evil.”

In other words, neither God nor the Church is really needed to tell us how to behave. Our conscience is enough. Even devout Protestants would not go that far. Protestants only cut out the priests as conduits between an individual and his maker. But Francis’s words suggest that it might be a legitimate option to cut out God Himself.

The Catholic Church would not have survived for as long as it has if it had not been prepared to change with the times. The Pope’s statement certainly is in accord with the extreme individualism of our age. But it is nonetheless a little puzzling. After all, a Christian believer, as the Pope must be, would have to assume that questions of good and evil, and how to behave ethically, are prescribed by church doctrine and holy texts. Christians believe that their views of right and wrong are sacred and universal, and that morality is a collective pursuit.

I do not know whether Edward J. Snowden, the American former intelligence contractor who exposed official secrets in protest against his government’s snooping on its citizens, is a Christian. Perhaps he is an atheist. Either way, he fits perfectly the new pope’s view of the moral person. Snowden claims that he acted according to his conscience, to protect “basic liberties for people around the world.” His view of the collective good was entirely individual.

Perhaps in a secular age ethical behavior has no other basis than one’s own conscience. If sacred texts can no longer tells us the difference between good and evil, we will have to decide for ourselves. Liberal democracy cannot provide the answer; nor does it pretend that it can. It is no more than a political system designed to resolve conflicts of interests lawfully and peacefully. Questions about morality and the meaning of life lie outside its scope.

But democratic politics can be, and often is, strongly influenced by religious beliefs. Most European countries have Christian-democratic political parties. Israel has its Orthodox parties. American politics is saturated by Christian doctrine and symbols, especially—but by no means exclusively—on the right. Muslims are trying to inject their faith into politics, often in illiberal ways. Then there are the secular political ideologies, such as socialism, which have a strong ethical component. Socialist and communist parties, no less than the Catholic Church, have firm views on right and wrong, and on what the collective good should be. Indeed, social democracy in many countries is rooted in Christianity.

And yet, despite the huge victory won by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats in Germany’s recent election, Christianity is a fast-vanishing force in European politics. And left-wing parties’ influence is vanishing even faster. Most of what remained of socialist ideology was washed away in the late 1980’s with the collapse of the Soviet empire.

What has emerged since the social upheavals of the 1960’s and the financial “Big Bangs” of the 1980’s is a new type of liberalism that not only lacks a clear moral basis, but also regards most government restraints as attacks on individual freedom. In many respects, we are no longer citizens, but consumers. Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s unrestrained behavior, both personal and financial, made him the perfect politician for the neo-liberal age.

Might there be new ways to establish a moral basis for our collective behavior? Some utopians believe that the Internet will do so by creating space for new citizen networks to transform the world. In the sense that social media can be used to mobilize people for good causes, there is some truth to this. Thousands of Chinese idealists, inspired by bloggers and social media, helped their fellow citizens after a recent earthquake, even as their government was suppressing the news.

But the Internet is, in fact, pushing us in the opposite direction. It encourages us to become narcissistic consumers, expressing our “likes” and sharing every detail of our individual lives without truly connecting with anyone. This is no basis for finding new ways to define good and evil or to establish collective meanings and purposes.

All the Internet has done is make it easier for commercial enterprises to compile huge databases on our lives, thoughts, and desires. Big business then passes this information on to big government. And that is why Snowden’s conscience drove him to share government secrets with us all.

Perhaps he did us a favor. But I cannot imagine that he is quite whom Pope Francis had in mind when he was trying to bridge the gap between his faith and our age of unbound individualism.

Ian Buruma is Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY : Problem Solving in the Anthropocene

Take a deep breath. Savor it for a moment. Now consider this: None of our modern human ancestors ever breathed anything like it—and, the way things are going, nor will our descendants.

Since the Industrial Revolution began, human activity has substantially changed the atmosphere’s composition. Carbon-dioxide levels are higher today than they have been in at least 800,000 years. The amount of nitrogen and sulfur circulating through the Earth system has doubled. The ocean’s pH is changing at an unprecedented rate, reaching levels of acidity that marine organisms have not experienced in the last 20 million years.

Clearly, humans—who now occupy almost 40% of the planet’s ice-free land surface—are shaping many of the planet’s fundamental processes. According to Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, this shift is so profound that it amounts to the beginning of a new epoch: the Anthropocene.

While some scientists believe that the Anthropocene actually began when humans started farming and domesticating animals, others (including me) consider it to be a more recent development. But, regardless of when the Anthropocene began, it is clear that humanity’s impact on the planet increased substantially after World War II’s end.

Indeed, around 1950, the world seems to have reached a tipping point, with practically every factor that heightens humanity’s impact on the planet—population, GDP, fertilizer use, the proliferation of telephones, and paper consumption, to name only a few—beginning to increase rapidly. During this period, which the scientist Will Steffen dubbed the “Great Acceleration,” the human population became sufficiently large and connected, with high enough consumption, to become a major global force.

In a 2009 study, scientists concluded that, by crossing any of nine “planetary boundaries”—climate change, biodiversity loss, disruption of nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, land use, freshwater extraction, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution—humans would increase the risk of fundamentally changing the Earth system. Given that these boundaries are closely interlinked, allowing trends toward any of them to continue, especially at the current rate, would drive the environment into unknown territory, potentially causing serious damage to the systems that underpin human survival.

In order to cope with the unique challenges of the Anthropocene, humans need a new approach to management and strategic decision-making. Developing successful strategies will require abandoning long-held assumptions that worked in the past, but that have become counterproductive myths today.

One such myth is that it is best to tackle one problem at a time with straightforward, targeted solutions. While this approach may be appealing, it is inadequate to address today’s most pressing issues. For example, producing and delivering nutritious food consistently to upwards of nine billion people by mid-century has implications for water and energy consumption, agricultural development and land use, the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and ocean acidification, not to mention biodiversity loss, such as through overfishing.

Given this, the Green Revolution’s narrow, production-focused approach cannot overcome food insecurity in the future, even though it produced truly impressive output increases in the past. The world needs an innovative, comprehensive strategy aimed at optimizing the entire food system—for example, by improving fertilizer and water use and food transportation and storage; by ensuring that adequate nutrition is accessible and affordable for all; and by changing communities’ eating habits to include less resource-intensive food.

The trouble is that complexity can be overwhelming, so people often prefer to break down complex systems into individual components. Rather than consider, say, eradicating extreme poverty and averting global warming in tandem—and developing mutually reinforcing strategies to achieve these goals—proposed solutions focus on one or the other, undermining their effectiveness.

Of course, addressing interconnected issues simultaneously carries its share of challenges. For one thing, no single person or group has enough knowledge or experience to solve all of the problems afflicting a complex system at once.

But a wider community—including governments, businesses, researchers, philosophers, faith communities, and even poets and artists—could devise and implement holistic strategies. Success will depend on participants’ willingness to cooperate and their commitment to put evidence before ideology. Thus, the real challenge lies in marshaling such an inclusive community—something at which global leaders have not proved adept.

A second major challenge is that resources are limited, making it impossible to solve all of the world’s problems at once. In this context, the ability to prioritize effectively is essential. But, rather than emphasizing one problem over another, the top priority should be building resilience into all global systems. Mechanisms aimed at solving a problem in one system should not be allowed to compromise another system’s resilience.

Another challenge will be to devise new metrics to replace GDP as the leading measure of human well-being. Even Simon Kuznets, the main architect of the concept of GDP, recognized that it does not account for many of the factors affecting human well-being; he argued that it should be used “only with some qualifications.” In the Anthropocene, GDP must be part of an array of metrics for assessing economic, natural, and social capital—that is, the value of the goods and services produced, as well as the dignity of the ecosystems and social structures that underpin this output.

Navigating the Anthropocene effectively and ethically is perhaps the most daunting challenge that modern humans have faced. Overcoming it will require a smarter approach to strategic decision-making and a broader understanding of innovation. It is time for us to rise to the challenge.

Kevin J. Noone is Director of the Swedish Secretariat for Environmental Earth System Sciences and Professor of Meteorology in the Department of Applied Environmental Science at Stockholm University