Hiiraan Online

Policemen at the entrance of Garissa University College on April 2, 2015 after armed gunmen attacked the institution. The full extent of operational and strategic blunders witnessed in response to terrorist attacks, including the Garissa University College killings, can now be revealed.

The Sunday Nation has established, in interviews with a highly-placed security expert, that the soldiers in barracks a few minutes away from Garissa University had the full capability to respond to the April 2 attack and quell it in less than two hours.

Questions also remain unanswered on why operational police and military chiefs in Nairobi and on the ground waited for so long to take decisions that could have saved lives, exposing gaps in how useful information is shared and collated between different security agencies.

“The soldiers there (in Garissa) are highly trained on how to fight in built-up areas. They are trained on how to clear room to room and floor to floor,” said an expert who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of his position in the national security pecking order.

Multiple sources within the military, but who spoke in confidence, indicate that some troops next door to the university had been rigorously trained by American and British special forces, in addition to rigorous training by local instructors.

Why they did not end the siege within the shortest time possible... until a police team was flown in from Nairobi?

Although Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Nkaissery and Inspector-General of Police Joseph Boinnet have maintained that the response time was the best in the circumstances, military and security experts have been scathing in their assessment.

“If you look at how we responded, it was not bad at all, say, compared with Westgate. It takes time to assess and make the decisions, escalating it from National Security Advisory Committee to the National Security Council and then to scramble the elite units, get them to the airport and fly them to Garissa, which is a two-hour flight. There were many moving parts and the nine hours it took was reasonable,” Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka told the Sunday Nation in the days following the attack.

But it doesn’t appear that way from the eyes of experts who have assessed the response.

“The attack on Garissa University College, which is next door to a military base, is a clear indication of the utter disregard the terrorists have for our security forces. The terrorists took control of the university grounds from 5.30 a.m. up to about 10 p.m. — a total of 16 hours of undisturbed orgy of killing, maiming and shattering of lives. That our security apparatus sees the 16 hours of horror as reasonable time is reason for us to be very worried,” wrote Lt-Col (rtd) Ben Mwarania, a security consultant, in the Sunday Nation last week.

He added that the performance of the security forces in the recent past gives little hope for a better tomorrow.

Another security expert, who spoke on condition of anonymity, wondered why military aircraft were not used to fly police commandos from the General Service Unit Recce Squad to Garissa, to shorten the response time. The expert said the inordinately long time it took to neutralise the attack showed weaknesses in the coordination of information at command levels.

NATIONAL EMERGENCY

He wondered why more equipped and highly trained soldiers had to wait for police commandos to come in from Nairobi and end the siege in what was clearly a national emergency.

Multiple sources within the security apparatus said chunks of useful information are only assessed and analysed at the national level, with senior officers on the ground — from the police, intelligence and military — not having an existing protocol on how to share information or mobilise resources within their reach to respond to emergencies of the Garissa university magnitude.

It has emerged that operational and strategic plans — well written but for long gathering dust in government shelves — may be the sin of omission that has seen terror attacks in the country escalate rather than reduce.

Since KDF launched an incursion into Somalia in October 2011 to fight Al-Shabaab, terror strikes in the country have increased every year.

The Garissa attack in which 148 lives were lost is the worst since the bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi in 1998 by Al-Qaeda.

A cogent plan to help the country counteract the effects of the incursion into Somali was abandoned at a most critical hour, leaving the country vulnerable to sleeper cells that had arrived in Kenya before KDF moved into Somalia.

Under Gen Jeremiah Kianga, a strategy had been mooted to create an integrated plan that would bring KDF, the police, the National Intelligence Service and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on board.

Impeccable sources have now told Sunday Nation that a number of meetings were held at military barracks in Embakasi, bringing together senior officers from the four government departments to strategise on how to secure the country once the troops moved into Somalia.

The plan appears to have lived through the initial stages of the incursion into Somalia, evident in the fact that news briefings on the progress made by the troops involved officers from all the four departments.

But the command centre for Operation Linda Nchi would later be moved, under the direction of the KDF senior command, from Embakasi to the Military Command Centre — a highly classified government facility where no civilians are allowed in.

The facility is strictly accessed only by the military and the President — should the need arise — in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief.

Shifting of the command centre meant that participation by the police, the NIS and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at operational level had automatically ended.

IDENTIFY TARGETS

The plan had been well thought-out, down to the district level across the country where security chiefs would identify possible terrorism targets.

They were then supposed to draw up response plans, complete with how different agencies would synchronise their responses, in case Al-Shabaab retaliated in Kenya.

It meant that, for instance, in the Garissa attack, the police and intelligence chiefs should have established a working formula with the military such that coordination of the response would not have waited for decisions from Nairobi, given the gravity of the matter at hand.

A similar coordination and response method was used to secure the country during the 2013 General Election in what is known in military parlance as “Aid to Civil Authority”.

Over the last December holidays, when intelligence information showed that terrorists could strike, there was high visibility of security forces, including patrols in Nairobi by Prison warders.

The scandal of the gaps that exist today can be traced way back to mid-1990s.

Back then, the government was dealing with rampant cattle rustling, banditry, inter-ethnic and inter-clan clashes that often involved use of heavy weaponry.

These security problems were heightened by a breakdown in command. An Israeli security expert, sources say, was detailed to propose steps the government could take to better secure citizens and property.

Then President Moi appointed a committee to study the report and make recommendations.

One of the key recommendations in the report, but which was never implemented, was the establishment of a Border Patrol Unit of the Police, with semi-military training and detailed to battle cattle rustling, ethnic and tribal clashes and cross-border fights that often break out in the northern half of the country.

“The threshold of the threat to public security now lies between crime and insurgency warfare. It, therefore, requires military or semi military mitigation in both time and effort. Furthermore, the battlefield has moved to highly populated areas and civilians are the main targets,” says a top-level security brief seen by the Sunday Nation.

“The response to mitigate these threats is hindered by weaknesses in the national early warning systems and the operational integrity of the combined forces’ actions ...

“Therefore, to exercise military level jurisdiction over this threat under the law, there is a need to restructure the police service to give it capabilities in the form of skills, organisation and equipment corresponding to military effort,” the brief states.