Kenya’s invasion of Somalia coincided with a number of other domestic conflicts: Rearguard contestation of the new Constitution, agitation in labour markets, dramatic demolitions of rich and poor citizen’s homes, and a secessionist movement at the Coast.

The radical departure from the nation’s foreign policy appeared to be one of those defining moments — except for the fact that two months after the army entered Somalia, it still lacks clear definition.

If anything, it’s downright confusing. Other military interventions in Somalia since 1993 only aggravated the country’s unstable internal equilibrium.

The liberation of southern Somalia will only free Al Shabaab to pursue the strategy advocated by Fazul Mohammed before his demise at a Mogadishu roadblock: Go underground and resume attacking enemy targets across the larger region.

Hence the question: Why go to “war” now? Does Kenya’s invasion of Somalia on October 18 signify a tipping point in the Horn of Africa’s power relations, does it hide more familiar motives, or are there other factors at work here?

The first hypothesis invokes the “tipping point” concept articulated by complexity theorists and popularised by Malcolm Gladwell. Analysts noticed that although a system often remains rigid in the face of conventional drivers of change, this is only a prelude to the accumulation of feedback, which at a certain “point,” precipitates a wave of cascading forces that sweep over and either break up or fundamentally reconfigure the system.

The collapse of Syad Barre’s government was such an event, resulting in the state of Somalia reverting to its component parts — clans and sub-regions. The outcome, often treated as a distinctively Somali deviation from the international system of states, was only an extreme permutation on similar developments across the “crescent of crisis.” The trend resurfaced in northern Uganda, eastern Congo, South Sudan, Darfur, Eritrea, southern Ethiopia, the Ogaden, and areas of Kenya.

The big picture includes the rise of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and other Islamist insurgencies. Al Shabaab’s decline, in contrast, conforms with a larger pattern signifying their inexorable decline.

The resurgence of people power exemplified by events on the Arab street is a more evolved reaction to governmental malfeasance and the influence of long-entrenched political and economic elites.

The success of North African religious parties at the polls is more about equitable fiscal management than anti-Western ideology.

These developments militate against viewing the invasion through the war-on-terror optic. Valid answers require we ask the right questions. For example: After several days of meetings with sundry government agencies and departments during his 1978 visit to Washington D.C, Barre turned to his aides and asked, “Can anyone tell me who really is in charge here?” Barre’s dilemma in Washington presaged a similar inability of world leaders to understand developments in post-state Somalia.

Who are the bad guys? The real question was and still is what as in what are the forces driving the turbulence engulfing our shrinking planet? This “what” includes accelerated demographic growth in the developing world, climate change, structural poverty amid widening economic inequality, industrial nations’ quest to secure future supplies of energy and vital resources, and the increasing ubiquity of ICT and global media.

The blowback generated by these factors explains why various social movements, ethnic coalitions, and armed rebels are, after decades of repressive and exclusionary governance, choosing to either capture the state, to de-link from it, or otherwise seek greater control over their resources and lives.

The post-1991 socio-cultural pathologies witnessed in Somalia are, to a large degree, the product of self-interested interference in the nation’s internal affairs. Economic interests underpin the resilience of Somalia’s Salafi activists and pirates.

The persistence of stateless regions where autonomous entities like Islamist insurgents, ethnic militias, and criminal syndicates threaten and prey upon the international order represents a tipping point of its own.

The messy wars, insurgencies, and lawlessness erupting during the new millennium are the flip side of the neoliberal economic policies responsible for unleashing waves of international capital and commercialisation across the planet. The global agents of this “late capitalism,” which Marx described as the stage where “the only thing that counts is money,” range from governments and warlords to corporations and drug cartels.

Africa is the last frontier for many natural resources required by the industrial world, but the patchwork of lawless regions across the greater Horn of Africa raises the risk for the investment needed to access and exploit them.

Taming Somalia is part of a grander project that includes facilitating international access to oil, minerals, and large tracts of land.

In an expose sub-titled White Collar War Crimes, Black African Fall Guys, investigative journalist Keith Harmon Snow links names like Pierre Falcon, Marc Rich, John Bredenkamp and other notorious fixer-entrepreneurs to the alphabet soup of militias terrorising Central Africa over the past decade. The host of more respectable actors whom he also implicates obliterates any distinction between white hats and black hats.

Is the new Uganda-Ethiopia-Kenya troika likely to promote the pacification of the Horn’s large swathes and pockets of stateless territory? Kenya’s ambivalent intervention was defensible from many perspectives; but when viewed from the prism of late capitalism, it appears to be more about other material incentives. 

The Islamic Courts Union and Al Shabaab succeeded by negating the pull of Somalia’s clans; restoring this dynamic is hardly likely to catalyse the pent-up forces of system change. Don’t expect much good to come out of the creation of Jubaland and balkanisation of the territory by neighbouring states.

This end game looks like a return to square one for the majority of poor Somalis. 
The appeal of Islamist radicalism peaked in 2003. The red in tooth and claw US neo-con inspired foreign policy countering it expired with the May 1 mission that terminated Osama Bin Laden. Back in Kenya, military intervention is providing a convenient excuse for dodging burning domestic issues.  

This region’s real war is against political impunity and failed governance, not feeding the cascading forces that may become a tsunami reconfiguring the map of East Africa. Kenya appeared to be making progress on the former front before the October 18 diversion.

Paul Goldsmith is a researcher based in Meru, Kenya