Ambassador Robert F. Godec served in Kenya as Chargé d’Affaires from August 2012 following Ambassador Scott Gration’s ouster, becoming the Ambassador in January 2013 after his November 2012 confirmation hearings and just ahead of Kenya’s March 2013 election.

Godec thus led US engagement with both the later stages of the 2013 election and the ensuing litigation (both the presidential election petition at the Supreme Court and the first five years of the on-going attempt to prosecute the IEBC technology procurement fraud from that election).

He led during the formation of the Jubilee Party in 2016, the eventual replacement of the Issack Hassan-chaired IEBC following protests in which opposition supporters were killed, the attacks on the USAID-funded International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) by the Jubilee Party, President Kenyatta and Cabinet members, the change of U.S. Administrations from Obama to Trump, the acquisition of the Kenya Integrated Election Management System (KIEMS) from Safran Morpho (n/k/a Idemia) shortly thereafter, the abduction and murder of IEBC acting ICT Director Chris Msando on the eve of the 2017 vote, the general election with two US-funded international observation missions and the successful Supreme Court petition annulling the presidential portion of the vote, the boycotted re-run, the announcement of the “Big 4 Agenda”, the post-election diplomatic negotiations, the “People’s President” swearing in, the “Handshake” and most of the first year of the Building Bridges Initiative.

For the status of things in December 2018 as Ambassador Godec’s replacement, Ambassador Kyle McCarter, was being confirmed see, Something afoot in Kenya: Nation newspaper is running investigative reporting on IEBC procurement corruption in 2017 and As U.S. Mission passes from Godec to McCarter, Africa Confidential explains how Kenyan politics is still ‘frozen’ in 2005-07 ‘time warp‘.

So at this point, Ambassador Godec is a seasoned veteran of Kenya’s post-2007 politics who knows the ground intimately from the last two election cycles.  (His prospective “permanent” replacement, Mary Catherine Phee, was nominated in April and received a favourable vote from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this summer, but a confirmation vote by the full Senate is blocked along with those of dozens of other nominees.)

Ambassador Godec is a seasoned veteran of Kenya’s post-2007 politics who knows the ground intimately from the last two election cycles.

I was asked a few months ago to write an article about US support for the BBI process, but I have been unable to do so because it is not clear to me what our policy has been or is now, and I have not found people involved willing to talk to me.  Given my role in telling the story of what went wrong in 2007 when I was involved myself, it is no surprise that I might not be the one that some in Washington would want to open up to now, but even people that I am used to talking to privately have not been as forthcoming as usual.  Nonetheless, Kenyans inevitably have questions, and those Americans who care may in the future.

Members of the Kenyan Diaspora Alliance-USA have announced that they have sent Freedom of Information Requests to USAID about support for the Building Bridges Initiative and some Kenyans on social media, and in a few cases in print, have asserted suspicions or accusations that the US government was intending to back “unconstitutional constitutional amendments” in the form of the BBI referendum for some negative purpose.

Looking at the degree to which the Obama Administration backed the passage of the new 2010 Constitution as the terminal event of the post-2007 “Reform Agenda”–to the point of having millions of dollars bleed over from neutral democracy assistance programming into supporting the “Yes” campaign in the 2010 referendum during Ambassador Michael Ranneberger’s tenure–I am having a bit of difficulty understanding why my representatives in Washington would be working in general terms to undermine the new constitution we helped midwife in the first place.

Kenyans inevitably have questions, and those Americans who care may in the future.

At the same time it has openly been our policy, under Ambassador Godec originally and then under his predecessor Ambassador McCarter, to support the Building Bridges Initiative in broad terms and we did provide some USAID funding for conducting the consultative process itself. I think it would be in the interests of the United States, and of Kenyans, for the State Department to get out front of the questions now, with the BBI referendum effort rejected both at trial court level and by the Court of Appeal, and with the Kenyan presidential race that has been going on since the Handshake entering into its later stages (the IEBC has just now been restored in preparation for 2022 after being without a majority of members since 2018, so critical decisions have been backlogged).

We remain Kenya’s largest aid donor, we have many relationships and support many government and private assistance programmes of all sorts in Kenya. Americans have become the largest customer base for Kenya’s economically important tourist business and have other significant economic relationships, especially remittances from Kenyans working in the US. Most Kenyans remain in economic need, and the US continues to have the same issues regarding terrorism as during the past 25+ years (most especially since the 1998 embassy bombing). In general, the geographic neighbourhood is experiencing more specific crises and some overall erosion of peace, prosperity and governance. While we may not be as influential in Kenya as we were prior to 2007, and anyone with money can play in Kenyan politics, we will be engaged and we will have influence in 2022. So there is no time like the present to articulate what our policy is for the coming year.

Youngsters loiter at their ‘base’. The base, an assembly point in a poor neighbourhood, is the place to play a game of cards, smoke bhangi (marijuana), plan criminal activities or preach the ideology of extremism. Drunken chatter from the bar nearby and rap music from the CD vendor fight for dominance. The stench of gasoline from a garage cannot compete with the smell of bhangi. It is here that young people get radicalised and express their disgust of the ‘stinking rich.’

‘We’re trapped here,’ says one boy as he lets bhangi smoke escape from his mouth, ‘My base is the centre of my world. And beyond I see rich neighbourhoods built with stolen money. On television I watch corrupt politicians. It’s my neighbourhood against yours. You’re rich because I am poor.’

The boy will not talk about the recruitment that is taking place in slum areas under the Somali terror group Al-Shabaab, the reason why I came to report in this area. ‘We have learned that we do not need to fight in Somalia’, says his friend. ‘There are plenty of reasons to fight in Kenya.’

The gap between rich and poor is enormous is Kenya. That is not just because of their different income, but primarily because of their different outlook on the country. From the perspective of the poor inhabitants – the majority – Kenya’s elite is rich thanks to massive corruption. Large-scale corruption does not only suffocate an economy, it kills any feeling of brotherhood and nationhood. ‘I am therefore declaring with immediate effect corruption as a national security threat’, declared President Uhuru Kenyatta in 2015.

In an interview I conducted a few years with Dr. Willy Mutunga, the former Chief Justice of Kenya, he said: ‘We have become a bandit economy. Africa has become stuck after 50 years of independence, after looting of resources. Inequality is also stuck.’ Putting the blame on the corrupt political elite, Mutunga added, ‘If our constitution and the clause Chapter 6 about corruption were being implemented, I am sure 80% of [politicians] would not be suitable for political leadership.’

Mutunga is averse to the pomp, wealth and self-regard that is the hallmark of many Kenyan politicians. He has been nicknamed, ‘the Robin Hood of the Kenyan judiciary.’ Mutunga claims corruption in Kenya has never been worse than today. ‘The influence of the cartels is overwhelming,’ he said. ‘They are doing illegal business with politicians. If we do not fight the cartels, we become their slaves. But leaders who do take on the cartels must be prepared to be killed or exiled.’

Mutunga’s opinion is similar to the view from the “hood”.  The perception that Kenya is more corrupt than ever seems to be vindicated in reading Kenyan newspapers. One of the more sensational stories focused on a judge called Philip Tunoi. It was reported to Mutunga’s office that the judge from the Supreme Court took a two million dollar bribe to sway the opinion in an election petition in favour of Evans Kidero, the former governor of Nairobi. The shock was the amount; Kenya is not (yet) Nigeria and high amounts like this are not common in bribing officials.

An even more intriguing newspaper story was about former minister Anne Waiguru, under whose watch 8 million dollars reportedly vanished in her ministry. No minister accused of abuse of office has ever been taken to court and then prison in Kenya’s history. The first big opportunity to show that the rule of law is paramount occurred in 1966. Journalists at the Daily Nation had uncovered evidence that minister Paul Ngei had stolen money from the Maize Marketing Board. Ngei’s political opponent, the equally powerful minister Charles Njonjo, called the editor of the newspaper and consequently gave permission to publish the story.

But the revelation regarding Ngei presented the then president Jomo Kenyatta with a dilemma. A strong bond existed between the two dating back to the anti-colonial struggle. More importantly, Kenyatta could not do without the support of Ngeis Kamba tribe. So the minister went free. The government proposed an inquiry, a usual trick in the cover-up culture. Since then a secret code has applied in Kenya: powerful politicians are above the law, no matter what newspapers reveal about them. Yet it was in Jomo Kenyatta’s time that a mania of predatory profiteering, a system of corruption and patronage, took hold.

The case of Anne Waiguru makes it an even more interesting reading because she was rumored to have had an affair with Uhuru Kenyatta, a rumor denied by the president. But why is she so well protected? Kenyans speculate. She seemed to have everybody in the state apparatus on her side. She was quickly cleared by the official Anti-Corruption Commission. Until a businesswoman involved in the scandal signed an affidavit claiming that Waiguru not only shared in the loot but also played a role in the cover-up. That raised many disturbing questions about the Anti-Corruption Commission.

Waiguru hit back saying that the businesswoman ‘was only … a front for a broader, more powerful cartel with various beneficiaries from the political establishment and the bureaucracy.’ Waiguru pointed fingers at a group around deputy president William Ruto, laying bare the mistrust within the ruling coalition of Kenyatta and Ruto, painting a picture of a political marriage marked by vicious infighting over lucrative procurement tender deals.

That brings to mind what Mutunga told me. ‘As long the cartels are protected, you cannot achieve anything. You are taking these people into a corrupt investigating system, through a corrupt anti-corruption system, and a corrupt judiciary.’ Mutunga’s challenge is a historic fight indeed.

There have been a lot of knee-jerk reactions – particularly from liberals – about the United States’ hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. Those who oppose US military intervention in foreign lands say the withdrawal couldn’t have come sooner – that invading Afghanistan in 2001 after the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington was a mistake and staying on in (“occupying”) the country was an even bigger mistake. They argue that US military intervention in Korea, Vietnam, Somalia and other places has been disastrous, and that these interventions reek of imperialism.

Well and good. But everyone who has something to say about the poorly planned US withdrawal from Afghanistan, including the Taliban and President Joe Biden, has failed to answer these questions: What would the women of Afghanistan have wanted? Why were they not consulted before the US president made the unilateral decision to pull out troops from Afghanistan? And what gives Biden and the all-male Pashtun-dominated Taliban leadership the right to make decisions on women’s behalf?

I was in Kabul in 2002, some three months after the US invaded the country and ousted the Taliban from the capital city. I spoke with many women there who told me that they were relieved that the Taliban had left because life under the misogynistic movement had become unbearable for women and girls. Girls were not allowed to have an education so girls’ schools had to be run secretly from homes. The Taliban were known for barbaric public executions and for flogging women who did not wear burqas or who were accused of adultery. Theirs was an austere, cruel rule where people were not even allowed to sing, dance, play music or watch movies.

Twenty years of war, beginning with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the subsequent US-backed insurgency of the Mujahideen (mujahidun in Arabic—“those engaged in jihad”) in the 1980s (which later transformed into the Taliban movement), not to mention the US invasion of Afghanistan after the 9/11 terror attacks, had left Kabul’s physical infrastructure in ruins. Entire neighbourhoods had been reduced to rubble and no one quite remembered any more whose army had destroyed which building. The only buildings still left standing were the mosques and the Soviet-built apartment blocks housing civil servants. In 2002, Kabul Municipality had estimated that almost 40 per cent of the houses in the city had been destroyed in the previous fifteen years. Solid waste disposal barely met minimum standards, and running water and electricity were luxuries in most homes.

After the Taliban fled the capital and went underground, an estimated 3 million girls went back to school. At that time, the average Afghan child could expect only about 4 years of schooling. By 2019, this figure had risen to 10 years. Today, more than 13 per cent of adult women in Afghanistan have a secondary school education or higher. Women’s participation in the political sphere also increased dramatically; in 2019, nearly a third (27.2 per cent) of parliamentary seats were held by women.

No wonder women around the world were shocked and dismayed to see how easily Afghan women and girls were sacrificed and abandoned by the world’s leading powers. “My heart breaks for the women of Afghanistan. The world has failed them. History will write this,” tweeted the Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad on 13 August 2021.

As Taliban fighters were gaining control of the capital Kabul on Sunday, 15 August 2021, an unnamed woman living in the city wrote the following in the Guardian:

As a woman, I feel I am the victim of this political war that men started. I felt like I can no longer laugh out loud, I can no longer listen to my favourite songs, I can no longer meet my friends in our favourite café, I can no longer wear my favourite yellow dress or pink lipstick. And I can no longer go to my job or finish the university degree that I worked for years to achieve.

There have been reports of Taliban fighters abducting and marrying young girls, and ordering women not to report to work. Afghan female journalists fear for their lives; many have gone into hiding. The sale of burqas has apparently skyrocketed.

The argument that women in other countries also suffer at the hands of men, and experience gender-based violence does not fly with many Afghan women who have been fighting for the rights of women for the last two decades. For one, there is no law in any country in the world, as far as I know, that denies women an education or bans them from working outside the home. Women in these countries may not yet be truly free, but at least they can rely on the law to protect them. All the gains Afghan women have made over the last two decades will now be lost. I do not for one second believe that the rebranded Taliban emerging in Afghanistan have become feminists overnight, despite their pro-women rhetoric at press conferences. Mahbouba Seraj, an Afghan women’s rights leader, told TRT World that what is happening in Afghanistan is “going to put the country two hundred years back.” “I am going to say to the whole world—shame on you!” she stated.

A series of failures 

That is not the first time the US has abandoned Afghanistan. After Russian forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the US pulled out as well, leaving the Mujahideen, which it had been funding, to its own devices. Yet, in 1979, when Russian forces entered Afghanistan, the US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had described the Mujahideen as “soldiers of God”, and told them, “Your cause is right and God is on your side.” The Mujahideen transformed into the Taliban, and imposed its severe rule on Afghans during the latter part of the 1990s.  It also became a den for terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda.  The US essentially created a monster that launched the 9/11 attacks 22 years later.

Afghanistan has had a long and turbulent history of conquests by foreign rulers, and has often been described as the “graveyard of empires”. But it has not always been anti-women. In 1919, King Amanullah Khan introduced a new constitution and pro-women reforms. The last monarch, Zahir Shah (1933-1973), also ensured that women’s rights were respected through various laws. But when Shah was overthrown in 1978, the Soviet Union installed a puppet leader. This gave rise to the anti-Soviet Mujahideen, who gained control of the country in the 1990s and eroded many of the rights women had been granted.

There have been reports of Taliban fighters abducting and marrying young girls, and ordering women not to report to work.

There are many parallels with Somalia, which also enjoyed Russian support under President Siad Barre. When the Soviets switched sides and began supporting Ethiopia’s Mengistu Haile Mariam, the US gained more influence, but it could not install democracy in a country that had descended into warlordism after Barre was ousted in 1991. After American soldiers were killed in Mogadishu during the country’s civil war in 1993, the US withdrew from Somalia completely. Conservative forces supported by some Arab countries filled the void. When a coalition of Islamic groups took over the capital in 2006, they were quickly ousted by US-backed Ethiopian forces. Al Shabaab was born. As in Afghanistan, the US had a hand in creating a murderous group that had little respect for women.

After the US invasion in 2001, instead of focusing on stabilising and rebuilding Afghanistan, President George Bush set his eyes on invading Iraq on the false pretext that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had links to Al Qaeda and was harbouring weapons of mass destruction. That war in 2003 cost the US government its reputation in many parts of the Muslim world, and turned the world’s attention away from Afghanistan. Bush will also be remembered for illegally renditioning and detaining Afghans and other nationals suspected of being terrorists at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay.  This ill-advised move, which will forever remain a blot on his legacy, has been used as a radicalisation propaganda tool by groups such as the Islamic State in Syria (ISIS).

The international community is now sitting back and doing nothing, even as it is becoming increasingly evident that the world is witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe that will have severe political repercussions within the region and globally. The international community of nations, including the UN Security Council, cannot do anything except plead with the Taliban to not discontinue essential services, which is a tall order given that three-quarters of Afghanistan’s budget was funded by foreign (mostly Western) aid. The Taliban was allowed to take over the country without a fight. And all the UN Secretary-General could do was issue statements urging neighbouring countries to keep their borders open to the thousands of Afghans fleeing the country.

The mass exodus of Afghans, as witnessed at Kabul’s international airport, is a public relations disaster for the Taliban. It shows that not all Afghans welcome the Taliban’s return. As the poet Warsan Shire wrote about her homeland Somalia, “no one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark”. Afghanistan has once again become a failed state.

The longest war 

The impact of the Taliban’s capture of the country is already being felt.  The exodus of Afghans is creating a refugee crisis like the one witnessed in 2015 during the civil war in Syria. The US and its NATO allies have essentially created a refugee crisis of their own making. This will likely generate anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiments in the US and Europe, and embolden racist right-wing groups. It is also possible that Afghanistan will become the site of a new type of Cold War, with Russia and China forming cynical alliances with the Taliban in order to destabilise the West and to exploit Afghanistan’s vast natural resources, which remain largely untapped. Girls’ education will be curtailed. No amount of reminding the Taliban that Prophet Mohammed’s wife Khadija was a successful businesswoman, and that his third wife Aisha played a major role in the Prophet’s political life will change their minds about women. Women and girls are looking at a bleak future as the Taliban impose punitive restrictions on them that even the expansionist Muslim Ottoman Empire did not dare enforce in its heyday. Afghanistan will become a medieval society where women remain voiceless and invisible.

The worst-case scenario – one that is just too horrific to contemplate – is that terrorist groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Al Qaeda will find a foothold in Afghanistan, and unleash a global terror campaign from there, as did Osama bin Laden more than two decades ago.

As in Afghanistan, the US had a hand in creating a murderous group that had little respect for women.

The irony the US having invaded the country two decades before, ostensibly to get rid of Islamic terrorists, Biden has essentially handed over the country to the very group that had harboured terrorists like Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. “President Joe Biden will go down in history, fairly or unfairly, as the president who presided over a humiliating final act in the American experiment in Afghanistan,” wrote David E. Sanger in the New York Times. (To be fair, it was not Biden who first opened the doors to the Taliban; President Donald Trump invited the Taliban to negotiations in Doha in 2018, which lent some legitimacy to a group that had previously been labelled as a terrorist organisation.)

Dubbed “America’s longest war”, the US military mission in Afghanistan has cost US taxpayers about US$2 trillion, one quarter of which has gone towards reconstruction and development, though critics have pointed out that the bulk of this money was used to train the Afghan military and police, and was not used for development projects. The military mission in Afghanistan has also come at a huge human cost; 3,500 soldiers and other personnel from 31 NATO troop-producing countries and 4,400 international contractors, humanitarian workers and journalists were killed in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2020.  Thousands of Afghan lives have also been lost. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan estimates that at least 100,000 Afghans have been killed or wounded since 2009.

Was the US and NATO intervention in Afghanistan worth it?  Should the US and NATO have stayed a bit longer until the country had well-functioning and well-resourced institutions and until they were sure that the Taliban had been completely routed out? I think so, because I believe that ousting the Taliban was as ethically correct as eliminating ISIS and defeating the German Nazis. The problem in Afghanistan is that the Taliban were never defeated; they simply went underground.

Women and girls are looking at a bleak future as the Taliban impose punitive restrictions on them that even the expansionist Muslim Ottoman Empire did not dare enforce in its heyday.

There is no doubt that the “liberation” or “occupation” of Afghanistan by the US-dominated NATO mission in Afghanistan brought about some tangible benefits, including rebuilt and new infrastructure,  the growth of a vibrant civil society and more opportunities for women. But the US’s support of Western-backed Afghan governments that are generally viewed as corrupt by the majority of Afghans may have handed the Taliban the legitimacy and support they seem to be enjoying among the country’s largely poor rural population, just as installing highly corrupt Western-backed governments in Somalia in the last fifteen years gave Al Shabaab more ammunition to carry out its violent campaign. The Taliban is also recognised by some neighbouring countries, notably Pakistan, which is believed to be one of its funders, and which receives considerable military and other support from the US. This raises questions about why the US is aiding a country that is working against its interests in another. This Taliban-Pakistan alliance will no doubt be watched closely by Pakistan’s rival India.

Afghanistan, unfortunately, is a sad reminder of why no amount of investment in infrastructure and other “development” projects can fix something that has been fundamentally broken in a country. Like Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion, it may fragment along tribal or sectarian lines and revert to a civil war situation. Under the Taliban “government”, Afghanistan may become a joyless place where people are not allowed to listen to music, dance or watch movies – where enforcement of a distorted interpretation of Islam casts a dark shadow on the rest of the Muslim world. And Afghan women and girls will once again pay the heaviest price.