This might ward off some of the risk in Puntland N° 1322 10/12/2011
" Nairobi goes to the Amisom
The Kenyan army cannot afford to carry through the war that it has undertaken against al Shabaab. It now intends to do so through the African Union Mission on Somalia.
In deciding, this week, to integrate, at the request of the African Union (AU) its military contingent in Somalia to the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom), the Kenyan government is seeking to establish itself as an active regional power. In fact, it cherishes the hope that the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) will take over the leadership of this African defence force whose mission is to protect the Somalian Transitional Federal Government (TFG) against the Somalian Al Shabaab Islamists and will be able to control the operations of the Amisom soldiers.
These days in Nairobi, Major Emmanuel Chirchir, spokesman for the KDF, has off the record made no secret that this was indeed Kenya’s objective. For strategic reasons, the KDF wants to position itself as the most professional army in the region. Their ultimate goal is to attain, through Amisom, the original objectives of the military incursion into Somalia. Kenya’s leaders realised that with their own military forces alone they would not be able to remove the al Shabaab without risk from their military strongholds of Baidoa and Kismayo. In addition, the cost of the KDF military expedition in Somalia is beginning to mount up. The integration of the KDF into Amisom will enable it to receive some of the international funding granted to the African force "
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