The last couple of months have not been the best for Kenya. Against all conventional wisdom and experience, the military is sent into lawless Somalia in hot pursuit of a ragtag terror militia of no fixed abode. The US, Britain and France, which seemingly goaded Kenya into action, have long learnt from experience that you do not send battalions, tanks and armoured personnel carriers after guerillas; you deploy special  forces and units, and gather as much intelligence as possible before launching any assault.

And when you are dealing with foes as vicious as the Taliban or Al Qaeda, you send in the drones as the US does in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Al-Shabaab is, obviously, not yet in the league of the Taliban or Al Qaeda, but Washington, it would seem, considers them deadly enough to justify the use of drones, which it has deployed in Somalia.

We at Diplomat East Africa have had no quarrel with Kenya’s incursion into Somalia. Even at the risk of belabouring the point; we have expressed our full and unconditional support for any measure that stabilises Somalia. We, however, draw the line when an operation that should be transparent and well coordinated suddenly starts wobbling. First, we get contradictory statements from government ministers who should be reading from the same script.

For example, Prime Minister Raila Odinga goes to Israel and is captured on television seeking the country’s support for Kenya. A day later the Minister for Defence Yusuf Haji issues a statement suggesting that the PM’s request was personal. The Israeli ambassador in Nairobi then helpfully says the PM’s request was for homeland security only. The Kenyan military suggests that France, the UK and the US are supporting its war in Somalia. The three countries politely point out they are not. If they are in Somalia, it is for other purposes. Surely, the conduct of war demands better communication.

To avert questions about its legitimacy, Washington had the ingenuity to make its war on terror global by getting the Security Council to unanimously pass Resolution 1368 condemning the attacks on American soil and asserting the Universal Right to Self-Defence of victim states.

The terms of the Resolution explicitly state that those found to be supporting or harbouring perpetrators, organisers and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable. Its ambiguous language enabled it get passed Muslim countries such as Bangladesh and Tunisia. It also received the nod from the five members of the Security Countries and other countries which sympathised with the US.

Washington, it would seem, then decided that it had all the legitimacy it needs to take its so-called war on terror anywhere it wanted and, in a show of its insufferable arrogance, sought out countries with dodgy human rights where it could torture and abuse terrorism suspects.In a sense, President Barack Obama’s government is involved in two wars; “a war of choice” in which it picks its victims seemingly at random and “a war of necessity”, for example, its raid on the home of Al Qaeda chief and terror king pin Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, in Pakistan.

It is the damage that the so-called “war of choice” is doing to legitimate and necessary attempts to rid the world of the terrorism menace that we are concerned about.

Congratulations are in order for President Salva Kiir Mayardit of the new republic of South Sudan. The journey to this auspicious occasion has been long, difficult and fraught with dangers. Indeed, it has taken 25 years of blood, destruction, exile and tears for hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese who took a stand against the tyranny of the Northern Arabs to reach this point.

As Salva Kiir and his team take to the podium to usher in Africa’s newest state, the fathers of the Sudan’s People Liberation Movement (SPLM) and its armed wing, the Sudan’s People Liberation Army (SPLA) must be acknowledged and honoured. The late Dr John Garang must top that list. His death in a helicopter crash in August 2005, just three weeks after he was appointed vice president of Sudan and barely six months after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between North and South Sudan, was truly tragic..

Wonders will never cease; they will only increase. Enter a 62-year-old man. He is married to a beautiful woman and is a father of four from a previous marriage. He is multi-millionaire. He is leading in opinion polls which suggest he could be president next year.

His salary – minus perks - is more than President Obama’s. He leads a jet set life. His name is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, CEO of the International Monetary Fund. He is on record as telling a journalist that he worries that some woman will be raped in some parking lot and then be given half a million dollars to frame him.

He says this because it is well known that he likes women, which is why he has been nicknamed the Great Seducer. And, he knows already there is a woman who claims he attempted to rape her. But DSK, as headline writers, admirers and critics alike know him, shreds his reputation, ends his job and terminates his march to the presidency in a hotel room in New York.

Isn’t it strange that as the UN Security Council was voting to impose a no-fly zone over Libya ostensibly to protect the people of that country from their government, protesters in Bahrain and Yemen were being brutally battered and mowed down by their own security forces?

Isn’t it strange that the African Union (AU) which maintained a studious silence as Tunisians and Egyptians staged protests for days on end to oust their leadership and which has remained silent as Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi battled his own people, acquiesed to the Security Council?

Isn’t it strange that as Cote d’Ivoire’s presidential claimant Laurent Gbagbo’s forces shelled a town and killed tens of people, the AU and the UN Security Council both turned a blind eye to the mayhem in West Africa and instead acquiesed to a no-fly zone in the north of the continent?

Isn’t it strange that the Arab League which maintained a curious silence as peaceful protesters ousted the leadership of Tunisia and excited similar demands in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen backed military action against Tripoli but turned a deaf ear to the goings-on in Bahrain and Yemen?

Nairobi has commanded its diplomats to lobby members of the UN Security Council to vote in favour of deferral of the cases preferred against six Kenyans by the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague.The six have been fingered by the court as masterminds of the political mayhem, pillaging and plunder that followed Kenya’s 2007 General Election in which more than 1,000 were killed and thousands more displaced.

Nairobi wants the cases halted for 12 months during which time, presumably, mechanisms for local tribunals to try the sextet and others facing lesser charges will have been put in place and Kenya, then, will take charge of the prosecutions.The cases preferred against the sextet by ICC’s Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo have rattled Kenya’s wobbly governing coalition, split government along party lines and set the State against rights groups and internally displaced people.

Unless there is a last minute and sea change of mind and conviction in Southern Sudan, all indications are that the people of this region of Africa’s largest country will on January 9 vote to break from the union as we know it and usher in Africa’s newest country.That will not be an end but the beginning of a long journey for both Khartoum and Juba. The break up will throw up a host of challenges mainly for the South but also for Khartoum because separation does not begin and end with the declaration of the results of the referendum.

In light of this, we are of the opinion that diplomats from both Khartoum and Juba should be guided by a single principle in discussing the issues that a break-up of the Sudan union as we know it will throw up – peace must prevail at every stage of discussion and deliberation.In this regard, we would like to posit that diplomats of the African Union and the United Nations be actively involved in ensuring that negotiations between Khartoum and Juba regarding their post-referendum relations are driven by the absolute need to ensure peace in Sudan.

The great paradox of the Sudan is that Africa’s largest nation in terms of geographic size is simultaneously a land of milk and honey as well as torrents of blood and tears shed on an epic scale.

Sudan is blessed with so many natural resources, including water and forests, particularly in the South, that it is truly a land of plenty, a possible paradise in earth.  But it is also the land of the world’s longest civil war, the conflict between North and South which ended (some say merely halted) in 2005 with the Kenyan-brokered Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), arguably the most carefully crafted and loophole-resistant peace pact in the history of conflict resolution.

Some of the most harmful yet intractable ill-will, bad faith and sheer skulduggery in the public sphere in the world and in history are to be found in the North-South divide in Sudan. Consider but one instance. Sudan is an oil-producing nation, but, fully five years after the signing of the CPA, there is still no clarity (and therefore no transparency) regarding such a basic matter as the correct and true position on oil revenues data.

That this year’s United Nations General Assembly slotted into the agenda discussions on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) speaks volumes about the commitment of the 192 member-countries to the “we can end poverty by 2015” mantra. Whether the deliberations on past, present and future of the visionary, if ambitious, targets against poverty will bear fruit across the member nations in the next five years is another kettleful of fish of altogether.

As things stand now most of the regions of the world for which the UN fashioned the eight overarching goals in 2001 are falling behind expectations. No single nation in the eastern Africa region has eradicated extreme poverty and hunger while universal primary education remains a dream. While attempts have been made to achieve gender equality and empower women, the region is yet to attain the desirable figures.

Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda have made laudable steps towards reducing child mortality rates and improving maternal health but UN figures indicate that Burundi, Sudan and Somalia are anywhere but close to these targets. Fluctuations in combating HIV-AIDS, malaria and other diseases in the region are a veritable two steps ahead, one backwards.

The United Nations Office in Nairobi is without doubt an important facility, not only because it serves as the global headquarters for the flagship environmental agencies of UNEP and UN-Habitat, but also because it is the headquarters of UN agencies in most of Africa.

For this reason, UNON and its Gigiri Complex stand as a living testimony to the involvement of Africans in the most important government of the world, the United Nations. More often than not, many Africans do not appreciate the fact that they are part of the UN family by right.

Indeed, some of the UN interventions on the continent are executed in a manner likely to suggest that they are philanthropic interventions.  Indeed, the Kenyan government must be praised for the foresight that led founding President Kenyatta to donate the pristine and ever-green land on which the UNON stands today.

From time to time and especially since the last decade, insinuation to the effect that UNEP and UN-Habitat could be moved from Nairobi to some other part of the continent or even out of the continent breaks to the surface.