I do not understand the Westlake Mall massacre.
I found this interesting nytimes article which explains some of the background and fears of what may happen, but I do not understand how murdering all these people will help anything. Yes, expats may stay away because of this. Yes, Shabab may have shown it can terrorize a whole lot of people.
And yes, there are too many people in Africa that have far too little.
But I do not understand how this will help. Desperate people do desperate things, but I do not understand how this will help. Is it not meant to help or change anything? To just lash out? I don't get it.
So many stories of true heroism have come out the last week. And so much awfulness.
Was this meant to improve conditions for the area or just a group showing they can hurt a lot of people?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/sunday-review/making-sense-of-kenyas-westgate-mall-massacre.html?pagewanted=all
Making Sense of Kenya’s Westgate Mall Massacre
THIS was the attack we all knew was coming.
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For the past seven years that I’ve lived in Kenya, I’ve been following two very different story lines that represent what’s happening in contemporary Africa and that collided that fateful day in Westgate. The first is of the dramatic expansion of Africa’s middle class, now more than 300 million people, and perhaps there’s no better place on the continent to watch this than in Nairobi, where new office blocks are rising above the tin-shack slums, new bistros are popping up all over the place and taxi drivers are getting on Facebook. It’s essentially Africa joining the world.
(clip)
But at the same time that I’ve been chronicling this rapid, almost dizzying development, I’ve become a specialist in despair. Sub-Saharan Africa is still home to some of the poorest, most violent countries on earth: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, South Sudan, the Central African Republic — places where the government is a ghost and civilians are stalked, raped and killed by men with guns. You have no idea how many guns are in these places, and at the end of the day, all that separates Kenya from Somalia, the promising and the broken, is a thin line in the desert that usually goes unpatrolled. To live the good life here, to take the kids to the water park and hang out in new wine bars while a medieval mix of famine, plagues, warlords, pirates and sudden death seethed next door, did seem too good to be true.
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I had this sinking feeling that when the Shabab finally gave up any hope of ruling Somalia, they would strike Nairobi. They had been reluctant before, because Nairobi was their back office, where the white-collar Shabab lived, the accountants, financiers and logisticians. The instant they hit here, the Shabab leaders knew, Nairobi’s Somali community would fall under such intense pressure and scrutiny that it would be impossible to do business....(much more)
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Response to kestrel91316 (Reply #1)
for their unhappiness...and many of them are taught that only THEY can change things by killing the infidels 
The first is that if they do something huge and ugly and horrifying that kills a lot of people in a mediagenic fashion, their targets - in this case, the Kenyan people - will decide that the costs of intervening in Somalia aren't worth what the region is getting out of it, and will pressure their government to get out of there. It's a standard attrition-warfare sort of thing and boils down to "our willingness to stand and keep hurting you is greater than your willingness to come over here and keep hurting us. Find a new hobby or we'll make this ours."
As far as Somali militants are concerned this is a very successful strategy; the general feeling among the ones who were around at the time is that they successfully routed the United States with it in the 1990s, so a third-rate local power like Kenya should be as doable, in their eyes. Whether the Kenyan government will back off as opposed to ramping up their efforts remains to be seen of course, but you can be certain the general public's having some pretty heated conversations about whether it's worth it.
The second is far more complex: it's something called politique du pire. The rough translation would be "the politics of making things worse." It's been one of the standard theoretical underpinnings of a lot of guerilla or terrorist movements since the 1960s.
The general idea behind PDP is similar to the first one - you're trying to bring about a change in where the public stand with regards to the government through violence. However, the idea here is that it's the government's behaviour the attackers are trying to influence. Whether you see terrorism as a military/strategic threat (like the United States or, I guarantee you now, Kenya, does) or as a criminal matter (as most European countries do), the fact remains that it's pretty hard to prevent dedicated ones from doing at least something without stretching the limits of what it's okay for governments to do.
With this approach, making the governments push things too far is actually the goal. By hitting a target with lots of flashy horror, a movement can make a government (or its people) desperate enough to start doing some very draconian things in the interests of safety. This can be through becoming increasingly totalitarian at home, or through dishing out its own flashy horror by attacking the home territory of the terrorist organization. In both cases the planned goal is similar: push the government far enough that the people it is acting around no longer find it acceptable, provoking them to act against it en masse.
If the government's gone too far in its own home, then perhaps it will provoke the people into trying to take it out somehow, possibly replacing it with a government more amenable to the attackers' goals. (You generally don't overthrow a government to replace it with a similar one, after all - you're reacting to what it is and want that to change.) If the government's doing the same thing abroad, then the same principle holds, only it's another government that's the target of the uprising. In this case if Kenya ramped up their operations against al-Shabaab in support of the Somali government, the goal would be turning the last fourteen or so Somalis who already don't support it against Mogadishu. There's a final possible outcome, where they're also trying to provoke allies of the government in question in the general interest of "how dare you support these monsters?" - this sort of thing went on in a lot of Middle Eastern countries that were supporting operations against Iraq and Afghanistan, for example.
That last option is playing a longer game than the others. It's probably what bin Laden had in mind when he attacked the United States - provoke them into hitting a Muslim country, outrage the Islamic street with American atrocities, and turn them against their own local governments for supporting this. In practice it has not worked particularly well, but it was a toss-up in the first place since nobody tried it on that kind of scale.
The PDP approach in general doesn't have a terribly stellar success rate, but it's appealing to a lot of groups because of the times where it has succeeded (or come close - "they almost did it, we just have to do X and we'll get the rest of the way!"
, and also because it has a clearer progression and goal than "if we punch them hard enough they'll give up," which isn't really an option groups that aren't conventional armies have in the first place. While it doesn't often change governments, it does sometimes put enormous pressure on them, which can be a benefit to the group launching attacks in the first place.
Other times, of course, it backfires entirely: they attack the government, the government gets replaced with some totalitarian dictatorship in order to remove the militant threat, and then, well, proceeds to capably do exactly that...
Anyway, that's probably more of an overview than you wanted with the question in the first place, but it's still a start. A lot of ink has been spilled over the generations about this sort of thing, both by people trying to figure it out and by the actual guerillas and terrorists themselves, and the simple question of "why would you do that?" can snowball into surprisingly varied schools of thought pretty quickly.
One of the most oppressive and restrictive regimes on the planet, the society that produced the majority of Al-Qaeda terrorists (including bin Laden himself, and 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers ) and where an immense flow of money to said terrorists, and others who have caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and non-Americans alike, has come from...
...and they are a key U.S. ally in the region.
