An intelligent view on al-Shabab and its cohorts

Stephen Walt has an interesting article triggered by the FBI's sending 20 agents to Kenya to determine whether al-Shabab may soon be mounting an attack here.  Here are some excerpts that should - but won't - provoke our leaders to rethink our war on terror.

Got it? For Americans to be 100 percent safe on American soil, the U.S. government has to get more deeply involved in the local politics and national security problems of this troubled East African region -- using the FBI, CIA, special operations forces, drones, whatever -- in order to root out bad guys wherever they might be.
There are two obvious problems with this line of reasoning. First, it fails to ask whether America's repeated interference in this and other parts of the world is one of the reasons groups like al Qaeda and al-Shabab sometimes decide to come after us. Indeed, to the extent that the United States might face a threat from al-Shabab, it might be because Washington has been blundering around in Somali politics since the early 1990s and usually making things worse. The same goes for Kenya too. Al-Shabab attacked the mall because Kenya sent troops into Somalia in 2011 and their intervention had undermined al-Shabab's position in that troubled country. Kenya may have had its own good reasons for intervening; my point is simply that the tragic attack it suffered wasn't a random act. On the contrary, it was a direct consequence of Kenya's own policy decisions. To say that in no way justifies this heinous attack -- it merely identifies cause and effect. 
I am not arguing for a retreat to Fortress America or saying that the United States should not devote some of its vast intelligence and national security budget to monitoring possible terrorist groups. But we really do need to ask ourselves if chasing every terrorist group that might have some reason to target the United States (or U.S. citizens abroad) is going to make the problem bigger or smaller. And that is especially the case when these groups emerged largely or entirely in response to local political developments, as was the case with al-Shabab. We have no reason to like such groups at all, but getting in their face is probably the best way to get them in ours.