High stakes in Kenya crisis for U.S. war on terror

By Mark Trevelyan, Security Correspondent - Analysis

LONDON (Reuters) - Kenya's violent crisis threatens to destabilise one of the United States' key counter-terrorism partners in Africa and could influence Washington's decision on where to site its new military command for the continent.

The official death toll stood at 486 on Monday from clashes that have rocked the East African nation since a disputed election last month.

This in a country which has suffered two major al Qaeda attacks, one of them on a U.S. embassy, and provides a bulwark against a neighbouring failed state -- Somalia -- which is seen by the West as a training ground for Islamist militants.

"The last thing America needs is for Kenya to implode. Then, as far as the Americans are concerned, they basically have lost Somalia," said Knox Chitiyo of the Royal United Services Institute in London.

"An unstable Kenya means an unstable region -- and it's already a turbulent environment," said Kurt Shillinger of the South African Institute of International Affairs.

Washington has long looked to Kenya as one of the pivotal nations, along with the likes of South Africa and Nigeria, that are key to stability and economic development hopes in Africa.

Since 1998, when al Qaeda staged its first mass-casualty attacks by blowing up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and neighbouring Tanzania, killing more than 200 people, it has also been a front line in the war on terrorism. Four years later, three suicide bombers blew up a Kenyan hotel, killing 15.

Kenya has proved a willing U.S. security partner: it was quick, for example, to reinforce its borders and round up dozens of suspected Islamist militants who fled Somalia after Ethiopian troops ousted them from their Somali strongholds in late 2006.