Kenya has long been an African success story, a place that's been relatively stable, peaceful and prosperous despite being in a neighborhood rocked by major disasters for decades.
There's been endless civil war in Somalia, genocide in Rwanda and famine in Ethiopia. Yet these calamities have, by and large, not spilled over to Kenya, which has been the crossroads of East Africa, serving as a business, transportation and tourist hub.
This also explains why an upscale mall in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, was an ideal target for al-Shabab, the Somali militia with ties to al-Qaida.
"Kenya is full of Western interests and if al-Qaida wants to target America, which is obviously its reason for being, Kenya is the place to be," Bronwyn Burton of the Atlantic Council told NPR's Morning Edition.
"They would much rather be operating in Nairobi, where they can hurt more people and they can make more progress in their jihad than they could ever hope to accomplish in Mogadishu," Burton says.
Kenya has always been one of the most outward-looking African countries with its wide-ranging links to the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
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