Warriors without Borders

On hindsight, if anywhere in Nigeria was going to breed a neo-Islamist insurgency, it was perhaps always going to be its long neglected northeastern frontier, a region historically prone to cross-border banditry and a gateway to the strife-afflicted and drought-stricken Sahel. The Sahelo-Saharan zone is a borderless dark economy of organized crime, drug, human, weapons and diamond traffickers, and rebel groups.  Boko Haram exemplifies a geopolitical phenomenon featuring transnational non-state actors with scant regard for national boundaries. Its insurgency has been enhanced by Nigeria’s porous borders with Chad, Niger and Cameroon and is unlikely to be defeated without significant international collaboration.

The group’s increasing methodological sophistication since 2009 (from motorcycle-borne ride-by shootings to using improvised explosive devices) and the evolution of its demands from previously locally-centered grievances against state and federal authorities to a more nebulous neo-Islamist anti-state agenda, indicate contact with foreign insurgent groups. If globalization is characterized by borderless transactions and the free flow of capital, information and culture, it is also defined by the transnationalization of strife. Domestic conflicts in sovereignty-deficient states tend to escalate into transnational security emergencies. The internet enables the transmission of insurrectionary tactics, theologies and technologies across far-flung locales. An aspirant Nigerian mass-murderer can access the preachments or bomb-making expertise of a Yemeni extremist online. The net has also aided the formulation of a grand Jihadi narrative in which Jihadists, whether in Nigeria, Indonesia or Somalia, see themselves as comrades in a global revolt against secular sovereigns.

The transnationalization of conflict cuts across religions. Consider the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the spearhead of an insurgency that was launched in Uganda in 1986 and which aims to establish a society based on the Ten Commandments. The LRA’s rebellion is originally rooted in the discontent of the Acholi of Northern Uganda but has long since become synonymous with mass murder, rape and abductions in South Sudan, Central African Republic and Congo. Indeed, Boko Haram’s serial abduction of young girls for forced marriage and sexual slavery mirrors the LRA’s fiendish tactics.

In 1994, when the Nterahamwe, the Hutu extremist paramilitary that carried out the Rwandan genocide was dislodged by Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front, it fled deep into the Democratic Republic of Congo. Between 1994 and 1997, the Nterahamwe waged a deadly insurgency against Rwanda from the DRC while another rebel group, the Allied Democratic Front also launched a campaign from there to oust Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni. To this day, Rwanda and Uganda continue to face anti-state actors based in the DRC.

The LRA, the Nterahamwe and al Shabab in Somalia mutated from local insurrectionists into transnational anarchists. None of these groups can be defeated without international partnership. Should Somalia utterly fall to al Shabab, for example, it would become a hub for international terrorists in the Horn of Africa and would undoubtedly destabilize Somalia’s neighbours. Kenya, Eritrea and Ethiopia cannot contend successfully with al Shabab without taking an active interest in Somalia’s stability.

Ever since Afghanistan served as a nursery for al Qaeda in the early 1990s, international terror groups have sought ungoverned spaces and weak states where to sink their roots. However, they are not content to stay confined in such enclaves; they see them as bases from which to export terror. Thus, al Shabab is not just an enemy of Somalia; it is ultimately an enemy of the East African Community. Likewise, the DRC’s weak central government and its perennial chaos have made it a haven for transnational anarchists and a destabilizing vortex in the Great Lakes region. If Boko Haram is not liquidated in Nigeria, it is likely to further evolve into an al Qaeda in the Sahel and could plant a subversive foothold in Chad, Niger and Cameroon.

The transnationalization of conflict is not about a clash of civilizations between the West and the Islamic world as famously posited by Samuel Huntington. It is a clash between the formal sovereign authority of nation-states and non-state actors in regions populated by sovereignty-deficient states. In many places, this clash also ties into the tension between colonial cartography and resurgent micronationalism. Colonially-imposed borders are being tested by transnational actors. The Tuareg rebellion in Mali in 2012 was only the latest iteration of a decades-long campaign to create Azawad – a Tuareg homeland that will span a number of Sahelian countries. The 2012 edition was sparked off by the return of over 2,000 Tuareg mercenaries that had previously been retained by Muammar Gaddafi. They left Libya after the fall of Gaddafi’s regime with an impressive arsenal and grand ambitions.

Parts of Africa today are not unlike 19^th century North America – a resource-laden frontier with weak governments, where the lines between banditry and subversive dissidence are dangerously blurred. In these parts, post-colonial state formation has either stalled or is proceeding slowly. The Oxford scholar Paul Collier once predicted that future civil wars would pit governments against private extralegal military groupings that will variously be called rebels, terrorists, freedom fighters or gangsters. These wars, he said, will be a throwback to the time before nation-states cohered. Perhaps that future is now upon us. 

Transnational anarchists have been bolstered by the decreasing legitimacy of nation-states, especially those in which national solidarity remains aspirational, and which suffer from weak institutions, a democracy deficit, severe poverty and inequality. African states have to forge regional security strategies but these groups cannot be destroyed solely by military means. Political leaders have to strengthen inclusive national institutions, deliver developmental dividends and starve such groups of the oxygen of deprivation which helps foster their depravity. 

(Published in Thisday, May 5, 2014)

(All images sourced online)             

Nigeria's Geostrategic Blind Spots

Nigeria’s most pressing national security concerns are of transnational dimensions. They range from the resilience of the terrorist insurgency in her northeastern frontier, a long neglected region vulnerable to subversive currents from the Sahel and the Maghreb to endemic oil theft and piracy in her southern coastal waters now ranked the world’s second most dangerous maritime sector after the Gulf of Aden and with the potential to disrupt the broader maritime economy in the Gulf of Guinea; and the influx of Sahelian pastoralists displaced by climate change, and in search of wetlands, a migration that is fueling conflict between farmers and herders over scarce land.

Against this backdrop, we have to rethink our foreign policy architecture which has been in stasis for some decades. Foreign policy thought has not significantly progressed from the buoyant days of Jaja Nwachukwu, Joseph Garba and Bolaji Akinyemi. From the 1960s to the 1980s, these foreign affairs ministers essentially based foreign policy on the doctrine of Nigerian primacy in Africa and defined her role as the chief opponent of neocolonialism and apartheid. However, since the collapse of apartheid in South Africa, Nigeria has not reinvented this role. Afrocentric activism is still a nominal pillar of our foreign policy but this has also been supplanted by a less confident, more beggarly comportment in the international space – a tragic reflection of the domestic lack of elite consensus and internal coherence.

Admirably, Nigeria has continued to contribute significantly to peacekeeping efforts in West Africa, and also under the auspices of the African Union and the United Nations. But these commitments seem to be pursued independent of any overarching foreign policy framework. The closest to a unified field theory to explain our human and material investments in the Africa is that they demonstrate our role as a “big brother”. Yet, uncritical beneficence is hardly the stuff of serious foreign policy.     

Revising our foreign policy calls for a decolonization of intra-African diplomatic relations. Many African countries are diplomatically closer to their former colonizers than to each other. Britain and Spain are thousands of miles away but we are far more familiar with them than with their erstwhile colonies, Ghana and Equatorial Guinea which are in our neighbourhood. One consequence of this dynamic is the perception of Foreign Service postings to Washington D.C. or to the Court of Saint James as being more important than those to “backwater” nations in our region. But in national security terms, our contiguous neighbours like Niger and Chad are far more important than say Canada or Italy. Equatorial Guinea, with which we share a maritime border, is more important than Spain. Instability in our neighbours immediately impacts millions of Nigerians far more than trends in Britain and the US.

A realistic ranking of nations in a hierarchy of strategic value would prioritize, in descending order, our contiguous neighbours, our major trading partners and nations that are home to Nigerians in diaspora who constitute a vital national resource. Thus far, West Africa and the Gulf of Guinea have been in our geostrategic blind spot but they actually constitute Nigeria’s near abroad – a zone over which she must act as regional gatekeeper. The sovereignty-deficits of our northern and southern neighbours mean that Nigeria cannot comprehensively deal with her national security challenges without projecting influence in her near abroad.

Nigeria is an Anglophone giant surrounded by francophone states of varying degrees of institutional fragility; a weak state surrounded by even weaker states. Economic troubles have forced France to slash military spending and curb her appetite for interventionism in Africa. France led a brief and measured NATO-supported intervention in Mali two years ago but has shown scant inclination to similarly intervene in the Central African Republic, a country where it has a long history of involvement. Decreasing French support leaves our francophone neighbours reeling from an influence vacuum. Nigeria’s main foreign policy challenge is to fill that vacuum. As a regional powerhouse, she is eminently positioned to do so. Given her transnational security challenges, it is absolutely imperative that she does so. An activist engagement in our sphere of influence would involve creating a common security umbrella with countries equally afflicted by non-state actors, deepening our intelligence infrastructure in the regional neighbourhood and working towards mutual economic prosperity.   

  

The campaign for permanent membership of the UN Security Council strikes nationalistic chords at home but it is even more important to reinvigorate our membership of apparently unglamourous bodies like the Gulf of Guinea Commission and the Niger River Basin Authority. The latter, for example, oversees transnational water resources in nine member countries. It approves dam projects that could have consequences for food security and the national economies in the Sahelian region as well as adversely impact Nigeria’s hydroelectric power capacity. Given the effect of climate change, the management of diminishing transnational water resources such as the River Niger and Lake Chad will be matters of increasing international disputation in the coming years. The Gulf of Guinea’s hydrocarbon riches have made it an area of interest to global actors. Its security challenges make it imperative for Nigeria to develop blue water naval capabilities to secure its maritime interests. Nigeria must also lead the international effort to impose law and order in the Gulf.

Ultimately, Africa needs Nigeria to assume her rightful role of leadership. The country’s search for internal coherence will have to proceed quickly. The security of an entire continent may well depend on it. 




(All images sourced online)  

The Real World Order

In recent weeks, watching Western leaders denounce President Vladimir Putin for Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine has been a surreal experience. Russia’s annexation of the Crimea has been called “a violation of international law”, a throwback to an era of imperial land grabs. In the 21^st century, countries that want to be taken seriously simply do not go about bullying smaller nations. Such thuggish behaviour supposedly violates some geopolitical ethic that most of the world could be forgiven for being ignorant of. In response to Western sermonizing, one can easily imagine Allende, Mosadegh, Saddam, Gaddafi and Lumumba and many others in the Valhalla of imperially-liquidated heads of state gasping incredulously at the self-righteous blather emanating from White Hall and the White House.

To be sure, Russia is guilty of aggression towards Ukraine. She has violated the latter’s territorial integrity and is definitely a bully towards her Eastern European neighbours. But Putin’s conduct is hardly novel. International law has long been the protean plaything of great powers, and invoking it in this case may have had impact were it not for the long list of international incidents in which the US and her allies gave it short shrift. Invocations of international law suggest a global legal order in which all nations are bound by the same rules. Instead it masks an order defined by American exceptionalism and the primacy of Western interests in which America operates as a lone-ranging super sheriff that is above the law.

Military intervention in sovereign nations has long been common international practice despite the shock that many nations profess when it is perpetrated by others. From the Falklands Islands to the Suez Canal to Kosovo, major powers have remorselessly forced their will on weaker countries to advance actual or perceived vital interests.

In 1983, the US invaded Grenada claiming that it was necessary to protect Americans and cited as legal basis for the invasion, a request by the little-known Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). It ignored the Organization of American States (OAS) which handles matters of collective security in the region and which was formed expressly to protect the principles of noninterference and national sovereignty. The US used its veto power in the United Nations Security Council to kill a resolution condemning the invasion as “a flagrant violation of international law and of” Grenada’s “independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity”. President Ronald Reagan’s position was that the US can and may use force to challenge regimes that threaten American security. It is possible to transpose the rhetoric and the justifications used by America on that occasion with those deployed by Russia for its recent aggression against Ukraine. They are virtually the same, and for good reason. Russia is not an outlier. It has acted imperially as her fellow major powers often do. Indeed, Russia possesses as much belief in her uniqueness as America does in her own exceptionalism.  

The problem of the international order goes beyond Russian expansionism or American vigilantism. The big five of the UN Security Council exercise special prerogatives in similar ways. Russia sees the former Soviet republics and chunks of Eastern Europe as her sphere of influence just as the US sees Latin and Central America as her own geostrategic backyard. Britain remains prepared to use military force against Argentina to keep hold of the Falklands which is almost 13, 000 kilometers away from the British Isles and only about 160 kilometers from Argentina. China projects its power in South East Asia. France looks upon its erstwhile colonial possessions with Napoleonic affection.

An international law that equally binds all nations is far from evident. Russia bullies Ukraine and Georgia. America bullies Venezuela and Cuba. Britain bullies Argentina. China bullies Taiwan and Tibet. France relives her imperial heydays with interventions in Africa. In fact, France’s longest land border is not with Germany or Spain but with Brazil due to her colonial territory of French Guiana.  

With regard to Ukraine, Russia is in a strong position. She is Europe’s major energy supplier and under Putin is intent on restoring the lost glory of the Rodina. The West is war weary, exhausted by exertions in the Middle East and Central Asia. Western publics are not as credulous as they were over a decade ago when George W. Bush and Tony Blair sent their armies into protracted wars at great cost and for uncertain ends. The austerity measures undertaken after the global financial crisis and accompanying defence cuts have also dented national confidence on both sides of the Atlantic. There is no enthusiasm for military confrontation, least of all with the Russian juggernaut. As the American political scientist, Michael Mandelbaum once sardonically observed, “The worst possible maxim to follow in geopolitics is ‘Pick on someone your own size.’” The feeble sanctions imposed on Russia by the West indicate the latter’s impotence.    

The lesson from the Ukrainian debacle is that an international order based on American supremacy or the primacy of the big five is no longer sustainable. The challenge is not Russian expansionism; it is an unequal international order that permits imperial exceptionalism and vigilantism. Until a genuine global democratic order emerges, in which all nations are treated equally, the world will continue to witness unilateral military actions. Emerging powers will be tempted to execute military solutions in furtherance of their strategic interests and without recourse to international institutions which are often no more than the talk shops of the impotent.  The 21^st century’s main geopolitical challenge is the democratization of the international order. 

(All images sourced online)