State of War

Nigerian authorities have been reluctant to describe the ongoing counter-insurgency campaign against Boko Haram in the northeast as a war. This reluctance is by no means unprecedented. Right up till the moment federal forces invaded Biafra, the federal government was still describing its mobilization against the secessionist regime as a “police action.” The tendency to understate security challenges is the state’s way of projecting an unflappable comportment; to reassure the public that “there is no cause for alarm” and that “the situation is under control.”

In this instance, the critical data defies understatement. Conservative estimates place the number of lives claimed by the insurgency at over 4, 000 since 2009. According to the UN High Commission for Refugees, the fighting has internally displaced 470, 000 people in Nigeria with another 60, 000 forced to seek refuge in Cameroon, Niger and Chad since 2013. More than fifty percent of the refugees are women and children. The closure of federal government colleges in the region has affected over 10, 000 students – a number that increases exponentially when the closure of other schools is factored in. The “talibanization” of the northeast is in progress as evinced by Boko Haram’s targeting of schools and preying upon girls.   

Since 2011, Boko Haram has struck the national police headquarters, army and air force bases in the northeast and the State Security Service headquarters in Abuja where inmates attempted a jailbreak last month. It has also attacked public schools including federal government colleges where young Nigerians of diverse faiths and ethnicities are educated. Its hatred for pluralism as embodied in the Nigerian state is unalloyed. Having moved from seeking virgins in paradise to snatching young girls for sexual slavery, the group’s ideological bankruptcy has been exposed. All that it has left is nihilistic sadism as evidenced by its murderous focus on soft targets. This makes it all the more dangerous.

President Goodluck Jonathan has not been able to rally the country against this threat; nor has he articulated a theory of the case that explains our current national security challenges and a grand ideological and strategic response to non-state actors. Instead, his administration has shown itself willing to use the conflict for political ends notably as a means of smearing political opponents. For its own part, the opposition is incapable of nuanced critiques of terrorism and sees an opportunity to promise miracles if elected. We are in a time of national crisis and statesmanship is in short supply.

The administration suffers from a massive credibility deficit. Jonathan’s serial broken promises to end the insurgency have been damaging. Continuing attacks on soft and hard targets such as military bases have undermined public confidence in the armed forces and security services. This is a shame because the military and the security agencies have worked hard to degrade Boko Haram. They have perhaps been undone by a predilection for “truth-bending.” Propaganda is a customary element of warfare but it has to be properly executed. Public impatience is understandable, more so, in the light of a political class that is largely considered insensitive to the plight of the poor – the insurgents’ victims of choice.

The administration has also failed to provide a coherent narrative timeline that explains the origin and evolution of Boko Haram. In January, Aliyu Mohammed Gusau was appointed minister of defence ostensibly to coordinate a new approach to the counter-insurgency. Gusau was National Security Adviser (NSA) from 1999 to 2006. Having been appointed again to that position by Jonathan in 2010, Gusau has been NSA longer than anyone else since 1999. An inquest into the origin and evolution of Boko Haram must surely ask questions of what he knew and did about the current threat when it was still at an embryonic stage in the early to mid 2000s. Gusau’s appearance before the senate for his confirmation hearing provided the opportunity to pose such questions. The senate instead afforded him the luxury of exemption from questioning. The fact that the senate failed to question a nominee penciled down to head the defence ministry in a time of war aptly demonstrates its dereliction of duty. 

The failure to produce an official biography of Boko Haram has been a boon to conspiracy theorists who tap into popular but false narratives to explain the insurgency. Some of the most colourful theories posit nebulous conspiracies starring either the president or his political opponents. However, in this instance, Nigerians are attributing to malice what is largely a consequence of incompetence. When a system long crippled by corruption, mediocrity and dysfunction is confronted by a protean, highly adaptive and asymmetrical threat, it is asking too much to expect an immediate nimble and strategically efficient response. These conspiracy theories continue to cloud the public mind at a time when national consensus is required.

Some of the measures that need to be taken – mass relocation of tens of thousands students to safer places for schooling or the establishment of protected camps for half a million refugees require competent leadership and a  strong state but the Nigerian state is weak and political actors are unwilling to lead.     

The military has scored moderate successes in its campaign at great human cost. Its casualty figures, while closely guarded by the defence establishment, are significant enough to warrant a national memorial and greater effort to commemorate the supreme sacrifices being made by the troops. However, the military is hamstrung by a deficit of numbers with which to adequately cover a theatre of operations which due to the nature of the enemy is highly fluid; a limited intelligence support structure and arguably, a resource deficit that adversely affects its ability to effectively hold ground. These deficits have to be surmounted.

But the military also suffers from being the only instrument in the toolkit favoured by politicians; it is, by definition, a broad sword when, in many instances, what is required is a scalpel. A purely military approach that is apparently devoid of preemptive policing, adequate intelligence gathering and psychological warfare components is bound to have limitations. For instance, the failure to protect moderate clerics that have been targeted by Boko Haram and to deploy them as a first line of defence against extremist ideologies in the communities is a tactical error. The army is also overstretched by its deployment across the federation putting out fires that are really within the purview of the police. The risk of mission fatigue is high.  

The National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, recently unveiled a broader strategy that incorporates non-military options in the counter-insurgency toolkit including greater efforts to win hearts and minds and to address the socio-economic conditions of the northeast. This will require time to work. The administration has also outlined the Federal Initiative for the North East (FINE), a raft of economic, infrastructural and agro-allied rehabilitation measures. Given the region’s scale of ecological, socioeconomic and infrastructural degradation, federal intervention is necessary. But until a suitably hefty security and military footprint is established and order is restored, rehabilitation and reconstruction will be impossible.

From all indications, this will not end soon. Counter-insurgency campaigns are notoriously long drawn-out affairs. This administration has been burned badly in the past by an imprudent eagerness to declare the imminence of victory. However, the nature of the enemy and the nature of its terrain which includes vast ungoverned spaces straddling borders with Cameroon, Chad and Niger, call for a reassessment of what ‘victory’ means. Both the public and the troops on the frontlines will be ill-served by premature triumphalism. Conversely, an open-ended military commitment with no timelines or performance indicators is untenable and carries its own risks. Prolonged militarization with ample occasion for human rights violations and scorched earth tactics will surely radicalize occupied communities and boost Boko Haram’s recruitment drive in the area. This dynamic, at least partly, accounts for Boko Haram’s resilience.  

Boko Haram lost the first phase of the war in 2011 when its attacks on churches failed to elicit widespread reprisals that could have ignited a broader sectarian war in which it would then have postured as an Islamist defence vanguard. Much of the conflict is now contained in the northeast but if the northeast is “abandoned” or “forgotten”, either by reason of paucity of resolve or resources, it would rapidly become a base for the insurgents to regroup and eventually launch attacks on other parts of the federation. The northeast frontier is usually on the fringes of the national consciousness but as the gateway to the Sahel and the Maghreb, it is an area of vital importance where the insurgents must be denied refuge or breathing space. We cannot afford for this to become a forgotten war. At this point, international assistance is necessary to augment the joint military operations by Nigeria and her neighbours. National pride should not stop Nigeria from seeking external help even as it continues build capacity.

In an age of attacks on soft targets, there also needs to be fresh thinking on how to secure public spaces – parks, bus stations, markets and schools. Strategies for this must involve the cooperation between security agencies and the citizenry. Terror is tragically the new normal and we must adopt a permanent posture of vigilance.

Given the foul opportunism of politicians in a pre-election year, it can be easy to forget who the real enemy is. The indiscriminately ecumenical range of Boko Haram’s victims on April 14 in Nyanya, Abuja should serve as a reminder. 

(All Images Sourced online)      

Pax Americana and Its Discontents

Current trends in the domestic politics of the United States have implications for the world. On major issues requiring bipartisan consensus for progress – welfare and social security reform, gun control, cutting the deficit and immigration – recalcitrant Republicans and Democrats are locked in an ideological impasse. The only area in which the US president has real latitude is in foreign policy. Presidents shackled by the restrictions of stalemated domestic politics can still look impressive and act imperiously on the world stage. Nowhere is this more evident that in the president’s power to conduct wars.

We may be approaching a time when presidents will orchestrate military engagements abroad in order to shore up their ratings at home. With domestic politics deadlocked, American voters may have no other means for evaluating their leaders than how muscularly they conduct themselves abroad.

In August 1998, President Bill Clinton, while facing intense congressional scrutiny over the Monica Lewinsky affair, ordered cruise missile strikes on terrorist camps in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for earlier attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Some critics thought that Clinton was trying to deflect attention from the tawdry scandal threatening to submerge his presidency by appearing presidential and decisive on the world stage. They cited “Wag the Dog”, a movie in which the White House hires a Hollywood film maker to create a fake war in the media to divert attention from the president’s sexual peccadilloes. Clinton administration spokesmen denied that the president was trying to wag the dog.

The notion that an American president could stage an international incident for domestic political gain is not outlandish. We could yet see the assassinations of foreign nationals whether terrorists, rogue scientists or dissidents strategically timed to provoke an uptick in pre-election polls. This would simply be a logical advancement from the George W. Bush administration’s use of colour-coded terror alerts to frighten the American public into acquiescence.

Foreign wars conducted by special ops units and Predator drones can enable presidents to exorcise the “wimp factor” that comes from being unable to push their agenda through an implacable congress. Bitterly divided at home between Liberal secularists and conservative religionists, war-making may become a logical means by which a president conjures patriotic paroxysms and rallies his people to the Star - Spangled Banner.  

The last decade witnessed an unprecedented expansion of the president’s war powers and their disconnection from congressional oversight and democratic constraints. Liberals had hoped that Barack Obama would reverse the trend which began under Bush. But it has continued largely because politicians are rarely inclined to refuse more power and also because of the sense that an assertive presidency is needed as a counterweight to an intransigent do-nothing congress and to shepherd an evidently “confused” electorate which keeps sending divided governments to Washington. As Peter Beinart wrote recently in Newsweek, “Liberals may not be thrilled about the drone program, but they trust Obama’s judgment in a way they never trusted Bush’s. And… they want a president strong enough to impose his will on a Congress that they consider reactionary, corrupt, and dismissive of the public will.”

During the 2012 elections, Republican efforts to tar Obama as weak on national security as they typically do to liberal presidents simply failed to stick against the man who took out Osama Bin Laden and ordered more drone strikes in his first year than his predecessor did in his entire eight years. With presidents rendered impotent at home but virile abroad, thanks to the exigencies of the “war on terror”, the world has ample reason to fear American militarism. Because drones largely eliminate the need for boots on the ground and therefore the spectacle of flag-draped body bags arriving from foreign lands to public outrage, they offer a politically cost-effective way of waging war and attaining the tough guy image that reassures Americans that the president is keeping them safe. With their disregard for the niceties of sovereignty and international law, drones are the new symbol of US imperial omnipotence.  

It is worth noting that the debate in the US over the drone-assassination of Anwar al Awlaki, an American citizen, was about whether the president can order the termination of a US citizen. It is taken for granted that he can order the killing of foreign citizens. Indeed, the US can kill foreign citizens in their own countries as drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen indicate. The toll in “collateral damage” – civilians, men, women and children – is deemed an “acceptable loss.”

The international media, so often exercised about Arab terrorists and African warlords, its favourite pantomime villains, has little to say about the serial misdeeds of the biggest war-making power on earth. The very viable case for hauling US officials (Bush and Dick Cheney would be great) before the War Crimes Tribunal is simply laughed off. It is the most pungent indication that the international community is an unfair constellation and that might is still right. While western pundits fulminate over the election of Uhuru Kenyatta who is billed to appear at the Hague for alleged crimes against humanity, they side-step the fact that US and British officials are responsible for far more deaths of innocents in  Afghanistan and Iraq. It seems that wearing a suit and sitting in White Hall or the White House while ordering a war on the basis of fabricated evidence (as in Iraq), confers immunity from justice.

As is so often the case, technology has a way of democratizing power and will do so yet again in this brave new world of imperial presidents and drones. It was when China and Russia joined America in the club of nuclear nations that she began to advocate nuclear arms control treaties. American officials will start preaching restraint in the use of drones once China and Russia carry out drone campaigns of their own. The Bush administration’s doctrine of pre-emptive war undermined America’s customary self-righteous sermonizing to other countries. US officials bleat tamely about the need for dialogue and restraint when China and Russia carry out bloody campaigns in Tibet and Chechnya, because they recognize that it is hypocrital to do so. Vladmir Putin gamely defined Russian operations in Chechnya as a “war on terror”, appropriating Bush’s terminology and implying moral equivalence between the two nations’ militarisms.

The problem with Pax Americana is that its imperial character cannot make the world more peaceful. After witnessing the Euro-American intervention in Libya which ousted Gaddafi, other nations took note. They watched as western nations violated a country’s sovereignty, aided an internal insurrection, bombed the country into submission, and saw to the killing of the country’s leader. They learned that Gaddafi had signed his death warrant when he signed away Libya’s weapons of mass destruction. This is why Iran and North Korea are unlikely to give up their nuclear aspirations; because they fear a power that has arrogated to itself the right to determine who rules other nations. Despite the war weariness in the west stemming from the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, the potential for conflict in the Persian Gulf and the Korean Peninsula is quite high. 

Thus, Pax Americana by default, if not design, can only generate conflict in the world. It will continue to do so until two things happen – until the US resolves the contradictions that have paralyzed its domestic politics which in turn prompts her presidents to play “Captain America” and engage in imperial overreach. More importantly, there has to be a common plumb line for global justice that targets war criminals of every hue…Yes, including those that are to be found in White Hall and the White House.   

All Images Sourced Online.