Nigeria’s Interminable Insurgency? Addressing the Boko Haram Crisis

Opportunities to address the Boko Haram crisis have been missed, so the situation has become more entrenched, resulting in a seeming reduction in the policy options available to respond. But there are steps that can be taken, primarily by Nigerian state and non-state actors, but also by Nigeria’s neighbours and international partners. Boko Haram has been evolving in northeastern Nigeria for over a decade. An extremely violent  Islamist movement, it has in 2014 entered a new transitional phase. The inability of Nigeria’s armed  forces to obstruct its onslaught, combined with a higher international profile, have lent it a confidence  and ambition that appear to have prompted increasingly strategic behaviour, alongside its ongoing  indiscriminate and widespread attacks against civilian and state targets. The movement grew out of socio-economic flux that came with a process of democratic transition,  coupled with the consequences of decades of mismanagement resulting from military rule and  corruption. In a sense, Boko Haram too has been in a constant state of flux: it has always adapted  to changing circumstances, with its methods and membership reflecting this. This has allowed for  multiple descriptions of the group to endure, bridging different narratives of terrorism, insurgency  and criminality, where different drivers of conflict and instability have converged. Unique in Nigeria for its combination of sectarianism and terrorist tactics, Boko Haram is skilled  at exploiting state institutional weaknesses. Its familiarity with the terrain in Borno state, its home  territory, enables it to navigate around a demoralized and deficient security presence to carry out  attacks with impunity. Boko Haram was not a violent movement at its inception, nor at the point of its transition to a terrorist  network in 2009–10 was it a movement of such size and organization as to be a national threat. But  responses to Boko Haram have suffered owing to the dearth of credible information and the triumph  of vested interests in this opaque context. The uncertainties continue, and it is an amalgamation of  the lack of facts, competing political interests, multiplying local grievances and under-resourced yet  enmeshed armed forces in the northeast of Nigeria that has provided Boko Haram with the space,  motivation and opportunity to grow and further entrench itself in its northeastern stronghold. The movement’s ability to use this situation to present itself as a significant threat of substantial  capacity, together with the public messaging by its leader, Abubakar Shekau, and the criss-crossing  of borders by its members, have led to speculation over the nature of its international links. But while  a more internationalized and networked Boko Haram may evolve, viewing the problem through  an international prism risks inappropriate policy responses. Boko Haram is strongly rooted in its  domestic context and grew out of confrontation with the Nigerian state: it is host to a multiplicity of  domestic actors and interests and operates in a complex political environment. Any external actors  seeking a more active engagement in the crisis, for whatever reason, risk becoming entangled in what  is ultimately a Nigerian crisis. The actions of Nigeria’s security forces have been a significant determinant in the trajectory of the  crisis. Since the military repression of the Boko Haram uprising in July 2009, continued massacres,  extra-judicial killings and arrests without trial have widened the gap between communities and the  armed forces. The purpose of the presence of the armed forces in the northeast needs to change: the  only sustainable way to combat Boko Haram is to protect civilians. Without a reordering of priorities  and visible efforts to regain the trust of communities, Nigeria’s military will be caught fighting an  interminable insurgency. For those seeking to impede Boko Haram’s violent advance, Nigeria’s coming general elections in 2015  are an important consideration. It will become more difficult to distinguish between ideologically or  grievance-driven Boko Haram attacks, politically manipulated attacks and violent political militias  that may or may not claim to be affiliates of the movement. Although the April 2014 kidnapping of  more than 200 children, still missing, focused new and significant international attention on Nigeria  and Boko Haram and triggered offers of assistance by Nigeria’s international partners, it is in their  capacity to support dialogue, witness protection and the provision of humanitarian relief and shelter  for displaced civilians, as well as providing institutional support for inter-agency cooperation, that  these partners can be most helpful. The Boko Haram threat to Nigeria overall has been more oblique than a direct physical threat. The  movement has been continually eroding a still nascent sense of cohesion and will to accommodate  and compromise in such a diverse nation. This has served to legitimize reactive and short-term  policy responses to one of the most complex, unique and poorly understood security crises Nigeria  has ever faced.