Remember all those hundreds of girls
kidnapped by Boko Haram, the Islamist
insurgents in Nigeria? Well, turns out
that seven months later, few of them
have been returned home. Many have
been married off to Boko Haram
fighters–in other words, into sex slavery.
How could this be, given all the outrage
that the kidnapping occasioned?
Remember the #BringOurGirlsBack
hashtag campaign? Even Michelle
Obama got into the act.
But now few of those who patted
themselves on the back for their social
conscience in tweeting remember
anymore whether their tweets achieved
any effect–and most, one suspects, have
moved onto other causes (though not,
for some reason, to the slaughter in
Syria, which claimed another 76,000
victims last year). It turns out that–
surprise, surprise–the sword remains
mightier than the tweet.
More significant than the fact that the
tweet campaign has fallen short–did
anyone over the age of 14 ever imagine
that it would succeed?–is the fact that
military assistance provided by the U.S.
Africa Command to the Nigerian forces
has also fallen short. The drones have
now been withdrawn amid mutual
recriminations between the U.S. and
Nigeria, as recounted in this New York
Times article.
U.S. officials blame the Nigerian military
for being brutal and corrupt and
ineffective. The Nigerians complain that
they haven’t received heavy enough
weapons from the U.S. Nigeria’s
ambassador to the U.S., speaking at the
Council on Foreign Relations (where I
work), recently said, “There is no use
giving us the type of support that
enables us to deliver light jabs to the
terrorists when what we need to give
them is the killer punch.”
Needless to say, the U.S. military
representatives, schooled in a decade of
hard counterinsurgency in Iraq and
Afghanistan, have the better end of this
argument. Heavy weaponry will only
make the situation worse if it enables
the Nigerian military to kill more
innocent civilians, thus leading their
friends and relatives to flock to Boko
Haram for protection and revenge. The
key to success is cleaning up the military
and improving its relations with civilians.
That is true not only in Nigeria but in
other countries–Iraq comes to mind–
where insurgencies have had a field day
recently.
Alas, American leverage to change
indigenous military forces in a place like
Nigeria is limited. The U.S. actually had
more leverage in Iraq when there were
still tens of thousands of U.S. troops in
the country but when President Obama
pulled the troops out, our leverage
disappeared–and so did the combat
effectiveness of the Iraqi military. Now it
must be rebuilt if Mosul and other towns
taken by ISIS are ever to be retaken.
There is no easy solution here. The U.S.
must continue to use what influence it
has in places like Nigeria to push for
military transformation–not in a high-
tech direction but rather in the direction
of more accountable, less corrupt forces.
If Nigeria’s leaders knew what was good
for them, they would undertake this
transformation themselves, but of
course as in many other countries they
are so invested in a corrupt power
structure that few of them have the will
or the means to reform it.
At the end of the day Nigeria needs
nation-building starting with the army.
Until Nigerian leaders wake up to this
need, Boko Haram will go from strength
to strength.
www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/01/02/boko-haram-and-the-need-for-nigerian-military-reform/