Nigeria Shows Its Weakness

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/world/africa/nigeria-shows-its-weakness.html

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DAKAR, Senegal — Throughout the nearly five years of the Boko Haram uprising, Western military officials assigned to Nigeria have had the same complaint: The Nigerian Army was eager to get gadgets from the West — surveillance equipment, specialized weaponry, protective gear — but was otherwise not in the least bit interested in its advice.

It didn’t want to hear about best practices in counterinsurgency, these officials said. It didn’t want moralizing lectures on winning hearts and minds or gathering intelligence. This was Nigeria’s business, and Nigeria could handle it, the officials were told for years. The offers of help were rebuffed. Behind that attitude was Nigerian pride in its huge military establishment and a belief — not unfounded, even if misdirected — that Boko Haram was a domestic problem that must have a domestic solution.

Now, with world attention suddenly focused on the failed war against the Islamist terror group, Nigerian officials, civilian and military, have radically changed their tune. Boko Haram, it turns out, is not just a Nigerian problem, but actually a phase in what President George W. Bush liked to call the Global War on Terror. So of course Nigeria is eager to accept help from Britain, Canada, France and the United States, and others — and in fact, shame on those countries for taking so long to wake up.

The abduction of nearly 300 schoolgirls from the remote village of Chibok has had the effect of sharply concentrating the collective mind of Nigerian officialdom in the capital, Abuja, around a problem that had been treated for years as a regional distraction.

When President Goodluck Jonathan finally visited the epicenter of the insurgency, Maiduguri, some months back, for instance, it was played as major news in the Nigerian media. Mr. Jonathan and his aides have been baffled by the criticism that he was slow in responding to the abduction of the schoolgirls. Their bafflement is well founded. In fact, he responded to the kidnappings in the same way that he has responded to countless other Boko Haram atrocities (or indeed to the anti-civilian depredations of his own military): minimally, or not at all.

Chibok and the immense global mobilization over it has changed all that. Abuja is now saying in unison that the fight against Boko Haram can’t be handled by Nigeria alone and so it is no wonder that the terrorist group is still rampaging unabated. “Sadly it took Chibok to get the world to see,” one of the country’s leading antiterrorism officials, retired Maj. Gen. Sarkin-Yaki Bello, said in an interview in Abuja last week. “The global community has yet to come to terms with this,” he said. “It is a war to save humanity.”

Actually, though, there is good reason to think that the original view — that this is a Nigerian domestic problem — was correct. To be sure, Nigeria needs the intelligence and military help of its new allies around the world. But in goals, ideology, training, outlook and even tactics, Boko Haram is characteristically Nigerian: that is, focused on Nigeria alone. The outside world hardly exists for it.

It has never expressed much if any interest in global jihad. When I met with two Boko Haram members in Kano two years ago, they made it clear that their principal target was the Nigerian state, and their main ideological mission the radical Islamization of Nigeria. They denied having received training overseas and expressed no interest in targets outside Nigeria.

Periodically, there are reports that Boko Haram men have been trained in Mali or elsewhere and have received help from Al Qaeda’s West African affiliate. But the evidence is fragmentary and unconvincing.

Boko Haram attacks Nigerians, not foreigners, in a strategy of killing as many fellow citizens as possible to prove what is already apparent: Mr. Jonathan’s state is weak, is incapable of protecting other Nigerians, is losing its domestic terror war, and fields an army that is hollowed out by corruption, poor leadership and indiscipline. Those are domestic issues to be solved by Nigerians. The well-meaning assistance of outsiders could help, and most likely will. But it won’t be enough.