US secretary of state John Kerry’s announcement that Washington has a team in Nigeria to assist in the hunt for more than 200 abducted schoolgirls included a twist. "We are also going to do everything possible to counter the menace of Boko Haram,” he said.

Kerry didn’t elaborate, perhaps because the US and Nigeria do not agree on the nature of the menace let alone how to counter it.

American officials are themselves divided. General Carter Ham, the then-commander of US Africa Command, Africom, has said Boko Haram wants to emulate al-Qaida and attack the US. Defence officials are looking to Washington’s alliance with Yemen, with its close intelligence cooperation and CIA drone strikes, as an example for dealing with Boko Haram.



But former top American diplomats have a less alarmist take. They say Boko Haram remains focused on Nigeria and that confronting the deep poverty and alienation that many people in parts of the Muslim north of the country feel is key to defeating the insurgency.

They also warn that the Nigerian army’s brutal counter-insurgency campaign has strengthened Boko Haram and complicated American military assistance.

Nigeria, for its part, is sensitive to offers of assistance that infer it is not capable of dealing with its own problems and wary of allowing the US military to establish a foothold.



Nigeria: a centrepiece of Washington's security policy

Although Boko Haram’s abduction of the schoolgirls has thrust the violence in Nigeria onto the world diplomatic stage, the crisis has been high on Washington's African agenda for several years. But even before that, the most populous country in Africa was a centrepiece of US security policy as the continent’s largest oil producer.



When an armed rebellion targeted oil facilities in the Niger Delta in the 2000s, the US provided counter-insurgency training, intelligence assistance and gave former Coast Guard cutters to the Nigerian navy.



Fighters with the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta prepare for an operation against the Nigerian army in 2008. Photograph: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Photograph: PIUS UTOMI EKPEI/AFP/Getty Images

The Nigerian government wasn’t keen to acknowledge the aid partly out of pride but also because it was keen to diminish the seriousness of an uprising driven by popular anger that the Delta was the source of the country’s wealth while many of its people lived without basic amenities such as electricity.



That rebellion, which mixed genuine grievance with a form of organised crime including kidnappings and extortion, also led some American officials to conclude that Nigerian governments were inherently unstable because of the country’s economic and religious division.



In 2008, the army war college in Pennsylvania carried out a war game in which the Nigerian government is on the brink of collapse and the US intervenes to protect the oil supply.



In recent years, Boko Haram has come to eclipse unrest in the Delta. It was not apparently an immediate threat to oil interests, in part because of geography. The wells where hundreds of miles away in the south. But General Ham saw a different threat.



“What is most worrying at present is, at least in my view, a clearly stated intent by Boko Haram and by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb to coordinate and synchronise their efforts. I’m not so sure they’re able to do that just yet, but it’s clear to me they have the desire and intent to do that,” he told the Associated Press in 2011.



US officials have pointed to what they say is rising anti-US rhetoric by Boko Haram. The US House of Representatives homeland security committee issued a report three years ago, ‘Boko Haram: Emerging Threat to the US Homeland’, which said the group could be a threat to Nigeria’s oil production.



“Boko Haram has already adopted many of al-Qaida’s targeting tactics. If Boko Haram continues this trend, Nigerian oil facilities will be in the crosshairs,” the report said. “It is critical that the US work more closely with Nigerian security forces to develop greater domestic intelligence collection and sharing with the US Intelligence Community. Military cooperation is vital to a successful counter-terrorism strategy. A possible model includes Yemen, with whom US built an effective intelligence sharing partnership.”



The House report noted favourably that cooperation with Yemen had led to a drone strike which killed an American Yemeni imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, who US intelligence described as the spiritual leader for a Nigerian Muslim, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas day in 2009.



The report said "the rising threat of Boko Haram presents the United States" as "an opportunity to expand diplomatic and military engagement with both Abuja and Nigerian Muslims in the north".



Ham has said that “very clearly Boko Haram has altered” the US relationship with Nigeria and that Washington was looking for “ways that Nigeria would like us to give help in developing their counterterrorist capabilities”.



The US Defense Department has spent millions of dollars in recent years helping Nigeria develop a counter-terrorism infantry unit and to develop "tactical communications". It has also trained Nigerian forces for peacekeeping operations.

An African diplomat responsible for dealings with the US said the Nigerians do not see the Americans' relationship with Yemen as an example, but a warning.

“There’s a lot of pressure for Nigeria to throw the door open to the Americans. The talk is of closer intelligence cooperation, all the things the Americans can do with their spy drones and listening devices. It’s in the Nigerians’ nature to be suspicious of this. It offends their pride and they wonder where it will lead. When people talk of Yemen, that’s not a good example with CIA drones buzzing around the sky picking off people,” he said.



There is also suspicion in Nigeria that American pressure for a greater role will be used by Washington to justify the establishment of the US Africa Command and to get it a foot on the ground after Abuja rejected pressure for it to be based in Nigeria and openly opposed its creation.



Nigeria's 'lack of urgency' in combatting Boko Haram

Part of the issue for the Americans has been to persuade President Goodluck Jonathan that Boko Haram is as serious a threat as Washington thinks it is. Many in the Christian south of Nigeria regard the north as backward and Boko Haram as Muslims attacking Muslims.



Protesters march in support the kidnapped schoolgirls in front of the Nigerian Embassy in Washington. Photograph: Gary Cameron/Reuters Photograph: GARY CAMERON/Reuters

The US House committee report described what it said was a “lack of urgency among senior Nigerian military commanders” in combatting Boko Haram and “the inability of the government to pay its soldiers” which led to low morale and desertions.



The former US assistant secretary of state for Africa, Johnnie Carson, said Washington's offer of assistance to Nigeria fits with its policy in other parts of the continent including the use of American troops and aircraft in a so far unsuccessful effort to track down Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army responsible for atrocities in Uganda.



"Our offer of assistance is consistent with the desire to help bring to justice individuals who are carrying out atrocities in Africa. Things that we can do for Nigeria are to help provide intelligence collection, better information gathering, help them to improve their investigative techniques, help them in their forensics training," he said.

But Carson said there are limits to the levels of American cooperation in part because of the brutal response by the Nigerian military to Boko Haram has contributed to support for the group.



"The government's response to the problem has been mono-dimensional – single-dimensional. It's always been a security response to the problems, and that security response, regrettably, has been very, very heavy-handed and very brutal in many respects. Individuals in the north talk about a military that comes in and responds to the Boko Haram threat as being just as predatory and disrespectful of their civil liberties as Boko Haram has been," he said.



"In fact, much of the Nigerian military cannot legally be assisted by the United States, because it would not be able to pass the Leahy vetting – that is, a military that has engaged, or seemingly engaged, in a violation of human rights."



US officials are not keen to see American forces yet again accused of complicity in crimes against Muslim civilians.



Carson said that ultimately a security response will not work without addressing the deep disaffection underpinning support for Boko Haram which began as an anti-government movement focussed on anger over poverty and corruption. He said the Nigerian government does not share that view.



“There always has been a reluctance to accept the analysis of what the drivers are causing the problems in the north," he said.



That's an opinion shared by a former US ambassador to Nigeria, John Campbell, who said Nigerian governments have been reluctant to hear that their policies have contributed to fomenting unrest in the north of the country.



"In the north, there is a pervasive sense of marginalisation by a government in Abuja that is perceived to be predominately southern and predominantly Christian," he said. "An elephant in the living room is just how much popular support Boko Haram actually enjoys. Government spokesmen fairly consistently say that it has no popular support, that, in fact, it operates basically through violence and intimidation, and that of course, I think is true. On the other hand, you have Boko Haram activity since 2009. It's been escalating, and the government seems to be very far away from being able to bring it under control."



• This article was amended on 9 May 2014. An earlier version described General Carter Ham as commander of US Africa Command. He is a former commander of US Africa Command.