Washington And The World Can a Handful of Troops #BringBackOurGirls?

Laura Seay is assistant professor of government at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

On Tuesday, the White House announced that the United States will send a team of military personnel, hostage negotiators and intelligence experts to assist Nigerian authorities in finding 276 teenage girls who were kidnapped from their school in Chibok on April 15. The mass kidnapping, which has galvanized global outrage and even led to a Twitter hashtag campaign, #BringBackOurGirls ( joined by First Lady Michelle Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and dozens of celebrities), was conducted by Boko Haram, a dangerous militant group that seeks to throw the Nigerian government and create an Islamic state in its place. As President Obama noted in announcing the aid, Boko Haram has engaged in “killing people ruthlessly for many years now”—the kidnappings are only the latest outrage.

On Monday, a man purporting to be Boko Haram’s leader appeared in a video to issue a stark warning. “I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah,” he said. Oddly, he made no demands, but what Boko Haram wants is clear: the establishment of an Islamist theocracy in northern Nigeria and beyond.


The U.S. team will involve fewer than 10 soldiers and will likely be focused primarily on providing intelligence and negotiation support. This is a small effort, but it points to the United States’ quiet, but growing engagement across dozens of African countries facing a metastasizing terrorist threat. Nigeria is especially important: It’s by far the most populous country in Africa and one of its three biggest economies. Each year, America sends Nigeria $5 billion in private investment and around $700 million in aid, and it’s the 5th largest oil exporter to the United States. A million and a half Nigerians live here, sending millions of dollars in remittances across the Atlantic and maintaining close business and personal ties to home.

U.S. security assistance in the region is not charity; it generally aims to bolster African militaries, and for two main reasons. First, the United States wants African militaries to staff peacekeeping missions on the continent. Second, the United States wants regional governments to suppress militant groups like Boko Haram. Both of these objectives serve the U.S. interest in avoiding putting boots on the ground in Africa (a prospect for which the American public has had no appetite since the failed intervention in Somalia under President George H.W. Bush) while still addressing security threats and humanitarian crises—each of which the continent has in spades.

America’s involvement is largely a good thing. Most African soldiers still get their basic training in traditional styles of warfighting rather than counterinsurgency tactics and other forms of unconventional warfare, though they rarely fight conventional conflicts. Instead, African soldiers often fight small, highly mobile armed groups in areas where there are large civilian populations to protect. So improved training, including instruction in respecting human rights and protecting civilians, almost always helps.

In Nigeria, this assistance could be particularly useful, but the reality has fallen short of lofty U.S. policy goals. Militant attacks on civilians still happen on a regular basis. Poorly equipped and demoralized Nigerian troops do not have the materiel, resources or training they need to effectively go after Boko Haram or protect the citizens of the large swath of northern Nigeria in which the militants operate. They work in extremely difficult terrain near the southern edge of the Sahara desert, where it’s all too easy for Boko Haram’s fighters – the core group of which number several hundred, but are believed to be supported by several thousand others – to slip across the border to avoid capture. In recent years, the group has launched a seemingly endless stream of attacks on villages, mosques, churches and schools.As its membership is amorphous and it can be hard to pin responsibility for specific deaths, we do not know exactly how many people Boko Haram has killed, but the death toll from the insurgency is at least 4,000 people. To say that the Nigerian military is falling down on the job is putting it mildly.

It also sometimes causes more problems than it solves. In October 2012, Nigerian troops opened fire on civilians after a bomb exploded in the city of Maiduguri, killing 30 people who were almost certainly not members of Boko Haram or any other militant movement. The armed forces have repeatedly engaged in other abuses against civilians as well. There is no evidence that these particular units were U.S.-trained, but as analyst Lesley Warner noted in a review of U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the region, the incident highlighted the need for better monitoring of American-trained forces. After all, the last thing anyone in the United States wants is for military training and improved skills to be deployed against civilian populations rather than the intended targets.

What the United States cannot control, though, is how this crisis plays out in Nigeria’s domestic political scene, which has changed dramatically in the last 15 years. After three turbulent decades marked by a series of military coups, the 1998 death of Gen. Sani Abacha opened the door for democracy. That shift has held, largely thanks to an informal agreement among ruling elites to rotate power between members of different ethnic groups representing the country’s two major regions: the largely Muslim north and the mostly Christian south. By tradition, if the president is a southern Christian (as is the case now with Goodluck Jonathan), the vice president is a northern Muslim, and vice-versa.

Nigeria is not yet fully democratic, though – since Abacha’s death, all the winning presidential candidates have been members of the ruling People’s Democratic Party, and the system is arguably little more than an agreement among elites to allow each an opportunity to loot the public treasury in turn – but it works. For all its problems, Nigeria today is more stable than it was under military leadership, and the country is a freer, more open place than it was two decades ago.

Except where it isn’t. The Chibok kidnappings were just the latest in a series of violent attacks on civilians that have grown increasingly brazen over the last five years. Chibok, however, has touched a nerve among Nigerians in a way that previous attacks did not. Citizens across all social classes, regions and ethnic groups have seized upon the story of the country’s 276 missing daughters and are using it to challenge a government that many see as incompetent and detached from their ordinary lives. Protests have broken out in the country’s major cities. In Lagos, the capital, traders’ associations shut down several major markets on Monday morning, a sign of major discontent.

President Jonathan, meanwhile, is doing little to dispel the perception that he is hopelessly out of touch. Two protest leaders were detained immediately after meeting with the first lady on Sunday night. The wedding of his daughter Faith, which took place the weekend before the Chibok kidnappings, was a lavish affair, complete with custom-engraved, gold-plated iPhones as favors for the guests. Ordinary Nigerians took to social media to express wonder that the president could afford such an extravagant celebration but couldn’t adequately equip the country’s security forces to rescue the girls.

The Chibok protests are the biggest episode of unrest in Nigeria since early 2012, when thousands rallied against the government’s attempt to cut fuel subsidies. That movement was successful; Jonathan quickly backed down, the subsidy remained in place, and calm was restored.

Will the response to Chibok be different? In this case, even finding the kidnapped girls might not be enough to save Jonathan. He is up for reelection in 2015, but his government is widely viewed as incompetent and corrupt. Nigerians are demanding more transparency on issues like how the money in the country’s security budget is actually spent. Although he’s unlikely to be ousted, Jonathan is well aware that his response to this crisis will play a major role in determining his reelection prospects.

Nigeria is a young country, with more than half its population under the age of 20. A recent survey shows high levels of disapproval of the country’s economic conditions and deep pessimism about the direction in which the country is headed. A political competitor who could effectively channel popular anger about inequality, corruption and poor services into a political movement could well depose Jonathan, assuming the electoral process is kept free and fair.

What would that mean for the United States? U.S. policy in Africa is driven first and foremost by a preference for stability and preserving a stable status quo. Were mass, disruptive protests to erupt or the political leadership to change in Nigeria, it would not automatically be disastrous for Washington, but neither would American diplomats and policymakers have an easy go of it. The United States has a great interest in seeing that the democratically elected leaders of one of Africa’s most important countries be committed to – and capable of – maintaining stability and fighting extremism.

Resolving issues around inequality and economic opportunity is the key to reducing the terrorist threat and ensuring that new ones don’t emerge. Boko Haram did not pop up in the desert as an isolated phenomenon of men obsessed with a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law, nor was it manufactured by international jihadis looking for a new hiding place. The group exists because Nigeria’s leaders failed to build an inclusive society that provides basic services, a decent standard of living and genuine opportunity for all. But Jonathan doesn’t seem up to the task, and nobody should be surprised if the botched response to the Chibok kidnappings leads to more misery rather than less. Unfortunately, a handful of U.S. troops isn’t going to change that sobering fact.