Although deaths from the terrorist group Boko Haram are down since they peaked in 2012, the group continues to wreak havoc across the northern part of Nigeria. In 2015, the U.S. pledged more military assistance to help fight the insurgency. But as former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell tells The Cipher Brief’s Kaitlin Lavinder, a military-only solution will not solve the problem. Ambassador Campbell, who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, talks with Kaitlin about the increase in Boko Haram attacks over the past few months and why it is difficult to implement a robust response to thwart future attacks.
The Cipher Brief: A report from Voice of America last month, using data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, found terror-related deaths across Africa are down from highs in 2012. However, you told me that Boko Haram related deaths have been on the rise over the past few months. What is causing this rise? And are Boko Haram related deaths so far this year still lower than compared to 2012?
Ambassador John Campbell: Yes, they’re down from highpoints in 2012. And in fact, Boko Haram was at that point responsible for more deaths than any other radical movement. So, yes they’re down from there.
I would refer you to a Voice of America report I saw from August 15, quoting a Nigerian intelligence officer as saying that there have been at least 37 Boko Haram attacks in the single city of Maiduguri over the past two weeks and more than 100 in the past six months. So there has definitely been an increase in Boko Haram activity. But it’s different from in 2012. In 2012, Boko Haram was actively occupying territory, and at its greatest extent, occupied territory larger than the state of Maryland. Now it no longer sees interest in occupying territory and instead carries out essentially hit-and-run attacks on relatively soft targets.
You may have also seen that there was a major attack on August 15, again in Maiduguri, by a female suicide bomber who killed 27 people. This is ongoing. And Boko Haram would appear to be far from defeated.
TCB: What is the purpose of the hit-and-run attacks, if the goal is no longer to control larger swathes of territory?
Campbell: This takes us to the interesting question of just what is Boko Haram? Boko Haram is not a conventional organization like, say, ISIS. Boko Haram has indicated no particular interest in state building. It has no economic program. It’s stated intent is essentially the achievement of justice for the poor through the rigid implementation of sharia. In other words, it may bear certain similarities to the Lord’s Resistance Army. It’s a millenary organization; it looks toward the end times. It doesn’t want to recreate the Nigerian state. It wants to destroy the Nigerian state.
TCB: Does it have its eyes set outside of Nigeria to surrounding countries?
Campbell: Surrounding countries, that’s meaningless, because the boundaries that separate Nigeria from Niger, Chad, and Cameroon were all drawn by the British and the French – in the case of Cameroon, by the Germans – at the end of the 19th century. Those boundaries don’t mean anything on the ground. There is a kind of cultural unity amongst the people [who support Boko Haram] that spreads across them.
If your question is, is Boko Haram interested in operations outside of its own particular cultural area? The answer to that would be there’s no sign of it thus far. There have been no significant attacks, for example, in southern Nigeria or in Lagos [Nigeria’s largest city], and nothing in Europe or the United States.
TCB: The United States in 2015, after Boko Haram pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, said it would boost military assistance to Nigeria to help fight Boko Haram.
Campbell: Be careful. It was [Abubakar] Shekau who pledged allegiance to IS. It has never been clear what authority Shekau has over Boko Haram, or in the particular case of the oath of allegiance, whether that meant anything beyond a personal oath of allegiance.
TCB: Still, the U.S. said that it would boost military assistance to Nigeria to fight this insurgency. Has the United States followed through on that, and is it effective?
Campbell: The administration has agreed to sell certain light aircraft to the Nigerian government, aircraft which the Nigerians have asked for. I don’t know where that stands in terms of congressional approval.
TCB: Why is the situation in Nigeria, with the increasing Boko Haram attacks concentrated in the north, important to U.S. national security interests?
Campbell: For one thing, Boko Haram’s attacks, while they pose no particular strategic threat to the United States, do pose a major threat to the Nigerian state. The Nigerian state has been an important partner to the United States for a very long time. Nigeria is also by far the largest African country, and its population is greater than that of the Russian Federation. Nigeria is an important place, and we have to be concerned about what happens there
TCB: What is the Nigerian military doing to respond to the increase in attacks over the past few months?
Campbell: Hard to know. The chief of army staff gave the army a deadline of 45 days to basically capture Shekau – either dead or alive. That was interesting because at various times, the Nigerian army has claimed it has already killed Shekau. The statement by the chief of army staff would indicate that he at least thinks Shekau is still very much alive.
There has also been a redeployment of certain senior officers to Maiduguri, presumably to improve coordination of the efforts against Boko Haram. It remains to be seen what the effects of that will be.
TCB: To clarify, you said the chief of army staff seems to believe that Shekau is still alive – does there also seem to be the belief that Shekau is orchestrating these attacks?
Campbell: That would be a logical conclusion. But you’ve got to be very careful here. We know remarkably little about how Boko Haram goes about making decisions – how decisions are made about what to attack and when. We just don’t know. We don’t know what the internal organization of the Boko Haram movement is. Is there, for example, a supreme council? Some people think so; others are skeptical. What is the relationship of Shekau, or a Shekau-like figure, to the rest of the organization? Not clear. Shekau apparently issued a new video a few days ago, which included attacks on President [Muhammadu] Buhari. Shekau clearly continues to have an important media presence. But beyond that, it’s hard to know.
TCB: With so little known about the internal organization of the group, what more could be done by both U.S. and African militaries, and also civil society, to stem this wave of attacks?
Campbell: I think there’s a dilemma here. Obviously Boko Haram continues to have a certain amount of public support. Again, going back to the Nigerian intelligence officer quoted in the recent Voice of America report, he said, “Boko Haram has a substantial level of local support and they also have sympathizers…Let me just tell you the fact: If you count one, two, three houses in Maiduguri, the third one, definitely, one of those household members is a member of Boko Haram.” In other words, Boko Haram is a deeply rooted popular movement, and a response to it has to be a lot more than the military.
A problem is, how do you respond to the drivers of Boko Haram when there’s no security? Security implies that you have to use the military. And yet in the past, there’s been lots of evidence that abuses by the military, and by the police, were an important driver of Boko Haram recruitment. So it’s not so simple. You can’t just come up with a little solution that says if we follow this military strategy or this set of military tactics, we can defeat Boko Haram. Clearly what’s going to be required is a multi-faceted approach to Boko Haram, which in turn would seem to imply really significant changes in the economic and social realities of northeastern Nigeria. And that’s hard for any government to do.
TCB: Are there any indications that the local governments in northeastern Nigeria and the Nigerian federal government are working on a kind of multi-faceted plan?
Campbell: Yes, there is. But when you are dealing with the central government of Nigeria, and also the state government, you are dealing with institutions that have only so much capacity. The president of Nigeria has been in London now for months receiving medical attention [and just recently returned to Nigeria]. The northeast of Nigeria is one of the poorest parts of Africa. The capacity is limited.
TCB: Do you have any final thoughts on this?
Campbell: Be careful of formulas. This is an extraordinarily difficult issue, extraordinarily difficult for any government to deal with.
