Nigeria: Government Must Do More To Share The Nation’s Wealth With The North,

By Professor Max Abrahms

I’d like to begin with a little confession: I’m not a Nigeria expert. In fact, I’ve never even been to Nigeria, though I’d definitely like to go sometime.

What I am is a political scientist who tries to understand and ultimately predict militant group behavior.

I study not just Boko Haram, but the dynamics of all major militant groups from al-Qaida to Hamas.

Today, I want to talk about Boko Haram from a comparative perspective in terms of both its differences and similarities relative to other terrorist groups.

This approach might be useful because political scientists have found all sorts of patterns in terms of how militant groups tend to behave, what works and doesn’t work against them, and why.

Now, perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Boko Haram is its killing power.

This is a group that’s killed over 2000 civilians in just the first half of 2014.

In terms of its killing power, Boko Haram is therefore in very, very rare company.

In fact, over the past 5 years, only 1 other terrorist groups in the world—the Taliban—has killed off more people.

Boko Haram wasn’t always like this, of course.

An important watershed happened in 2009, when the group’s founder was killed by Nigerian security forces.

Ever since then, the group has become much, much more violent, especially against civilians.

In this sense, Boko Haram is actually NOT atypical.

In a forthcoming study in the journal International Organization, my co-author and I examine the effects of decapitation strikes against militant group leaders.

Our sample includes pretty much every militant group that’s ever operated in the Middle East or Africa over the past several decades.

What we find is that militant groups are significantly more likely to direct their violence against the population after their leaders have been killed.

Many prior studies look at whether decapitation strikes—like from drones—reduce the overall amount of militant group violence. But what we show is that killing off the leaders of militant groups also affects the type of violence they tend to commit.

Just like other groups, Boko Haram turned its violence against the civilian population only after its founder was killed off.

Now, usually this strategy of civilian targeting is counterproductive for militant groups.

Unlike selective violence against government forces, indiscriminate violence against civilians tends to erode popular support for the militants.

Militant groups have power in numbers, so this loss of support can be a real blow to their fighting capacity.

A recent example is al Qaida in Iraq, which imploded after turning its violence against the Iraqi public.

For awhile, I predicted that Boko Haram would suffer a similar fate as AQI.

I waited and waited for the Nigerian public to rise up against Boko Haram and crush it.

But unfortunately, this hasn’t happened.

An important question is…why not.

I suspect there are a bunch of reasons why Boko Haram’s indiscriminate violence hasn’t led to its demise.

It’s true that some Nigerian towns have in fact formed vigilantes. But Boko Haram has simply made them pay for doing so.

Boko Haram is wielding violence as a communication strategy to say…listen, if your town even tries to oppose us, we’ll pummel it, and that’s pretty much what they’ve done, as recently as a few days ago.

In this sense, a bigger backlash hasn’t happened in more places because of a lack of capability rather than a lack of resolve.

But this isn’t the entire story. The truth is that the Nigerian public would have much stronger resolve to take on Boko Haram if the alternative were more appealing.

Goodluck Jonathan and the security forces seem to be going out of their way to lose the public’s support by adopting indiscriminate counterterrorism measures.

This past week, Amnesty International has shed light on all sorts of government abuses against the population.

Many of you here have probably been following the news stories of the extra-judicial executions carried out by the Nigerian military.

Prisons are full of Nigerians based on the flimsiest of evidence that they’re in any way connected to Boko Haram.

Just residing near a Boko Haram stronghold can be enough. And once you end up in one of these prisons, there’s a good chance you’re next stop is at the morgue.

This isn’t just an immoral government policy. It’s also a counterproductive one.

Terrorists and counter terrorists actually share a lot in common strategically.

There’s power in numbers for counter terrorists—just like for the terrorists themselves.

And just as indiscriminate violence tends to erode militant group support, the same is generally true for governments, though to a lesser extent.

Indiscriminate violence is counterproductive for governments because it communicates to the population that it may be targeted even if it doesn’t side against the government.

And for this reason, the safety of civilians may actually depend on joining the militants.

Government actions against the population can also seem discriminatory.

For instance, a story yesterday in the Washington Post spoke of how some Nigerians were calling for a ban on the hijab to help thwart female suicide bombers.

Ironically, my main recommendation is the same for both militant groups and the governments fighting them. And that is…to build up your power in numbers by refraining from harming innocent civilians.

This is timely advice not just for Jonathan, but also for Maliki. A lot of people—myself included—have been waiting for another Sunni awakening to stamp out the terrorists in Iraq.

But this hasn’t happened largely because Maliki—like Jonathan—presents such a flawed alternative option.

Insurgents tend to hide out in the population, so it’s always tempting for governments to turn against it.

But even for strategic reasons alone, that’s the last thing governments ought to do.

One of the difficulties of reducing the number of Boko Haram members is that they’re driven by a host of different motives.

Sure, some members have joined out of disillusionment with the government. But others because of poverty or just unemployment or their religious fanaticism.

In this sense, Boko Haram is just like other terrorist groups, which always appeal to members for a wide variety of reasons.

This is precisely what makes fighting terrorism so difficult.

In a way, terrorism is a lot like cancer. The reason we haven’t found a good way to combat it is because there are so many different causal pathways to getting it.

As everyone knows, you can get cancer in countless ways from exposure to the sun to toxic chemicals. If there were only one way to contract the disease, we’d be able to focus in on closing off that one route.

Because different Boko Haram members derive different kinds of utility from participating in the group, Nigeria needs a multi-layered counterterrorism response aimed at depriving any utility from the group.

In practice, this means that the government must do more to share the nation’s wealth with the North, which will make Boko Haram less appealing among the poor and unemployed.

More generally, the government must do more to be seen as siding with the people.

This means ending indiscriminate counterterrorism measures, especially the growing practice of extra-judicial killings.

And finally, the government—like many governments in the Muslim world—must find a way to counter the ideological narrative of violent Islamists.

In sum, Boko Haram looks a lot like other terrorist groups in some ways. But is different in others.

Only by appreciating both the differences and similarities can academics hope to inform the debate of how Nigeria might move forward.

Prof. Max Abrahms is an assistant professor of public policy. He researches and teaches on asymmetric conflict and international relations theory. His work on asymmetric conflict focuses on the study of civil war, insurgency, nonviolent protest, and terrorism.   Abrahms is an active term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. Between 2010 and 2013, Dr. Abrahms was a fellow of the Johns Hopkins University, Department of Political Science and Princeton and Stanford Universities, Empirical Studies of Conflict.