Last December, Muhammadu Buhari, the president of Nigeria, declared that “technically we have won the war” against Boko Haram, the insurgent group that has been terrorizing the country for seven years. Mr. Buhari’s comments came after the military dislodged Boko Haram from territory it had seized in 2014 and 2015. But five months later, it’s clear that the president’s pronouncement of victory was premature.
Today, Boko Haram is no longer occupying large parts of Nigeria. Instead, it has morphed into a group of well-organized bandits. The military’s successes changed Boko Haram’s threat, but didn’t eliminate it. In fact, vanquishing the group may be a quixotic goal. But there are concrete ways Nigeria can minimize the menace posed by the militants.
Boko Haram is unrecognizable from the proselytizing group it was 15 years ago, and from the semi-guerrilla army it was two years ago. With its fighters frequently being killed by the military, Boko Haram has resorted to mass kidnapping and extortion to replenish its ranks. The cadre of hard-core members inspired purely by devotion to a jihadist vision is being reinforced by child soldiers, forced conscripts and criminals.
As ideology has become less important for recruitment, other incentives — money and jobs, access to loot and women — have become bigger draws. As a result, the group now seems to spend as much time engaged in banditry as it does fighting “Western education.” When officials from Nigeria’s Office of the National Security Adviser interviewed Boko Haram prisoners, they were told that most of the group’s soldiers “have never read the Quran.”
This doesn’t mean that Boko Haram isn’t dangerous. The group still has the potential to harm Nigeria’s neighbors, Cameroon, Chad and Niger. And Boko Haram’s pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State in March 2015 could be a magnet drawing foreign jihadist fighters to West Africa.
Something must change if Nigeria is to adequately address the problem posed by Boko Haram. The military cannot remain on a war footing forever without turning the country into a police state. The three states in northeastern Nigeria worst hit by the insurgency have been under a state of emergency for three years. The military is overextended. In July 2013, Lt. Col. Sambo Dasuki, national security adviser to the president at the time, Goodluck Jonathan, revealed that the military was deployed in 28 of Nigeria’s 36 states.
Many politicians and counterterrorism experts say that the military alone cannot defeat Boko Haram and that economic development will be needed to stop violent extremism. As Gen. Martin Luther Agwai, the former chief of defense staff, has said, “It is a political issue; it is a social issue; it is an economic issue, and until these issues are addressed, the military can never give you a solution.” This may be true, but measures to improve the economy will take years or even decades to have an effect. In the short term, Nigeria has to find another way.
The military deserves some praise for learning on the job. Last month, it announced a program called Operation Safe Corridor for insurgents who surrender. A team of behavioral psychologists is working to deradicalize and rehabilitate detained Boko Haram members. This is a good start. But for this program to succeed, the security forces must behave with uncharacteristic restraint, avoid summarily executing Boko Haram adherents (as they have been accused of doing in the past) and keep them alive long enough for the psychologists to do their work.
The Nigerian government could also try to set off a mass defection from Boko Haram by granting amnesty to its foot soldiers who enter the rehabilitation program. But it’s unlikely that all of the group’s members, especially the hard-core jihadists among them, would accept such an offer. And even if they did, it would teach Nigerians a dangerous lesson: Violence pays.
For now, Nigeria can use the de-radicalization program to dry up the reservoir of disenchanted youths from which Boko Haram recruits. Then the military can continue fighting the inveterate ideologues who are unlikely to lay down their arms voluntarily. This selective application of force and persuasion will help deal with this longstanding insurgency.
But they are not the entire solution. An “iron fist in a velvet glove” strategy will significantly degrade Boko Haram’s ability to carry out mass-casualty terrorist attacks, but it will not guarantee harmony. Isolated pockets of violence will remain for years. Boko Haram remnants are likely to fracture into isolated rural bandit groups roaming Nigeria’s borders for several years. Boko Haram may eventually become similar to Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army: a wandering, religiously inspired cult that periodically lashes out. That would be a problem, but it would not be an existential threat to the country.
Max Siollun is the author, most recently, of Soldiers of Fortune: A History of Nigeria (1983-1993)