The Forever Counterinsurgency

The latest victims of Boko Haram’s decades-long insurgency in and around northeastern Nigeria were killed this June in suicide bombings targeting a hospital, a funeral, and a wedding. The final toll was eighteen people dead and many more injured. Over the years, Nigeria and its foreign security partners have expended colossal resources in a drawn-out conflict with the group (sometimes known as the Islamic State in the West African Province, or ISWAP). However, the confrontation has grinded along in a wearying stalemate—especially for the last nine years or so. The Nigerian government has spent those years playing down its failure to curtail the trend of extremist violence—for example, President Bola Tinubu called the June attacks “an isolated episode”—and has refused to make the strategic and bureaucratic alterations necessary to turn the tide.

Why has Nigeria failed to make meaningful progress in its counterinsurgency?

Admittedly, it is incredibly difficult to fight terrorists, even under the best of circumstances. Extremist militant groups have undeniable tactical leverage over state forces: they often recruit locals to fight close to home, meaning they know the terrain better than national troops; their beliefs can make them less sensitive to danger and human loss of life (the wedding bomber was a woman with a baby on her back); and they will go to any length to continue financing their efforts. In addition, it is difficult to break any action-reaction cycle, and Nigeria’s counterinsurgency was mounted in reaction to one of the most brutal, bloody campaigns by any modern terror group. At the peak of the insurgency, Islamist terrorists killed over 5,600 people in a year in Nigeria—mostly private citizens, and often with small arms at close range inside schools and mosques. The state’s actions in response have been, understandably, drastic, giving insurgents more motivation to respond violently. Confronted with such a determined enemy, Nigeria finds itself trapped in a protracted cycle of conflict.

While the nature of terrorism and cyclical violence is overwhelming enough, Nigeria’s counterinsurgency is also hampered by the longstanding weakness of the state, corruption, and poor strategic planning. The state has a relatively limited footprint in the northeastern region, making it easier for militant groups to recruit soldiers, hold territory, and more or less fill in for a negligent state.

To worsen matters, Nigeria has one of the most corrupt security sectors in the world. A study by the Carnegie Endowment found that the defense sector is rife with types of corrupt activity that produce a one-way flow of cash to top officials. This partly explains why, in a country with the single largest defense budget in sub-Saharan Africa, frontline forces routinely suffer dangerous equipment shortfalls. Unsurprisingly, the same soldiers have often complained about “low pay, long deployments and a lack of equipment,” among other problems.  

Corruption is also fueled by the influx of foreign money into the defense sector. Nigeria receives millions annually in security assistance, mostly from the United States and the United Kingdom. It isn’t just cash assistance; Nigeria has a particular appetite for expensive defense equipment. For example, the country is the beneficiary of the two most expensive U.S. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) transfers in Sub-Saharan Africa’s history. In 2017, Abuja purchased $593 million—just over a third of that year’s defense budget—of light attack aircraft, extending the streak in 2022 with attack helicopters worth $997 million, just under a third of that year’s budget. These sales suggest two equally concerning conclusions. First, that Nigeria’s counterinsurgency strategy is broken, and second, that there is, in all probability, an international political-military-industrial complex, or “counterinsurgency lobby,” that benefits from leaving it that way.

Like most extremist insurgents, Boko Haram militants are fighting a ground war. The majority of their victims are killed in smaller-scale bombings or shootings. Their strengths are their mobility and the element of shock; they crawl across territory using small, light arms to intimidate locals and cause destruction on an up-close-and-personal basis. Faced with this type of adversary, Nigeria’s decision to spend a high proportion of its resources on airpower is difficult to fathom.

The prioritization of attack aircraft over more precise weapons—those  that might be safer and more useful in striking militants embedded among civilians—coupled with corruption, bad intelligence, and ineptitude in the command chain would seem to be behind the unnecessary collateral deaths of hundreds of non-combatants in airstrikes. In 2017, a particularly egregious error resulted in the deaths of 115 internally displaced people (IDPs) and aid workers in an IDP camp erroneously targeted by civilian and military leadership as a Boko Haram encampment. Instead of funding a sophisticated, reliable reconnaissance network, the same defense ministry has resorted to paying members of minor armed groups small sums for dubious intelligence on the locations of insurgents. The same ministry has sent underpaid soldiers into close range infantry combat with outdated automatic weapons and dilapidated vehicles. Altogether, it comes as no surprise that Nigeria has failed to contain and quell the spread of extremist violence.

The assumption that the Boko Haram insurgency will be swiftly extinguished with the investment of the right amount of resources is axiomatic. Yet, if the foregoing shows anything, it is that a huge amount of man and material has been committed to the conflict over the years with little to show by way of battlefield success. If anything, Boko Haram has proved surprisingly resilient, begging the question of whether the insurgency is being sustained by a concatenation of factors which has less to do with the willful action of the opposing parties and much more with the complex interplay of their agencies.

In other words, the confluence of a global counterinsurgency lobby, state corruption and negligence, and bad strategy, rather than something in the nature of the insurgency itself, creates a “path dependency” that all but guarantees that Boko Haram—and the military response to it—will be with us for some time yet.

Natalie Caloca is a research associate for the Center for Preventive Action.