Although it is extremely hard to predict the actions of a terrorist group such as Boko Haram, Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, may be a looming target.

The organization’s capacity and ambition have grown swiftly, probably due to assistance from extremist groups in the Maghreb, Somalia, or farther afield.

And, as I wrote in December,

The country’s weak institutions make it ill-prepared to deal with threats like this. It is unlikely to have the capacity to meet the challenge. Expect more attacks in the coming months.

According to Human Rights Watch, Boko Haram has killed 935 people since 2009 in 164 attacks, including more than 250 in the first weeks of this year. It has bombed churches, police stations, military facilities, banks, and beer parlors. It attacked the United Nations headquarters in Abuja in August.

Last Friday’s devastating attack on Kano, Nigeria’s second largest city, went well beyond what any analyst predicted it was capable of. The Financial Times reported:

Eyewitnesses said hundreds of Boko Haram operatives were involved in the raids on eight police, intelligence and government targets that lasted several hours.

The police discovered 10 car bombs and hundreds of other unexploded devices on Monday in Kano.

The group, loosely modeled on the Taliban, seems intent on provoking greater religious conflict in a deeply divided country. Its members even talk of overthrowing the state. As Shehu Sani, a civil society activist, said,

They will attack again. It’s now a war that’s going on.

President Goodluck Jonathan has called Boko Haram the greatest threat to Nigeria since the Biafra War in the late 1960s.

The group is benefitting at least indirectly from a deep sense of frustration among Muslims in the north at southern (Christian) domination of the central government at a time when it was assumed it was their turn to rule. The inability of the state to promote development in any form compounds the alienation.

Venturing deep into the south—as an attack on Lagos would require—may be difficult to accomplish. All the attacks so far have come in the north or middle of the country, places either predominantly or partially Muslim. But as the Kano attack indicates, the group has reached a new level of sophistication, which could allow it to go where it could not previously.

Lagos offers more Western targets and important government institutions than anyplace else. Attacking the former capital city would help Boko Haram demonstrate that it can strike anywhere it wants and that the southern led administration cannot govern the country, important goals for the group.

The stability of Nigeria matters. The country is the dominant power in West Africa. It is on track to become one of the world’s five most populated countries by 2050. It exports more than 2 million barrels of oil a day, and has vast gas reserves. It is an increasingly important emerging market, receiving an estimated $6.5 billion in foreign direct investment last year. It is expected to soon overtake South Africa to become the continent’s largest economy.

Reversing this ominous trend line will not be easy. It requires a mixture of political, developmental, and security measures, all executed effectively.

But this is probably well beyond the capacity of a government well known for its dysfunction. Right now, the Jonathan administration seems overwhelmed and unsure how to respond. The intelligence agencies and police have shown little indication that they are ready to protect the country. A number of captured suspects, including the one accused of orchestrating the Christmas Day bombing, have even escaped custody.

As John Campbell of the Council on Foreign Relations explains:

If the Jonathan government persists in dealing with Boko Haram as a security issue without acknowledging and addressing the political dimension to the insurrection, it is likely that the conflict will intensify. The impotence of the police, military and security services so far indicates that the Abuja government does not have the ability or resources to destroy Boko Haram. . . .

Money will not solve the Boko Haram problem, and a political settlement would require a restructuring of Nigerian politics that would be difficult for any presidential administration to achieve.

As an ex-resident of Lagos who cares for the future of the country I hope my analysis is wrong.

Photo courtesy of Pan-African News Wire File Photos.

Five bombs exploded on Christmas Day at churches in Nigeria, one killing at least 27 people, raising fears that Islamist militant group Boko Haram – which claimed responsibility – is trying to ignite sectarian civil war.

Gun battles between security forces and the sect also killed at least 68 people in the last few days in northern Nigeria. Earlier this year, the Islamists struck the capital, Abuja, twice, including a suicide car bomb attack against the United Nations headquarters that killed 26 people.

Nigeria has stark ethnic and religious divisions and a history of Muslim-Christian violence. Such attacks are unlikely to improve matters.

Unfortunately, the country’s weak institutions make it ill-prepared to deal with threats like this. It is unlikely to have the capacity to meet the challenge. Expect more attacks in the coming months.

As a corrective – and to ruin your morning – consider this attack on a school, using the novel tactic of a horse-drawn cart-bomb:

A bypasser was killed and 17 persons, including six boys and three girl students, were injured in a remote-controlled bomb explosion outside a private school here on Wednesday.

A bomb disposal unit official, Malik Shafqat, said a device containg five kilogrammes of explosives had been planted in a horse-drawn cart near the graveyard outside the Shah Faisal Public School in Nauthia Jadeed.

The device exploded when the students had just started reaching the school in the morning. The explosion was so loud that it was heard all over the city. The cart-owner was arrested and was being interrogated, a senior police official said.

Rescue teams and volunteers rushed to the spot soon after the explosion and the injured were rushed to the Lady Reading Hospital. Doctors said one body and 17 injured people had been brought to the hospital. They said the condition of two injured was serious.

The slain person was identified as Umar Aziz, son of Abdul Aziz, resident of Bara Gate. He was a bypasser caught in the explosion.

The injured included Jamshed Khan, Taimur Khan, Yousaf Khan, Ishaq Khan, Rutba, Remeen, Sidra Ishaq, Iqra Ishaq, Badshah Khan, Tahira, Nigah, Rizwanullah, Naveed, Safeena Riyaz, Sana, Shahzeb and Abdur Rahman.

Spend a second, at least, reading those names, because they’ll almost certainly never be seen in print again. These victims of terrorism are almost completely anonymous, and the families of the deceased receive little or no support, neither do the injured who lose their livelihoods.

This – by the way – is part of a systematic campaign to target Peshawar’s schools. There have been three other attacks in just the past month. Imagine the reaction if that were to happen in Birmingham, UK, or Birmingham, Alabama.

Now it seems that Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, whose activities have centered on Mauritania, Algeria and Mali, is making efforts to link up with Nigeria’s Boko Haram movement, now imaginatively renamed the Taliban, to create a broad-based West African terror group.

AFP reports that AQIM’s leader has told his Nigerian brothers that, “We are ready to train your sons on how to handle weapons, and will give them all the help they need – men, weapons, ammunition and equipment – to enable them to defend our people and push back the Crusaders.” So far, negotiations remain at a fledgling stage, but the intent is there and, given the region’s notoriously porous borders, so too are the means.

- Bruce Schneier offers his take on the reaction to the attempted Christmas terror plot. “The problem”, Schneier argues, with the solutions being proposed (full-body scanners, passenger profiling, etc.):

“is that they’re only effective if we guess the plot correctly. Defending against a particular tactic or target makes sense if tactics and targets are few. But there are hundreds of tactics and millions of targets, so all these measures will do is force the terrorists to make a minor modification to their plot.”

[…]

“What we need is security that’s effective even if we can’t guess the next plot: intelligence, investigation and emergency response.”

- Elsewhere, Samuel Brittan, argues in favour of taking a “fresh look” at certain liberal values – “[h]owever difficult it is to define a liberal”, he suggests, “it is not hard to spot anti-liberals.” John Gray, meanwhile, explores the relationship between neoliberalism and state power, suggesting that “[t]he consequence of reshaping society on a market model has been to make the state omnipresent.”

- Finally, the FT’s Gillian Tett has an interesting piece on the potential social impact of fiscal cuts and the implications of this for bond markets and national standing over the next decade.

But as recently as February this year, when I gave a talk to the UK’s Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism, the British government did not believe Islamic extremism in West Africa would coalesce into a serious threat, especially outside the region itself. Although the FCO has placed half of Mali and Niger and all of Mauritania on its list of travel blackspots, their people still seemed unruffled when I talked to them about their West Africa strategy a couple of months back.

They may be sleeping less easily now. Although Al Qaeda’s infiltration of the region remains at a fledgling stage, the arrest of the Nigerian and the kidnappings of four Spaniards and two Italians – all in the past six weeks – are an indication of the potential dangers both within and without West Africa’s borders. And the pressure that is encouraging young Africans towards extremism – the great collision between demography and poverty that is taking place against a background of inept and venal governance – is intensifying by the day.

The authorities are doing what they can. Nigeria’s police cracked down violently on the Islamist Boko Haram movement back in August, and Mauritania’s police take copies of taxi drivers’ ID cards so that they can haul in their families if passengers disappear.

But without economic development the region’s governments will be fighting an impossible war. Al Qaeda’s wealth will buy off police and army as well as luring in new recruits. It is development that people need – relevant education and infrastructure investment provided by their own governments that are responsive to them and not to donors or other vested interests, and that provide a fair enabling environment for businesses large and small; assistance from the West by means of getting out of the way of trade and migration and forcing Western businesses to behave honestly; and they also need a large dose of luck: they need leaders to emerge who have the will and courage to stop the cycle of selfishness and corruption at all levels of government and to shed the burden of aid in favour of self-reliance; and they need their neighbours to remain stable and peaceful. Only West Africa itself has the power to stop extremist violence in the long-term. As many people I have spoken to in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau realise, the rest of us can help most by clearing their path.

- RUSI, meanwhile, assesses the issue of troop numbers on British shores, viewing the commitment to hard power through the lens of the country’s world role. In related news, the Conservatives are set to confirm that General Sir Richard Dannatt, recently retired as Chief of the General Staff, is to advise them on defence policy.

- Elsewhere, Professor John Merriman asks if the bombing of a Paris café at the end of the 19th Century spawned terrorism in its modern form. Current policy, he suggests, would do well to take better account of historical experience.

- Finally, with the slew of annual awards from the Nobel committee well under way, attention turns to possible winners of the economics prize – to be announced on Monday.  Thompson Reuters offers its annual, citation-based, predications here. Brad DeLong, meanwhile, suggests that this year’s gong should go to Mark Gertler and current Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke.

Edwin Dyer

Back in February, I gave a talk on security in West Africa at a Demos leadership masterclass on International Security and Counter-Terrorism.  Yesterday came news that Al Qaeda’s African arm had killed a British hostage, Edwin Dyer, whom they captured in Niger in January (they killed him in neighbouring Mali). In my talk, I predicted that the security threat from West Africa might be more of a long-term problem for Europe, but that it was one that was worth monitoring in the short-term too. It seems the threat might be more immediate than I feared. The talk is available here.