Defense alone won’t end Boko Haram slaughter

Cameroon’s approach of striking only when under attacks is helping rather than hurting Boko Haram.

On Wednesday, Boko Haram burned churches, mosques and homes in Fotokol, in apparent retaliation against the attack of Chadian troops on their position in Gamboru inside Nigeria.

Officially Cameroon killed more than 50 militants and lost six soldiers. But the civilian toll could have been worse. Some reports said scores of civilians were killed – ripped with bullets, set on fire and cut in the throat.

The attack was not the worst by the Islamic group in recent months. It was only the latest in an escalation of attacks against Cameroonian military and civilian interests that began around November 2014.

The assaults have become more frequents and grander is scope, and have revealed the firepower capabilities of the terrorist group. They have also changed from food robbery incursions and ransom-driven abductions a year ago to undermining Cameroon’s military capabilities and even attempting to take territory.

What this recent attack shows, however, is that Boko Haram is not deterred by the increased level of troops and firepower from Cameroon and Chad, nor by the prospect of a multinational force that will see and additional 1,700 troops engaged in the battle.

Attacks have actually increased since the arrival of Chadian troops. Secondly, it shows that Boko Haram is capable of rising again in spite of the amount of casualty it suffers.

Its army is now mostly composed of forced fighters, young men and increasingly women forced into the bushes during attacks on villages across northeast Nigeria.

The group has shown that in the pursuits of its ambition to carve out a territory governed through Sharia law along the shared border between Cameroon and Nigeria, it is very willing to inflict as much pain on its recruits as on the troops fighting them.

Cameroon has so far put up a good fight. But on Wednesday and at all other points in Cameroon’s campaign against the group, the military waited for the attack to take place before retaliating.

Cameroon’s strategy since the beginning of the military response has been to build a line of defense along the border to prevent any deep territorial incursion of Boko Haram.

One of the military’s top goals is to ensure that the militants do not take as much as a square-metre of Cameroonian territory. Cameroon has held back from going after the enemy beyond the border, maintaining a strict but costly respect of Nigeria’s territorial integrity.

In the past two years or so, Cameroon killed about 2000 militants and lost fewer than a hundred men. However, it is hard to find more positive outcomes from the military strategy. In addition to the rise in the number and scale of attacks, most of the western border of the Far North is now uninhabited because everyone has fled.

Kouserri and most of the towns and villages surrounding it have been cut off from the rest of the country for at least three months because highways and other secondary roads have become too dangerous for civilians to travel.

The military expects the battle to be long drawn, even with the arrival of additional troops. Civilians expect the social and economic cost to go higher up.

Maintaining a line of defense will thus not be sufficient to cut back Boko Haram’s capabilities and eventually defeat the group. President Paul Biya recognized earlier this year that they have the ability to swing back into action, no matter how much casualty they suffer.

While no one really knows the size of Boko Haram’s army of fighters, the military believes the group is well-armed and has the mindset of a conventional army. More troops will boost rather than deflate the group’s ego and push it to new extremes.

A few people have suggested that for Cameroon and its partners to be successful, they need to take the battle to the enemy. That implies shelling Boko Haram positions deep inside Nigeria.

Most of the territory occupied by Boko Haram is uninhabited and the collateral damage will be minimal, far less than the toll piled up by the group’s own strikes.

The ongoing negotiations for an AU-backed multilateral force offers a perfect opportunity. While Cameroon may be unwilling to enter Nigeria on its own, it can do so under the guise of a multilateral operation. Chad is currently doing just that.