Tension, Fear & Alarmism in Nigeria

Inside the Boko Haram (BH) camp, like in any other terrorist organisation, all is never full of roses as many may assume, they also have their internal war to unravel. Research shows that reasonable amount of BH members are not uniformly motivated by the cause, nor equally willing to sacrifice for the cause and the best tactics of killing innocent citizens to achieve their strategic end. Reasons being that; the original members of the sect have been killed, injured or displaced. Reasonable amount of its current members received no formal training rather taken under duress to join the sect. Within the principles of counter-terrorism modules, it may be construed that the sect is running out of ideas and genuine followers, thus mistakes, peaceful negotiation or surrender seems to be inevitable. Therefore, our policy response should be to exploit this short fall of the BH sect.
This organization is currently torn by strife and disagreement as members’ debate ideology, strategy, and tactics as pressure continue to mount from our liberal democratic workforce. Even when there is no conflict within the group, leaders often engage in costly efforts to monitor their agents. Historically, terrorist groups have repeatedly splintered because of differences of opinion about how to conduct their struggle. The Irish Republican Army, for example, spawned at least five splinter groups in the mid-1970s. Further evidence suggests that the cohesion of Islamist terrorist groups is similarly tenuous, although conflict at the upper levels does not always preclude low-level cooperation. It may be surprising to know the level of infighting and conflicts over strategic focus and arcane points of doctrine within the BH caucus.
To understand why there is so much preference divergence in terrorist groups, it is important to differentiate between divergence in underlying preferences and divergence in induced preferences. Induced preferences are a function of three factors namely: underlying preferences, the information individuals receive about the situation of our entire law enforcement workforce in the northeast, and beliefs about the actions implied by specific information. People who have exactly the same underlying preferences can have very different induced preferences if they get different information or have different beliefs about how to interpret that information.
Focusing on induced preferences suggests several reasons why the very nature of terrorist operations drives preference divergence. The first reason is that people who are good at violence, those who make ideal recruits as far as their ability to conduct operations, often have underlying preferences for violence which lead them to seek more violence than is politically desirable. Early Marxist militants were the first to document problems caused by the positive correlation between skill at violent action and the amount of violence one finds appropriate.
Within the terrorist organisation, for example; it is unlikely that the leader may have ideas and directs all the attacks in the country. Furthermore, to understand how terrorist organize themselves and carry out attacks, it is critical to understand their disciplinary challenges.

*this was published in the Daily Times dated Friday, December 12, 2014