Benny Avni

Benny Avni

Opinion

Nigeria’s nightmare a ‘teaching moment’ on Islamist threat

The ongoing nightmare in Nigeria grotesquely demonstrates that, though Osama bin Laden is dead, the battle against militant Islam is far from over.

The Nigerian police reported Tuesday that Boko Haram extremists had kidnapped at least eight more girls, ages 12 to 15, from their village.

The group is plainly out to build on the worldwide publicity from its mid-April kidnapping of more than 200 girls from a Christian school in northern Nigeria. Its leader, Abubakar Shekau, on Monday appeared in a widely-distributed video, boasting of that operation and vowing to sell the girls, mostly 12-year-olds, as slaves.

Presumably, the girls forcibly “converted” to Islam and “married” to Boko Haram leaders will be spared slavery.

In Boko Haram’s ideology, you see, girls aren’t supposed to waste time on education, let alone at a Christian school.

The group — its name translates as “Western values are forbidden” — wants Nigeria to become a “pure” state based on the laws of Islam. It’s become one of the world’s foremost proponents of Islamist supremacy, advocating the spread of the faith by the power of the sword. Operationally, it’s often termed an al Qaeda “affiliate,” with ties to various militant Islamist groups around the globe.

Protesters take part in a ‘million-woman march’ in the Nigerian capital Abuja over the government’s failure to rescue the kidnapped schoolgirls.EPA

Nigeria’s government, meanwhile, is focused only on keeping oil flowing out and petro-dollars flowing in. When mothers of the kidnapped girls and others protested the government’s mishandling of the kidnappings, First Lady Patience Jonathan reportedly said that the demonstrators should be arrested.

Her husband, President Goodluck Jonathan, called on the United States to send troops to Nigeria to help him fight against the Islamists. Good luck with that; we don’t do “boots on the ground” anymore.

Yes, the FBI has offered to help free the girls. And, true, the State Department is dispatching an undersecretary, Sarah Sewall, to Nigeria.

But this administration, like many before it, by and large sees Africa as a back-page story. (Secretary of State John Kerry, back from a week-long trip to Africa on Monday, didn’t alter his travel plans for a hop over to Nigeria for a look-see. On Tuesday, he did call President Jonathan to offer more US assistance.)

Nor is Washington interested in new face-on confrontations with militant Islam.

After helping overthrow Libya’s Moammar Khadafy, we disregarded Colin Powell’s old “you break it, you own it” warning. We believed the aftermath wasn’t our problem, and kept only the lightest of security footprints there — even lighter after the deadly Benghazi attack.

Now Libya is filled with Islamists who are fighting each other while plotting a wider war against the nonbelievers. The Daily Beast reports that DC-based intelligence officers’ snappy name for Libya’s terror-fest is “scumbag’s Woodstock.”

In Syria, we declined to adequately back a moderate alternative to dictator Bashar al-Assad. Now groups like the al-Nusra Front and ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) are gaining a foothold at the heart of the Arab world. (The Saudis increasingly fear the Syrian war is emboldening their own extremists; on Tuesday, they announced a round-up of dozens of Syria-bound Islamists.)

No, we’re not doing nothing. US drones just offed some attendees of a recent “summit” of top al Qaeda operatives in Yemen — after they got so cocky that they broadcast video of their gathering to the world.

So yes, the CIA and other Western clandestine warriors keep the fight against Islamist terrorists alive. But missing is a larger sense of purpose: an understanding that taking out some bad apples won’t make the apple cart wholesome again.

“Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” Joe Biden boasted during the 2012 campaign. President Obama went further, repeatedly claiming, “Al Qaeda is on the run.” In fact, militant Islamists of all stripes, who advocate an all-out war against the West, are gaining footholds in more and more spots in the Mideast, Africa, Asia and even Latin America.

True: The ample warnings that eventually this growth will come back to haunt us have, to date, failed to materialize on any grand scale. Then again, the same can be said about warnings about al Qaeda’s rising ambitions in the run-up to 9/11.

The Boko Haram episode should serve as what Obama often calls “a teaching moment”: Islamist extremism is gaining. It’s a challenge on par with the Cold War.

We’ve yet to devise a comprehensive strategy for winning this war. But shouldn’t we at least acknowledge we’re still in it?