 And David is playing the good cop, and I will play the bad cop, and urge everyone to return to their seats so that we can get on with round two of our exciting adventure today. Spurred on by what I thought was a terrific close to the first session. And I see that there are some reinforcements in the room. John Temmon has joined us. Good. Is everybody here? Almost. Almost. Good. Turned it back over to David. Okay. So we're going to now turn our discussion in a more political direction. We're going to look at a political scenario, but first we'd like to talk a little bit about some of the political factors at play and try to stretch our thinking a little bit about what kind of tools may be available to us. Before we do that, let's answer how many questions, Claire, three, four, three. So let's just do three quick questions, get everybody's brains working again after multiple sandwiches. What is the largest political driver of extremism? Here to create representative governments, persistent ethnic tensions, concentration of political power in the hands of the few, corruption, or other? All of the above, of course, are there, but the question is what is the largest? Forty-two percent say concentration of political power in the hands of few, and six percent say other. Who said other here? Why did you say other? Well, it may not be the most important, but I think we're going to neglect religion to our disadvantage here today. I mean, religion is such a central factor in this. I can talk more about it later, but I think the religious factors have to be considered. Okay. Very important. Yes. I was going to say along those lines, a utopian ideological worldview. What do you mean in terms of these guys, in terms of the bokeh or robin? Yes. You just got to speak closer to the microphone. The fragmentation of the ULAMA, the competition between sex, the funding of different sex by foreign universities like the International Islamic University of Medina has created enormous competition among different religious leaders that eventually spawned Muhammad Yusuf. Okay. Interesting. There's a comment here from the audience. Poverty and economic exclusion. Okay. Thank you very much. One more. From where? Here. To your right, sir. To your other right. The United States. Oh, the United States. Yeah. I'm sorry. There's people all over, and I've ... Okay. I would put just an incompetent government of which corruption is just one part of the incompetent government. Oh, okay. Excellent point. Excellent point. Next question. What international bodies can play the largest role in helping to establish effective governance that combats extremism? International NGOs, the UN, donor governments, international financial institutions, or other? I mean, clearly some work must be done domestically, but what international organizations Okay. So international NGOs lead the way with a tie between donor governments and international financial institutions. Who said other? Why did you say other? None of them, in my experience, are going to do anything to really help a government in the short term deal with an extremist threat. Is there some international mechanism that can? The coalitions led by the United States, however risky that might be, have done some good. Okay. Good. I would use the word coalition lightly, but of civil society organizations that are brought together. Laying a lot of places. Sorry. Civil society organizations that are brought together by international bodies to communicate amongst each other. Okay. Brents? I didn't like the concept donor governments because Nigeria doesn't need a lot of money. Governments that are influential for politically and other reasons may have more influence, but I don't like the idea that we don't. Okay. That's an important distinction. Sarah, did you want to say something? I was going to say the same thing, and I was going to say you're not going to like it, but I don't think any of this matters so much in that more than most other countries where we work, that Nigeria is insular. Okay. I have no objection to that. I was going to say OIC. OIC is more important. Okay. Michael? I was going to say as a corollary to Ambassador Jeffrey that I come down the side of donor governments, but I would expand it in the way that Ambassador Lyman said, and my view is that there are things that they can do to hinder the establishment of effective governance, and sometimes it's about what you don't do as opposed to what you do. Okay. Next question. What is the most effective tool the international community has to push for political reform? Governance training, policy-based loans, democracy promotion, support for local NGOs, pressure from the international business community, other, kind of thinking it would be about 100% other here. No, it's not. So 41% of you say support for local NGOs focused on government accountability leads the way. Next, pressure from the international business community, and other, is that you too? No? Somebody else? Other? 10% of you said other and no one's owning up to it. Okay. Did you want to say something? There's a microphone. There has to be a microphone near you to say something, right over here. This gentleman. You just walked past him. No. Behind you. There you go. Briefly. Microphone's not on. Hello? Okay. Very briefly, please. I think one good way is examples that other nations can give. Like I would say, if the United States today joined the BRICS nations in promoting economic development in Africa or in Asia, that can set an example of how to transform relations among governments for other places. Okay. So these are some ideas, some views on the political. Before we get into the views on the political, I'd like to just turn to two people quickly who have, you know, in listening to the morning, had some ideas on how we can tackle these things that I think will be helpful, and the first is Maksud. Thank you. Basically I had some systematic reflections that I thought I wanted to share with all of you regarding the ethos of peace game and the dynamics of the interaction today in the morning. Basically the way I perceive the dynamic that should be in the way that I think should many ways guide the interaction in the next segment of the afternoon is basically to look at abilities of generating immediate yet short-term solutions that need to be both creative but also unorthodox. The comfortable situation where we go with long-term solutions or maybe generating some abstraction of some sort is an easy exercise. We were all acquainted with mainstream political theory and thinking where it's all about political realism and being too cynical maybe. But what we maybe need to encourage is having more of a paradigm shift, looking at the challenge which is we have a situation of the moment on the ground. We need to come up with solutions. These solutions need to be short-term, immediate, and the catch is that we have no time to maybe think in long-term ways. This is maybe not very productive and maybe not ideal, but nonetheless that's the main challenge of the peace game is how to strategize and work towards this direction. The other thing is I want to encourage all of you to think as peace strategists. Basically having some sort of a peace toolkit. Different diplomatic ways, economic means, alternative approaches than actually just referring to military approaches or ways of doing this. So that paradigm shift is important for us to be able to look at the different ideas or solutions needed in this regard. Thank you. Thanks. I just want to underscore, again, our focus here is to get outside of the box of simply straight-lining extrapolation of what's happened in the past. That requires us to be a little bit creative and for you to be not to be slave to the role you're playing, but to actually take command of the role you're playing and say within these parameters what's possible as opposed to what has been done. Michael, you had a couple of thoughts. Thank you, David. Princeton and Johnny and others here have taken part in these, but we're sitting around this table and discussing things as track one participants and so the responses we have are in that vein and going along the lines Maksud just mentioned, I think if we think ourselves perhaps closer to a 1.5 or a track two where there are the opportunities for confidence-building measures identified early unorthodox recommendations so there's a creativity that comes out of it, I think that might help the conversation. Good. I think both of them is the term unorthodox and I, you know, I just want to underscore that. Now what we want to do here is for the next little bit set the stage for political discussion. Talk a little bit about what the political drivers of radicalization and extremism are. You can talk about it in the context of Nigeria, you can talk about it in a broader context, but what we want to do also is talk about them in a way where even as we're commenting on what are the drivers today, we turn our attention as quickly as possible to how can we address these drivers, produce positive change, where can we find ideas in all of this. So as I asked, you know, the initial group of people that we had asked to kick this thing off, you know, the first question are what do you see the drivers, but I want to quickly go beyond that. John, let me let me start with you and what do you see as the primary political drivers in Nigeria of the kind of extremism we're talking about? I think the political timing of this phenomenon, which is started earlier but then 09 and then the jailbreak and 10 and so forth, maps almost tracks almost completely with the electoral cycle. And if you have an election that tips expectations in one way or another, if it's not seen as free and fair, you're going to have winners and losers, particularly for the presidency. And since that's where the money comes in, that's where the power is, that's where the military, the police, everything there. That's that's a do or die scenario. So the kind of the prime impetus to feeling disaffected, I think, is this question of marginalization that can come from elections, which you're not seeing is as free or fair. More recently, when the military and the security people have gotten involved in trying to put this Boko Haram down, they don't, the mass elite gap, they don't know what's going on the way the military is structured. They don't know what's going on in the grassroots. So civilians have to take over that function, but the military have been, and then even the intel people, have been flying blind in the north and sort of stomping here and there. And that has created, that has created the tsunami that we now see that was not there four years ago, was not there 10 years ago at all. So this question of kind of shining the light on the way in which the government has responded or not is important. And I won't belabor the change of government that's coming up here very shortly, but it is fair to say that the leader of the opposition was a folk hero, is a folk hero in the far north. And to feel you've been robbed in some way and that the courts are stacked is why we're really on the edge of something very serious. This is a short, short term. We'll know by the end of next week who the candidates are. And then we're in the race to see whether the election actually happens or not. But I think that the heavy handedness, you know, nine when they rounded up these kids and then shot Mohamed Youssef and then put him in jail, killed 800 people, put him in jail, and then the jail break. And then we've seen that thing, snowball ever since. So this may take longer, but I heard the Europeans offered to do some training on police. I think that would be very welcome. The EU takes this very seriously. And I know there are some real world initiatives that are coming up in that direction. But in terms of the short term, I think the marginalization coming from elections at the national level and then this heavy handedness of military and security people. And I could also say there has been no effective counter narrative. I'd like to come back to that point at some point. OK, good. And I think we should come to the point of the counter narrative. Because again, that's the kind of area where there is a lot of opportunity for creativity, particularly in societies that have a lot of internet use, for example, where there's a lot of people plugged into new media, reachable by a new means, and new narratives can take root via those new means. Martha? Well, by the way, I'd like everybody to make a special effort in the next hour to lean closer to your microphones, because everybody has just consumed food. And they're all inclined to drift off to sleep. So unless you're really close to your microphone, you're going to lose them. Yeah, good. Great. OK, I hope I'm close enough. Probably most of you know that I'm a generalist and not a Nigeria specialist. And I'm an academic. And sort of from an academic point of view, we would say that the Boko Harami. So now you've lost all credibility. Now I've lost all credibility. I'll have to restore it somehow. That the Boko Harami insurgency or terrorism or outbreak or whatever we want to call it is, it's in effect over determined to use academic jargon in that there are so many causes. There's not one. There's not two. There's so many. And everything we've talked about feeds into it, which means that it's, to say it's enormously complicated also leads one to lose credibility. But what it means is that in order to address it, you've got to come at it from different vectors at the same time. And those vectors have to be coordinated. And we talk about thinking holistically, but do we have any real ideas about how we could do this? The sorts of things we could do together. And so I agree completely with John and I think the notion of looking, not just at overall, all these conditions that might lead to it, but the timing of the outbreak is critical to understanding what's going on. I also think that sort of the history of Boko Harami shows us a couple of things that are very important. One is that this is not a unitary entity here. We've been treating it this morning as though it were a something. And there is a something, but this is a very divided group. What we have now is splinters and splinters. I think those of you who are more familiar with the history will know that. And you have the founding father in effect who's killed by the security forces. All this is important to their mythology. Also, I think it's important to remember that it's very much locally rooted. It arose in circumstances that are extremely propitious for the rise of this particular ideology. And many of you know these circumstances much better than I. I think that the government repression is also an extremely important issue. And across my mind that one of the reasons that I was invited might be a chapter that I've written for a recent USIP publication in which I concluded with sort of the bad example of Nigeria in which the security forces are strong enough to engender grievances by their brutality and their human rights abuses not strong enough to completely crush the movement in the North. And so you're caught in this terrible dilemma of if they were weaker, the problem might not have been exacerbated so much. If they were stronger, the end might have been quicker but more brutal. But now you're stuck in this in between and how do you change that sort of dynamic? So on that optimistic note, I'll start. Well, let me go back. I wanna probe a little bit further. Something that's gonna come up again in the course of our discussion. You said we can do this. We have to approach this on multiple levels. Who's we? I think the responsibility has to be primarily at the level of the Nigerian government, the government in Abuja as well as the governments in the North. And I have to admit that this morning we were talking about what can the international community do? I don't see that there are a whole lot of things that we can do and we shouldn't think that we can leap into this and certainly in the short term. And I agree completely with John that until we know what's gonna happen with regard to the elections, I think we need to be prepared for what are the likely outcomes of the electoral process if they happen, if they're accompanied by violence who wins. And that will really be very important in determining what the international community and its different elements could do. And I'll just add to that. I was sort of, I wasn't surprised because it's very realistic, but when the minute there's violence against the UN or against international NGOs, they pull out. We've seen this happen again and again. I understand the reasons why they do that, but the results are very unfortunate. Yeah, I think this question of who is we, who is the coalition, how do you do this? Which by the way can vary on issue by issue within this sort of array of ways that one has to address this political issue is vitally important. And I think a related question is, or there are two related questions to come to mind. What if the government that you feel has got primary responsibility isn't actually capable of doing that? The traditional response of the rest of the world is to shrug and to say, well then, there's not much that can be done. And I think one of the points of looking at extremism rather than any individual group is that this is a global trend. And there has to be a tipping point when people stop saying these are all isolated incidents that don't connect to one another because when you do look at them as isolated incidents, you don't feel an obligation to get involved. But if you see them as a pattern that extends from the West Coast of Africa straight into Asia, then it has a strategic consequence and it might create a motivation for governments or institutions to get involved with it. And this is really, this drives a lot of the discussion and I just wanna flag it here. So as we go forward, we've got it in mind. Muhammad, you are the next in line. Thank you very much. I think while we continue to overemphasize the failure of governance at the center for obvious reasons, we should not close our eyes to complete failure of the other tiers of government, particularly the states in the North as well as the local government and the cultural and traditional institutions. Before independence, the cultural and traditional institutions played a very key role in all aspects of governance. And when the British colonized Northern Nigeria, they did find that the level and quality of governance was almost comparable to what they had in other parts of the British Empire. Hence the indirect rule of policy that they adopted in governing the Northern protectorate. Then, but over the years from independence to now and we have seen the erosion of authority, the almost total collapse of the Emirates system as we move from parliamentary system of government before the war, civil war and during the civil war, the creation of the states by general government in order to address some of the issues of marginalization and development that we talked about earlier in the morning and part of this afternoon. With the adoption of the presidential system of government, the US model in 1979, it was our hope that all these issues of marginalization that led to the civil war would have been addressed once and for all. People would have been given platforms to be inclusive both politically and economically. And in addition to the 36 tech structure, we have 774 local governments that were supposed to serve as platforms for local civil society to participate at the all levels. But what we have seen is in the North in particular, is the near collapse of our demonstration both at the local government levels and in some of the states, in most of the states, I would say, with the exception of a few that you talked about, Kano, for example, stands out very clearly due largely to the leadership, to the current leadership in Kano that decided to make a difference. So something has to be done. There's a debate going on and we saw in the National Comfab that took place a couple of months ago whether we should set aside the American system and go back to the parliamentary system or whether we should adopt the French mixed bug, but be that as it may, the issue it's about leadership. It's about the quality of leadership, not only in Abuja, but also in the states as well as the local government and also the traditional institutions. The emergence of Sanusi in Kano as Amia has excited some enthusiasm, especially among the youths that will probably see a more dynamic, more modern and effective leadership at the traditional level. They do not have roles, official roles in the constitution, in the American constitution that we adopted. They have been called for them to be given specific roles to give them authority in order to address some of these local issues. So I think we have to look at it from a holistic point of view. I'm sure Professor Payden and Martha will agree that we have failed. It is what we are seeing, the dysfunctional system that is now producing insurgences like Boko Haram is a direct result of this failure at our level. And we welcome this type of to-do-in-round tables with experts who have other experiences in other parts of the world who would provide some input into how we'll be able to correct ourselves. Thank you. That's a very important point and it's really something I want to get into immediately in the context of this conversation. I'm going to turn to Chris next and then we're going to open it up a little bit. But what is an advantage in the context of this kind of discussion is looking at other places that have faced similar situations and have produced things that may have worked or may have at least had some lessons. And a number of you around the room have had experience in those places and I want to turn to you next. But Chris, I would like to direct the same question to you in terms of what do you perceive as the most important economic drivers? I mean, political drivers. Thank you for what you said. I think it's very fascinating to be having these conversations on the eve of what could be probably the most competitive political election that Nigeria has had in recent history. And so with that in mind, I want to make sure that as we talk about the political drivers, we make a distinction between the origins or the direct causes of extremism and all of these political grievances which may exacerbate or aggravate the situation without necessarily being the primary causes. And I think that point was raised very early on this morning in saying, yes, people can feel marginalized, they can be low levels of economic development, they can be a sense of lack of representation. But these issues, even in aggregate form, cumulatively do not necessarily trigger extremism. There has to be a trigger moment. And then these issues can become enabling factors that provide the swarms in which extremism can thrive. With that said, I will just make two comments to get us started. One is that I think one of the political drivers for me is the very centralized nature of the Nigerian state. Which, contrary to its constitutional provisions of being a federation, tends to centralize a lot of the power in Abuja. And so what this happened, what this means, and probably it's a legacy of the military rule which is very centralized, and in the situation where we see Nigeria constantly struggling to re-establish its federalism, what this means is that grievances at the local level tend to be directed towards the centrality of power in Abuja. And so when people have grievances of lack of service delivery at the local level, they don't tend to look at the local government area, chairman, or the state governors, they direct their grievances towards Abuja. And I think that's something that Nigeria is still struggling with. The second political driver for me is how citizens in a democratizing society interpret political outcomes of competitive processes in which they're losers. And for me, this issue really came to the fore in 2010 and 2011, first with the debate over the succession of the then vice president with the passing of the president. Which debate was even coming just three years after there had been the whole question about the term elongation with Obasanjo, noting that the fight to respect how the constitutional respected was led by then vice president Attiku, who was also from the north. And then three years after that, Yeradua from the north passes and Jonathan becomes the vice president. And I think the manner in which that whole debate was driven within the domestic body politic of Nigeria exacerbated some of the hard feelings within certain constituencies in the north. And so you fast forward to 2011, and we have what I still believe was a very credible election in 2011, a much better election than any of the other presidential elections Nigeria had experienced since 1999. And after the election results were announced, that a certain segment of society felt aggrieved by the outcome of those elections. And we saw what happened with the riots on over 800 people that mostly in northern cities. So I think that the way in which citizens interpret democratization processes has a lot to say in how they perceive whether they're part of the process and part of the game and therefore likely to benefit from some of this dividends of democratic governance or not. That's why for me, when you put up one of the very early questions, I thought one of the ingredients to even the whole question of the political drivers is the level of citizen awareness and the level of education about what democratic governance is about and how the processes naturally should work in favor of the entirety of the country as opposed to a few individuals. Okay, so we can approach this on several levels. We can identify political drivers that contribute to extremism. And again, this is similar to the development discussion. While building healthy, stable, high functioning governments is an overall objective, our focus is more specifically on the conditions that promote extremism. They're not completely separable, but it's more on that. So what are the things that drive that dysfunctional government, corruption in the government, lack of representation, disenfranchisement, splits between the federal government, the local government over concentration of power in the center. There are a number of things that have been mentioned here. So those are drivers of the kind of conditions that might promote extremism. And then we can talk about what do we do about those things? And when we say we, of course there are many different definitions, is there some, are there some things that have to be done internally by the Nigerian government in which case, do external actors who have an interest in seeing them do that find a way to influence the Nigerian government. So that becomes the challenge. How do you influence the Nigerian government? In some cases, the Nigerian government may not be capable of doing it. In which case you say, are there other means other than the Nigerian government for affecting that? One of them might be changing a narrative using social media, another might be using NGOs and training programs and so on and so forth. But what are the other tools that might do that? And among the questions associated with that are who are the right parties to advance those things? Because clearly, if you have a movement that is skeptical of the West and Western education, it may not be desirable to have a bunch of organizations that look, sound and act Western be at the forefront of that. If there's a debate about the true nature of Islam, in the midst of it, perhaps it lends itself to having countries that have more experience with that be at the front of it. And so we have a multi-tiered problem here. What are the drivers? What are the tools? Who are the actors best in power to use those tools? And then what perhaps is a strategy for addressing those things? Do any of you who have experiences outside of Nigeria that you feel are relevant in the context of Nigeria? Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, it's a belabored times, the ISIS comparison, but I think there is a little bit of kernel of truth. You have a problem and you have a solution. The problem, all these drivers of governance and corruption and all of that, there is a ready-made plausible solution. That's why I mentioned the utopian ideological world view is the problem is this Nigerian reality. There's a reality on the ground, people suffering, people being marginalized. And you have hollowed out institutions. And then you have, there is a model. There is a model for resistance, for seeking some sort of justice. There's this very horrible, terrible, violent, Takfiri Salafi Jihadi model, which lends itself to these types of situations. So, it kind of goes back to a guy who was neither a Nigerian nor an Islamist who wrote a paper called, wrote a book called What Is To Be Done, right? As Lenin wrote, what is to be done about this problem? Well, there is a solution in the eyes of these extremists to this thing. And it's not development, and it's not all these other things. It's a type of political violence or a just cause. And this ties into the whole question of counter-narratives. By the way, on that I would mention, there's I think some really real world important work being done by a cleric based in the United Arab Emirates in the shake of Dala bin Baya with the Nigerian clerics, which is important to kind of build a counter-narrative. But I would focus on that kind of, the solution to the problem is a violent form of political Islam. I'd like to address the issue of tools in the who that you brought up. And I think that those of us who work in this rather new field of CVE or counter-violent extremism, accept two basic principles about the practice. And one is that there is no cookie cutter policy strategy or tactic that works in every context and it's completely different wherever you are and whatever the dynamics and drivers are. The second one is that the only viable CVE solution has to be locally owned and has to be delivered by local incredible voices. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a role for outsiders and Westerners or NGOs or international players. And I think what's important to acknowledge is that there's an actual defined body of knowledge and skills tied to developing counter-narratives, skills that can be taught and transferred and then taken on the unique and contextual issues in any particular country. So I think of CVE as something that can be taught and transferred. And I think that's an important way to think about this kind of work. Pauline. Yes, I'd just like to introduce a note of caution here. As what we're really talking about here is a war on perceptions and shaping perceptions, whether we do it through economic or political tools. And there is a danger here that if we develop a strategy or a set of tools or initiatives that are defined only in terms of counter-terrorism, it's a weak read on which to hang our policy in Nigeria because they will suspect that we'll go home real soon. There are people that wanna fight terrorism but they are basically suffering under the penalty of both a terrorist organization and a predatory government. It's a twin threat to the people who's living in Nigeria. And unless we balance that in a way or shape the tools or policies that we do with a narrative that offers hope for the future for Nigeria as a unitary entity and we haven't talked about whether this actually will bring Nigeria up to the brink again and threaten the unity of the country. And that's a real important thing because a lot of people will conclude that the way out here is the way out. That in fact they dissolve the country and every section of the country goes their own way. So I just think that defining it, I know we're doing it for US interests in terms of counter-terrorism it's related to everything else that you laid out David. But there is a danger here that if we confine ourselves simply to a strategy of counter-terrorism without talking about the other threats that are there it could backfire. Right and look, we don't wanna confine ourselves to something and thus make what we do ineffective. We wanna stick to things that are effective Bronwyn. I've done a great deal of work in Somalia and in my opinion one of the massive mistakes that was made in that conflict was the lumping in of a legitimate movement with the terrorist label. When we use words like extremism and terror. Yeah, lately. Sure, sorry. When we use words like extremism and terror to describe a group we're attempting to delegitimize them. You know Chris is used to the Congress and everybody's shouting at each other all the time. That's right. Yeah. And I think here in the case of Boko Haram it is undeniably true A that the Nigerian government has been a driver of the conflict and B that though there are indeed a lot of large problems that are pushing people into extremism there are also small and specific drivers that can be addressed. For example, Boko Haram has said that it's kidnapped women and girls because the Nigerian government has arrested its own women, wives and children and there's no reason that the international community cannot push the Nigerian government to examine those claims and release any innocent women and children that it's holding. I'd also like to point out that when we have these easy remedies available to us and we don't choose to act on them we reinforce the idea that violence is an okay option because we are also not being reasonable. Okay, important point, Leanne. One of the things that I think might be useful for us to- This is you speaking as you. Sorry. Not in your capacity as Boko Haram. Not in my capacity as Boko Haram. Is to think about that Boko Haram is actually somewhat of a fragmented organization and so is the concept of government in Nigeria or in a lot of places and if we think about them as solely of one to 15 personalities in Abuja that we're most familiar with we're missing the fact that there's an entirety of a civil service that underpins a Nigerian state of 175 million people. And so the concept of civil service might be something in this governance challenge that we come back to over and over again that actually the international community can have a little bit more influence on rather than just the personality based influence of a couple at the top in Nigeria. And even though the security services for the most part are centralized and national there a lot of the other types of government players are actually local. And so I know USIP with bringing the governors here was part of this but I think we can get even more local than that because what are the drivers of extremism is one question but some of these things are actually just veneers and if you just peel back the onion one layer earlier you're not it's not actually those drivers that are these big political drivers they're actually pretty localized. Well that's a good point we have a couple of folks here from Nigeria up in the stands here and I just I'd love to get as many Nigerian voices as we could particularly as we've been talking about this did you guys want to talk a little bit about how you're how what the perspective is from the local level as to what the drivers are and particularly on the political side of it. Yeah thank you very much. My name is Florence from Nigeria and civil society and from our perspective the political drivers also the selection process of our leaders is a real issue. And we see election as being fixed. We don't look at election being real in Nigeria being fixed that a leader must be there and believe it or not if this incoming election Jonathan is not there again Boko Haram will go there which also die in natural deaths that's the way we say it and if it happens that power shifted to the nut again then another insurgents will happen at the southern level so how do we place the divide? The solution will come from us we know we are the shoes is paying and we can do it. Thank you. No, did you want to say something as well? Later? Later, okay, okay. All right, let's go down to click. Let me just from a journalistic point of view I think one of the things I would want to do is ask Matt to write a long weekend takeout and among the things that I asked him to explore this gets back a little bit to what you were saying David are the, is the ideology of Boko Haram how it is the same or different from the ideology of say Al-Shavab in Somalia or Ansar Al-Islam and other extremist groups in the Maghreb and Al-Qaeda Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Peninsula Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb as well, as well. I'd ask him to look also at the spread of radicalization as a driver and the extent to which the Saudis particularly and the Iranians since 1979 may have spread that 1979 was the Iranian revolution it was a galvanizing moment for not just for Shia but also for Sunnis you had the first modern nation dedicated openly to Jihad and that 1979 was also the year you had the siege of Mecca which we had ultra-Wahhabis taking over the most important capital of Islam and that had a real impact on Saudi Arabia and it wasn't a moderating impact the Saudis had to get to the right of that in a certain extent and then I would also ask him to make sure he covers the extent to which what I would call the jihadist brand of extremism is anti-Westphalia in other words it is an attack on the whole concept of the nation state and so it makes a lot of sense for Salafi jihadists to look at weak nation states, corrupt nation states nation states where people don't have a strong sense of national identity particularly if there are a lot of Muslims that you can recruit and to go into those states and try to destroy them is a way to destroy the Westphalian system and more generally and Western dominance as well and maybe Matt wants to pick up a how he would approach reporting that. By the way we're not playing a scenario here you could just be mad if you want. What's that? I'm always mad sir. Very good. No but it strikes me too that we're avoiding one of the most obvious things that Buk-a-Huram is part of a global network that's risen up in the last few years of a set of affiliates of Al-Qaeda there is some evidence out there that they've trained with Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb so taking into mind all the pathologies of Nigeria I can acknowledge them but they apply to possibly the majority of countries poverty, corruption, bad governance and there must be there probably is something else going on here and I think we might want to raise that issue as well. Yes, John. Let me insert just a couple of important historical facts and also reiterate I think some of the importance of a few drivers that have been touched on. We all look back at the origins of Buk-a-Huram to 2002 and the turning point being 2009 when Muhammad Yusef was killed. Many have portrayed this current conflict as one of Muslim antagonism towards a Christian dominated, southern dominated government in Abuja but many people fail to remember that when the initial assaults were taken against the rise of Buk-a-Huram the president was Muhammad Yara Adua, another Muslim leader and that at the outset of the most intense and vicious parts of the upswing we did not have a Christian, southern president in power. It was the end of the Yara Adua period so this should be kept in mind which brings me to a point I think our colleague from George Mason, both of our colleagues from George Mason pointed out but I would put in a greater high relief that some of the political drivers to this conflict are indeed a failure of local government, both traditional local government and the form of Islamic leadership in the North as well as modern government and the form of governors who have equally failed to deliver the goods to their societies, have failed to deliver good and good. Education, good healthcare, good infrastructure and roads and so you have that as a failure, a failure of both traditional government and a failure of modern government at play. The other key driver which I think is of course not mentioned here is intensely is the enormous conflict between the center and the states and the competition over control, power and spoils which also exacerbates this issue to a great extent. So I think that while clearly there are a number of reasons out here, we need to look very closely. I'd also say to our colleagues on the media side that if you look back in 202 to up to 209 to 10 this is not a part of a global jihadist movement in its origins. This is a local resentment towards both traditional leaders in the church and the government as much as anything else. I think that it is evolving and has progressively evolved and some of these linkages in terms of copycatism are starting to form, but we have to remember that a lot of these drivers and go back to the economic issues as well is that you don't have to finance externally Bokeha hard. Haram, when Bokeha Haram or parts of Bokeha Haram are nothing but a criminal syndicate. Robbing banks and post offices and carrying on high class kidnappings. There is enough money in that that precludes the need for outside resourcing. And so I think that we have to be careful about equating too many of the international linkages too soon. I think that they are emerging and they're certainly emerging in the form of copycatism, but we need to remember that when all of this started to get nasty there wasn't Southern leadership in power in Abuja, it was Muslim leadership and the resentment is strong there as well. I think that's an important point. I do think however that one of the things that we've seen is groups that have arisen for different reasons morphing together or choosing to align themselves with broader movements because that empowers them in a variety of ways. And I can't help but think that listening to Johnny's description just now, Jim, that it could have been a description of Iraq. And you were ambassador of Iraq and I was wondering if you heard the same thing. Very much. It started as a local reaction to First Saddam and what he did in a almost inevitable resistance to any outside force coming in. And then of course, as you know, this variant of al-Qaeda that we associate with Zakkawi and is now morphed into ISIS with its very particular unique Shia Sunni dichotomy at its heart rose up first against us. That was its narrative but after the Fallujah battle in 2004 it directed itself far more against the Shia majority in the country in a struggle to try to provoke a regional conflict and it didn't succeed then. It's now back again coming over the border from Syria trying to do it again. I'm trying to find a conclusion from that that would apply to Boko Haram because Boko Haram hasn't developed either a unique philosophy as far as I can see that would provide its claim to jihadi supremacy in the region nor anything like the capabilities of ISIS but the problem that we had in dealing with this beyond all of the capability problems and the economic problems and the political problems and the ethnic problems you've had in Iraq was that it was an extremist ideology and a certain percent of the population would be attracted to it and would fight like hell to the death to try to expand it and you have a similar phenomenon with these people and it's very, very hard to stop without a whole lot of brutality and a whole lot of resources. It also echoes very closely some things in Afghanistan it echoes very closely some things in Libya and you do have these commonalities across the board. Yes, Sarah. So I wanna specifically raise something that we've kind of been dancing around. We've just got a couple of minutes so I'm gonna go to each of you briefly, okay? Sure and that's the question of Nigeria's response the Nigerian government's response to Boko Haram and specifically the human rights abuses that have occurred because after ideology and changing the narrative and then combating the political and economic marginalization I think this is the third top issue to countering violent extremism and not only because it's counterproductive because we're actually further alienating populations by killing hundreds of civilians and disregarding due process extradition killings you name it but there's also no accountability so we need to change the tactics and create a much more productive strategy with the Nigerian government and secondly, there has to be some kind of accountability or you're never gonna get trust from those populations. No, yes over here. I just wanna counter this idea that we're dealing with people who have very romantic ideas about the past. I think Islamism today is what communism was for a lot of people who are anti-colonial 50 or 60 years ago. You have a status quo that doesn't work and these people come and realize that with this idea I can recruit a lot of people who are very frustrated with the status quo and so these people are not really interested in ideology so much. It's a conduit. The argument is really about power and you look at people in North Nigeria or you look at people in a lot of places in the Arab world or in the Muslim world where we have failures. What the people who are coming here and trying to replace a status quo know is that there is lack of consistency on the status quo in its commitment. How committed is the central government of Nigeria to Northern Nigerian development and growth? Not so much. Can Boko Haram prove that it's gonna be more committed to that this region? It needs to do that but it knows that time is on its side. It knows that if it does this enough people will be like, okay, a couple of stonings a year, a couple of chops a year but at least things are gonna work and we're gonna get investment and things are gonna be consistent. This is the thing. What you're really fighting against is this very deep perception that local government, the state governments, the status quo is not really committed to this region. It's just they wanna snooze the region, they wanna push back Boko Haram a little bit, make them weaker and then just go away and come back to this. As long as people in those regions believe that, believe that the central government is not going to be in Northern Nigeria for the long run. You're still gonna continue to see a lot of success of Boko Haram in that region and I think that's important. There's a very, very powerful point that needs to inform the way that we approach this scenario because if you accept the idea that what is motivating Boko Haram is deep-seated ideology, historical issues, religious issues that are in people's DNA, then you'll treat it one way. If you view it as a political tool, much as communism, which was a good example, which is not to say that people don't believe in elements of it, it's simply to say that they are using it for personal gains in terms of power, then your strategy isn't counter-ideological or counter-religious, it's just counter-political. It's a very different thing. Okay, looks like you really wanna jump in and then we're gonna wrap this up. Very, very short. So I just wanna add one thing to the second half of what you just said is that we're going to cast this in terms of power and political tools. We need to add the term identity to that as well because that might be what the leaders of Boko Haram are seeking, but what's the people who are joining the group are those who are seeking an identity and that's an important piece of it. Okay, look, this has been a very useful discussion for framing the political debate. And I think we've identified some drivers and I think we've identified some important questions that we've gotta grapple with as we are going forward. I also hope that you took to heart the comments of Maksud and Michael about seeking creative unorthodox solutions to some of these problems as we go forward in the debate. I personally also took to heart the earlier comments about human rights abuses. And with that in mind, although the program says we don't have a break here between now and the two-hour scenario, I feel we should. I'm getting a lot of support. This could be identity issues, could be ideological issues. Right. But I'm gonna go with it for self-interested reasons. So it's now about 10 o'clock. Can we reconvene here at two o'clock? Thanks. I'm sure. Gotta go to the court. That's right.