[Airbornelawyer]

Nigeria and West Africa. As I emphasized repeatedly in this column space, 2007 was a critical year for Nigeria and the world (especially the United States, for which the West African nation is the fourth most important foreign supplier of petroleum) as the country went to the polls for what should have been the first transition from one democratically-elected president to another in its history. Unfortunately, as I reported after observing the election firsthand, the voting was marred by widespread violence, fraud, and other irregularities. While the man "elected," Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, was duly inaugurated, he faced mounting challenges, not least of which was violence in the oil-rich southeast where attacks by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and other groups had cut overall oil production has been cut by about 500,000 barrels per day, that is, an estimated 20 to 25 percent of Nigeria's total capacity. As I subsequently warned, "the vulnerability of Nigeria's oil infrastructure is not only a threat to U.S. interests, but also a potentially mortal danger to the country's own future."

Compounding Nigeria's problems in 2008 will be potential spillover from the conflicts in the Sahel. Early last year, my assertion of a resurgence for the "Nigerian Taliban," a group which first appeared around 2003 and was composed, like the Afghan group whose name it adopted, primarily of radicalized religious students (the members actually refer to themselves as the "Muhajirun," or "migrants"), was rather greeted by many analysts with skepticism as was my warning that Nigeria's "indigenous extremists now have access to local power brokers, to say nothing of foreign partners eager to supply them with not only with weapons and other material support, but also a virulent ideology with global ambitions." Yet the warning proved to be on target: in mid-November, Nigeria's State Security Services arrested al-Qaeda-linked militants in three northern states, capturing the would-be terrorists with weapons, explosives, and other deadly materiel. With the gathering strength of AQIM to its north and its own internal difficulties, Nigeria – and with it the rest of West Africa – will likely face a rocky road in the years ahead.

The rest of Africa. While the terrorist threat in the rest of Africa is not as immediate as that in the subregions discussed above, neither is it altogether absent. Earlier this year, writing with South Africa in mind, I noted that while one should be careful not to over exaggerate the imminence of the threat, the overall risk is very real: "Between the ideologically-motivated ignorance [of many among the country's rulers] to the dangers posed by transnational Islamist terrorism as well as the attractiveness of South Africa's highly-developed infrastructure to terrorist networks seeking a base for and/or a theater of operations, terrorists understandably find in South Africa an enabling environment at the very least."

The need for vigilance against terrorism, in fact, could be described as "pan-African." Even countries with little or no history of Islamist violence – or much of Muslim population for that matter – face nowadays face challenges as witnessed by the confrontation in Uganda's Bundibugyo district, which borders the Democratic Republic of Congo, between the government and the so-called "Allied Democratic Forces," a group launched in the 1990s with help from Khartoum (see my piece more than a year ago on "The Growth of Militant Islamism in East Africa"). An apart from concerns about Islamist militancy, there is the phenomenon of state-sponsored terrorism. For example, as I warned earlier this year with respect to Eritrea, "the rogue regime in Asmara ... is fomenting a growing cycle of violence phenomenon that not only threatens the stability of its neighbors, but, because of its support of an al-Qaeda-linked Islamist insurgency [in Somalia], risks opening a broad terrorist front across the entire Horn of Africa." In this context, the possible renewal of conflict along the Ethiopia-Eritrea border which, as I reported most recently in late November, is a very distinct possibility given Asmara's violations of the demilitarized buffer zone, casts a shadow on the coming year.

Two years ago, in the very first column in this series, I observed: "A war on terror must be fought globally, whenever and wherever extremists try to find shelter. While some priorities must inevitably be set in the allocation of scarce resources, entire regions must not be ignored simply because they do not figure prominently in certain conventional worldviews. Otherwise, in this conflict, a forgotten front can quickly inflame into an Achilles' heel." Through the creation of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) and other initiatives, which this column has consistently advocated, Africa is no longer the "forgotten front" in the struggle against terrorism that it had been just a few years ago. However, there is still much to be done in what is, indeed, a "long war."



— J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., as well as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.

Dr. Pham is the author of over two hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).

In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies. He is also a frequent contributor to National Review Online's military blog, The Tank.

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