Nigeria Christians hit by fresh Islamist attacks

Nigeria has been hit by a fresh wave of violence apparently targeting the country's Christian communities.

At least 17 people were killed in Mubi in Adamawa State as gunmen opened fire in a townhall where members of the Christian Igbo group were meeting.

There were also reports of a deadly attack in Adamawa's capital, Yola.

The Islamist Boko Haram group said it had carried out the attack in Mubi and another in Gombe on Thursday night in which at least six people died. The group has staged numerous attacks in northern and central areas in recent months - on Christmas Day it attacked a church near the capital, Abuja, killing dozens of people.

One Boko Haram faction has warned all southerners - who are mostly Christian and animist - to leave the mainly Muslim north of Nigeria. Adamawa state borders Borno state, where Boko Haram emerged.

Last week President Goodluck Jonathan declared a state of emergency in Yobe and Borno states, as well as Plateau state in central Nigeria and Niger state in the west, following a surge in ethnic and sectarian violence. They had been meeting to organise how to transport the body of an Igbo man who was shot dead by gunmen on motorbikes on Thursday evening.

"It was while they were holding the meeting that gunmen came and opened fire on them," a resident said.

Witnesses said gunmen burst into the hall and shouted "God is great" as they opened fire.

Later, a man claiming to be a spokesman for Boko Haram told local media the group had carried out both the Mubi and Gombe attacks.

"We are extending our frontiers to other places to show that the declaration of a state of emergency by the Nigerian government will not deter us. We can really go to wherever we want to go," said Abul Qaqa.

He said the attacks were "part of our response to the ultimatum we gave to southerners to leave the north" and called on the government to release all Boko Haram prisoners.

Later on Friday, there were reports that eight people had been killed in another attack on a church in Yola.

"Some gunmen went into the church and opened fire on worshippers killing some people and wounding several others," a local journalist told the AFP news agency.

A source at the local hospital told AFP that between eight and 10 bodies had been taken there.

Police have also been engaged in a gun battle with suspected members of Boko Haram in another north-eastern city, Potiskum, in Yobe state.

"Gunmen who are, from all indications, members of Boko Haram came in large numbers and have encircled police headquarters. They chanted 'Allahu Akbar' [God is Great] and fired indiscriminately," a resident told AFP.

Boko Haram, whose name means 'Western education is forbidden', is fighting to overthrow the government and create an Islamic State.

More than 500 people have been killed by the group over the past year. On Christmas Day, it carried out a string of church bombings which killed 37 people at one church outside the capital, Abuja, alone.

President Jonathan, who is a Christian, has vowed to crack down on the group but Christian groups have accused him of not doing enough to protect them.

Dealing with reality

The contours of the new military strategy announced by Barack Obama at the Pentagon on January 5th have been fairly clear for some time. To talk of it as "new strategic guidance" is thus slightly misleading. Short of some cataclysmic event that reshapes the entire landscape, strategy should hardly ever be new, but continually evolving to secure national interests (which remain constant) in a dynamic environment (in which change occurs in unpredictable ways and at varying speeds). As it happens, that pretty much describes Obama's approach. It is realistic rather than new.

It starts out by acknowledging both explicitly and tacitly some painful truths. The first of these is that America's slow-burn budgetary crisis requires that defence spending falls back to a more normal level after the fat years presided over by this president's predecessor. As Obama observed: "We must put our fiscal house in order here at home and renew our long-term economic strength." Whether that means the $450 billion worth of cuts over the next decade the Pentagon has already been told to find or the $1 trillion that could in theory be imposed if the budgetary stalemate in Congress endures is still anyone's guess. Which it is matters quite a lot.

The second is that the kind of industrial-scale counter-insurgency and stabilisation operations that America has spent trillions of dollars on over the last decade are simply unaffordable and cannot be repeated.

The last American combat soldier has left Iraq and the drawdown from Afghanistan has begun, paving the way for a future in which America's counter-terrorism campaigns will be more targeted and fought with a mix of special forces, local partners and armed drones. There is also a strong suggestion that America will be more active in trying to prevent local conflicts from getting out of hand in the first place: "Whenever possible, we will develop innovative, low-cost, and small-footprint approaches to achieve our security objectives." America, says the document, should be able to fight and win one war while being able to impose unacceptable costs on an adversary elsewhere in the world, not fight two wars at the same time.

The third is the implicit recognition that the long wars against Islamist fanatics distracted America from paying the kind of attention it should have to "the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the Indian Ocean region and South Asia".

Consequently, the Pentagon is now promising that "of necessity" it will "rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region". In particular, there is a firm commitment to maintain America's ability to project military power in the region despite the rapidly rising military prowess of China and, in particular, its investment in asymmetric "anti-access/area denial" capabilities designed to make it too dangerous for American carriers to venture into its neighbourhood. The next decade will be a test both of that commitment and the way in which the strategic relationship with China-the first potential "near peer" military competitor America has faced since the collapse of the Soviet Union-develops.

It looks as if one of the casualties of this rebalancing will be the presence of American forces in Europe. Rightly, the document points out that most European countries these days are "producers" rather than "consumers" of defence and that there is no longer a direct need to station substantial forces in the region. However, that ignores the utility of a significant presence in a part of the world that is a lot closer to many of the potential fights than bases in America. It also underestimates the value that America derives from working closely with the armed forces of other countries and maintaining vital military-to-military relationships with America's closest allies.

While NATO leaves a lot to be desired and the feeble defence effort of too many of its members riles Americans, it remains the only vehicle that (fairly) reliably provides partners when America wants to do something in the world and does not want to do it on its own.

With that exception, most of what Obama announced is both sensible and a belated recognition of realities that have been all too apparent for some time. As ever, the devil will be in implementation. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy and in this instance the enemy is likely to be Washington's hyper-partisan politics and the lobbying power of bruised vested interests.