Can America Save the Missing Girls in Nigeria?

Rescuing the 276 girls still missing after a mass kidnapping by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram is just the beginning of addressing Nigeria’s civil strife. Especially considering the same band of violent radicals slaughtered more than 300 others this week and has a long history of violently attacking schools.

So while the kidnapping headline has drawn the world’s attention, the broader chaos that is taking hold in Nigeria “has become a global problem, and we need serious efforts to find a global solution,” said Edmond Keller, a political science professor who focuses on Africa at the University of California, Los Angeles.

On Tuesday, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan accepted the Obama administration’s offer to send a team of law enforcement and military experts to help find and safely return the schoolgirls Boko Haram abducted. The same day, the U.S. Senate formally condemned the kidnapping, and all 20 women senators, led by Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, wrote to President Obama asking him to take further action on the global stage.

Specifically, they requested that Obama pressure the United Nations Security Council to add Boko Haram to the al-Qaida Sanctions List. In layman’s terms, this would make the group “international outlaws,” according to Nii Akuetteh, the former executive director of the Africa Action NGO. If this criminal group is added to the al-Qaida Sanctions List, the U.N. would be obliged to help find it and freeze any of its known assets, Akuetteh said.

The United States had already added Boko Haram to America’s list of foreign terrorist organizations in the fall of 2013, but the band of senators wants the rest of the world to reach the same conclusion, and then do something about it.

“The girls were targeted by Boko Haram simply because they wanted to go to school and pursue knowledge, and we believe the United States must respond quickly and definitively," the senators wrote to Obama. “In the face of the brazen nature of this horrific attack, the international community must impose further sanctions on this terrorist organization.”

The uproar started on April 14 when news broke that Boko Haram had attacked a school in Chibok, a settlement in the Nigerian state of Borno. It kidnapped more than 300 girls—some have since escaped—and threatened to sell them into slavery or marry them off to its soldiers.

Humanitarian organizations and regional experts hail the Obama administration’s offer of support and the legislative action as positive first steps but emphasize that Nigeria’s civil unrest requires long-term support. Without diminishing the importance and urgency of locating the missing girls, they emphasize the broader issues at stake.

“We also need the public to channel its outrage into preventing future abuse,” said Caryl Stern, president and CEO of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

“This global outpouring for the abducted girls is profound but is greatly diminished if we abandon the cause of child protection after the headlines fade,” Stern said, urging people to get involved with the End Trafficking project.

Both Keller and Akuetteh point to the complicated and challenging political dynamics with which Nigeria is struggling to cope.

“The country is pretty divided,” and “Jonathan gets a lot of criticism,” said Akuetteh, who previously lived in Nigeria and spearheaded George Soros’ West Africa Foundation. Despite the atrocity of the kidnapping, “the Nigerian government did some foot dragging” before dealing with the problem, Akuetteh added. It took Jonathan three weeks to acknowledge the abduction publicly, and the country is known, experts say, for being reluctant to accept help from foreigners.

“This radicalization seems to be taking place,” Keller said, who pointed out that Nigeria is home to many ethnicities with competing interests. Neutralizing extremist groups in Nigeria is “going to require boots on the ground.”

The hope is that in the immediate future, American support will make a difference in rescuing the missing girls, but the odds aren’t great.

“I haven’t seen the full extent of the U.S. assistance,” Scott D. Taylor, director of the African studies program at Georgetown University, told TakePart. “But given the lack of success in catching Kony [an African warlord who enslaves children], despite our 100 or so ‘advisers,’ I am skeptical about the outcome in Nigeria.”