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The Discerner

In February I Wanted America to Do Something About Nigeria. On Tuesday a Nigerian General Explained Why the Troops Are Leaving.

About two hundred American troops are going home this month. I asked for them in February and then stopped reading. The parable is about duration.

In February I Wanted America to Do Something About Nigeria. On Tuesday a Nigerian General Explained Why the Troops Are Leaving.

I remember exactly what I said in February, because I said it in a group chat and the message is still there. Someone had posted about the strike on suspected Islamic State fighters in the northeast, and about the president's claim that those fighters were hunting Christians, and I typed four words: finally, somebody is doing something.

I did not ask what the something was. I did not ask how many people it involved, or how long they were staying, or what the end of it would look like. I felt the relief of a burden transferring to someone with a budget and a plane, and then I went and made dinner.

The something was about two hundred people.

On Tuesday, at a security briefing in Abuja, a Nigerian major general named Samaila Uba stood up and told reporters those two hundred are going home. He had a prepared statement. He said he had been getting a lot of calls.

What he actually said

Uba, who speaks for Nigeria's Defence Headquarters, was careful, and the care is the interesting part.

The withdrawal of about two hundred United States personnel, he said, "should not be interpreted as a breakdown or termination of the Nigeria-United States security partnership." He called it routine. Mission specific. The relationship, he said, remains "strong, enduring, and mutually beneficial." Intelligence sharing continues. Training continues. Technical assistance continues.

Then he asked something of the press, and of the public, that I have been turning over ever since. He asked them not to read the departure as evidence of collapse.

The deployment began in early February as what the Americans called a small team, after an agreement reached in the wake of that strike. By the middle of the month Premium Times counted about two hundred troops in the northeast. They were not supposed to fight. Military education, intelligence, logistics, strategic dialogue. Then in the event they did fight, alongside Nigerian soldiers, in an operation that killed a senior commander of the Islamic State West Africa Province.

Seven months. One dead commander. A general asking us not to draw conclusions.

The Associated Press reported the confirmation the same day. The New York Times had the plan a week earlier. And back in July the commander of United States Africa Command, Dagvin Anderson, had already said out loud that much of the American force had been withdrawn, and that what continues is the partnership Nigeria asked for: intelligence sharing, and, in his phrase, the understanding that is necessary.

So the story was available in July. I was not reading in July. I was reading in February.

The thing I actually asked for

Catholic News Agency reported this week that State Department officials describe the American position in Nigeria as a matter of balancing other interests. I have only seen that in one report, so I am telling you it is one report. But it has the ring of every true thing anyone has ever said about foreign policy, and it is not scandalous. Nations balance interests. That is what they are for.

Here is what is not what nations are for.

In February I wanted a feeling resolved. I did not want a policy, because a policy has a duration and a cost and a September, and I did not want to know about September. I wanted the specific discomfort of reading about murdered Christians to be handled by somebody, and the arrival of two hundred Americans handled it, and I stopped reading.

That is not advocacy. That is outsourcing a conscience.

Jesus told a story about a widow who kept coming back to a judge who did not fear God and did not care about people. She did not win because she moved him. Luke is blunt about it: the judge gave in because she would not stop showing up. The whole force of the parable is duration. She was still there in September.

I was not still there. I was in the group chat in February.

What is actually true today

Nothing in Uba's statement is a lie, as far as anyone can show. Trainers and analysts are expected to remain. Nigerian forces do carry the primary responsibility for defending Nigeria, which is both a sovereignty claim and a plain fact. And Nigerians themselves raised questions about foreign troops in their internal security from the beginning, a detail American Christians tend to skip. The people I said I wanted to help were not unanimous that this was help.

I do not know whether the withdrawal is right, and neither, I suspect, does almost anyone who will post about it this week. What I know is smaller and harder. The killing in Plateau and Benue and Borno did not observe the deployment and will not observe the departure. It was never going to end when the news cycle did.

Close

The phrase that keeps catching is small team. That is what it was called in February, before it was two hundred, before it was seven months, before it was a general with a prepared statement asking the public not to overread.

A small team is what most of us are, too. Not a policy. Not a plane. A few people who can pray for a place, give to work being done there, write to a representative who has a vote on the next appropriation, and, mostly, keep the tab open after the strike and the statement and the withdrawal have all stopped being news.

The widow did not have a small team. She had one voice and no leverage and she used the only thing she had, which was that she came back.

It is September. Come back.

Sources

Sourcing note: the spine of this piece stands on Premium Times and the Associated Press, which are independent of each other. The State Department characterisation is a single CNA report republished on several Catholic properties, and the copy says so.

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