Military glory never abstains from whetting its appetite for the tastes of wars. Throughout centuries and at polls as well, wars on distant frontiers have been the very ambrosia on which political careerists sup at their own risks and perils. No better historic candidate about the correlation between glory and war than the imperial Rome. Indeed, by military might, Rome expanded and overstretched its imperial borders; unsurprisingly so that political advancement came along with risk taking on distant lands by ambitious statesmen willing to secure hegemony for the empire. Hence, Rome’s endemic wars became the dependable addictive pill feeding the imperial political blood cycle. Self-tellingly, it comes with no surprise that without restraint, in 146 BC Rome opted out of the destruction of Carthage and Corinth in the name of its imperial glory and unmatchable hegemony. The fall of Corinth and Carthage, however, marked a tipping point in Rome’s foreign policy. It ushered in the end of warfare against civilized powers in Rome’s foreign policy gambit. Rome’s expanding frontiers produced its own small wars epidemics. Subsequently, military interventionism by Roman troops amounted into chasing barbarians on distant frontiers, be it in Illyria, Macedonia, Spain, or Sardinia.

Noteworthy enough, today’s warfare dynamic has turned its back against civilized powers to indulge in chasing barbaric groups in distant swamps far from the American hemisphere and its international coalitions’ shores. Terrorist groups had nosed their way through the global news cycle with an appalling litany of hostage beheadings while rewriting the basic grammar of our daily survival instinct. Beyond the violent propaganda quandary of global radical djihadists, the brutal display of suicidal missions along with the sporadic eruption of mass killing is nothing but a blood writing on the wall by terrorists networks to attract funds while appealing to new recruits for their global agenda. Thus far, it has become the accepted norm on the global stage that low intensity fighters have been having the whip hand on modern warfare. The international community seems to be waffling on the appropriate cure to handling the mushrooming global terror networks. From valleys, oceans, mountains to deserts, turmoil brought about by terror networks is roiling freely. The quickly dispatched international coalition forces to stop the terror knights seem an avatar collective series of unproductive and costly nostrums.

In Afghanistan, meanwhile, more than 430,000 coalition troops and Afghan trained soldiers bowed down to the insurgent Taliban roughly one tenth as big. In order to defeat the ISIS terror networks in the Middle-east, a large international coalition of 63 nations and groups have been desperately waging a campaign to dismantle the hydra of this mushrooming terrorist networks. In Pakistan, the Haqqani network has given a token of proof that terror havens are resilient to destruction. From Venezuela to Mexico, leftist guerrilla networks have become part of Latin American invincible adopted public enemies. For more than a decade of state battle against guerrilla combatants has yielded little military success. From Iraq to Kidal in northern Mali, we have all become familiar with persistent spasms of violence and displays of suicidal missions by terrorists networks.

On the African frontiers, two decades of chasing radical terrorists has turned out to be an unsuccessful mission. Strongholds of radical terrorists have been writing down for future generation a new lexicon of terror. In 2011, the Somali terrorist networks cost the world at least $6.6 billion with unending reported attacks as a new lifestyle in the Horn of Africa. Despite a United Nations funded African coalition forces of 22,000 troops, Al Shabab is still and by far resilient. Since 1986, the Lord’s Resistance Army of Joseph Kony has been wringing its deadly grip on Sudan, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic as well. The Islamic soldiers of the caliphate, Boko Haram, launched on January 3, 2015 one of its deadliest attacks on the north-eastern Nigerian town of Baga killing more than 2,000 people. It seized large chunks of territory of the Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states. Whether Cameroonian, Nigerian, and Chadian combined troops will defeat Boko Haram remains to be seen.

The post-Qaddafi era ushered in extremist groups fielding the gaping power vacuum in the trans-Saharan region. Despite the much touted military success of the French Serval operation in Mali along the backing of 7,700 regional forces with the Malian army, the trans-Sahel region is still a safe sanctuary and the hotbed for terrorism.

Certainly, we have entered the century of a global low intensity warfare. This recycled franchise of modern industrial warfare complex marks the devolution of military power away from the modern state to the entrenched landscape of private armies, mercenaries, and militia groups. The surrender of political and military leadership on distant frontiers does not come without its security and political price tags. The revolving door of small wars or low intensity warfare has been throwing down the gauntlet on the strong foundation of our decaying large armies. More and more, there seems to be a disconnect between the modern military and the modern state. The modern state holds among its prerogatives the ultimate monopoly of the use of force and violence within its frontiers as the fair reward of freely self-constituted citizens.

Yet, the rise of terrorist groups and privates armies represents a birth certificate handed over to modern states as the laboratory of security and freedom. National sovereignty is comfortably leaning upon the bedrock of military might as a vanguard against third-wings organized military might. Visibly enough, today’s military monopoly over violence is crumbling under the weight of radical fighting networks. The African trans-Sahel region has been losing control of large chunks of national frontiers to the colonization de facto of armed groups and terrorists networks. Beyond the caliphate, African security quagmire needs urgently to rebuild its fractured trust between the state and its citizens.

* Narcisse Jean Alcide Nana, International Security Studies, UK

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