Abuja, Nigeria - As welcome as the news is that another top al-Qa'ida leader has been killed in Pakistan, the optimism that the organisation really is on the ropes needs to be tempered by reality. The audacious suicide bombing of UN offices in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, demonstrates al-Qa'ida's stepped-up activities in Africa. Boko Haram, the extremist Islamic movement responsible for the bombing, is akin to the Taliban. It proclaims Western education and culture to be sinful.
With backing from within the 50.4 per cent of Nigeria's 156 million people who are Muslim, including, it is claimed, members of the security services, it has linked with North Africa's al-Qa'ida in the Mahgreb and the al-Qa'ida-allied al-Shabab movement in Somalia to fight for Sharia law and an absolutist Islamic state.
Oil-rich Nigeria is a crucial Western ally. It is an African powerhouse situated where majority Muslim North Africa meets largely Christian sub-Saharan Africa. Cunningly, Boko Haram has sought to exploit long-standing religious sectarianism that was a major factor in Nigeria's Biafran bloodbath of the 1970s. It has recruited strongly among Nigeria's impoverished Muslim youth. Recently, the militants' grievances gained new momentum when Goodluck Jonathan, a southern Christian, became president, replacing a Muslim northerner.
In the recent past, Boko Haram militants have launched mass uprisings in the northeast, defying concerted government attempts to suppress them, and staged drive-by shootings and bombings, including a suicide attack on police headquarters in Abuja.
The bombing of the UN offices, modelled on an attack against UN offices in Algeria, is its biggest assault so far. It follows a warning from US Africa Command head General Carter Ham that Boko Haram is co-ordinating its actions with al-Qa'ida in the Mahgreb and al-Shabab and is a further worrying sign that al-Qa'ida, through its surrogates, has lost none of its potential to wreak havoc, despite the reverses regularly inflicted in Pakistan, especially by US drone attacks.
The death of the latest high-ranking al-Qa'ida figure killed in Pakistan, the Libyan Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a close aide of Osama bin Laden who became second in command following bin Laden's assassination in Pakistan in May, will lend further weight to the optimistic assertion last month by US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta that a strategic defeat of al-Qa'ida is within reach.
At the same time, as the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, there is a need for caution about such assessments. The deadly assault on the UN in Abuja is evidence, yet again, of the continuing global reach of Islamic extremism, despite the recent successes against al-Qa'ida, and the need to deal with it decisively -- be it in Pakistan or Nigeria -- before it wreaks even more havoc.