To add insult to injury...
It is not the responsibility of other nations to come in and solve Nigeria's problems for them. However, by any standard, the "response" of the unfortunately named President Goodluck Jonathan has been feckless and impotent.
If I were a citizen of Nigeria the sense that in the fight against Boko Haram, I was entirely on my own would be growing daily within me.
Pretty much.
My husband, a training and development consultant (now retired), had the misfortune of having to visit Nigeria on several occasions. His experiences and observations of the country are the stuff of nightmares. I think it's difficult for us, as 'Westerners', to fully comprehend the degree of primal savagery that exists there. Groups like Boko Haram are everywhere. They control their territories (and their illegal pipeline siphoning) with a horrific violence you will never see in a movie. Many of them are high on drugs, armed to the teeth and completely unpredictable.
During his stay in Lagos, and while traveling around the country, my hubby had an escort of heavily armed security people provided for him by the U.S. oil company he was consulting to. Twice they were stopped by a 'militia-styled' gang. My hubby is not a man who scares easily but he says, when your security contingent suddenly breaks into a sweat, you know you're in big trouble. They told him to sit quietly, put his head down and not make eye-contact. The 'thugs' (for want of a better word) prodded him with the business end of an AK47 and demanded to see his passport. When they saw he was South African they let him go, after extorting a large amount of US$. If he'd been a U.S. citizen, the security people told him, they would probably have shot all of them and taken him prisoner, to ransom him back to Texaco.
Given this kind of horror, which happens on a daily basis in that country, it is perhaps easy to understand why finding those girls, and even assisting in a search, is fraught with the most unimaginable danger. I shudder to think how much CNN must have 'paid' to safeguard their correspondents who went into those areas (not that any payment there is a guarantee of anything). IMHO, nothing short of a full-scale military invasion is likely to succeed and even then, it would result in some awful casualties. I really fear for those girls and all the honest, decent citizens of that country who just want to live their lives in peace.
If you're interested in what life is
really like in Nigeria I recommend
Eclipse, by Richard North Patterson. It's a novel, set in a fictitious African state that is a not-so-thinly disguised Nigeria. My hubby says that Patterson's descriptions are so accurate they gave him the chills. I'm pretty sure they would chill you, too.