Impasse over abducted girls as Nigeria admits it has no military option

The second reason to doubt the Nigerian military’s assertions is that since the military, last May, finally, began to address the problem of Boko Haram, it proved itself indifferent to civilian casualties. Hundreds of civilians were killed when military units indiscriminately shelled villages, or set hundreds of houses on fire – often with the civilians still inside – in the course of pursuing or cornering Boko Haram fighters. Western military analysts say that the Nigerian military has killed many more Nigerian civilians than Boko Haram militants in an exceptionally heavy-handed, ill-conceived, and incompetent campaign.

The third reason is that in the last six weeks the Nigerian government has issued different, and contradictory, statements about the fate of the abducted girls – including a bizarre assertion by the president’s wife that the girls may not have been abducted at all, and that their parents and relatives may have fabricated the abduction in order to score political points against her husband’s government.

The recent crisis over the abducted girls points to a deeper problem. “The problem, many involved in the rescue effort say, is the failings of the Nigerian military,” the New York Times reports. The Times goes on to say that

There is a view among diplomats here and with their governments at home that the military is so poorly trained and armed, and so riddled with corruption, that not only is it incapable of finding the girls, it is also losing the broader fight against Boko Haram. The group has effective control of much of the northeast of the country, as troops withdraw from vulnerable targets to avoid a fight and stay out of the group’s way, even as the militants slaughter civilians.

The Nigerian government had done little, if anything, against Boko Haram until last May, when it declared a state of emergency in three north-eastern states and sent tens of thousands of troops to battle Boko Haram. That campaign, announced with much fanfare, has had no effect at all. Boko Haram’s fighters have not only continued to strike with impunity, but have expanded their areas of operations further west and south from their original area of activity.

“It’s been our assessment for some time that they are not winning,” one Western diplomat in Abuja, speaking anonymously in keeping with diplomatic protocol, told the Times.

The one difference since last May, Western military observers note, is that civilians in Nigeria’s northeast have been exposed not only to Boko Haram’s ruthlessness, but also to the Nigerian military’s brutality.

The campaign has also demonstrated how dysfunctional the Nigerian military is. The Times reports, for example, that on a recent night, Boko Haram fighters ambushed a military patrol on its way out of Chibok, the town where the school from which the girls were abducted is located. Twelve soldiers were killed. The next day, when the soldiers’ bodies were brought to the Seventh Division, the main army unit fighting Boko Haram, soldiers angry about the loss of their comrades opened fire on the car carrying their commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Ahmadu Mohammed. The commander escpaed unharmed.

Other commanders have been attacked, too, but for a different reason: one of the major problems in the Nigerian military is the low pay of soldiers. The pay is so low, that it is sapping morale and undermining motivation . It is not that not enough money is allocated in the military budget for better pay to soldiers, but commanders at different levels of command skim much of that money so that not much is left by the time the soldiers are to be paid.

Military and intelligence personnel from France, the United States, Israel, and Britain have been in Abuja and in the field, focusing on trying to locate the place where the girls are held and determine whether or not they have been broken into separate groups. The United States has also deployed drones to scan the 37,000 square miles of Sambisa Forest, a scrubby, hilly semidesert covered by low trees and bushes in the northeast corner of Nigeria. Boko Haram has practical control of an area the size of West Virginia, but Western intelligence officials have reason to believe that the girls are held in Sambisa Forest.

“You have a lot of guys in town right now,” a diplomat told the Times, referring to foreign intelligence and security personnel. He added, though, that “A lot of this is assessment, and this is a pretty steep learning curve.” The Nigerian government’s assertions about knowing the location where the girls are held notwithstanding, one senior diplomat offered a more sober picture of the situation: “Realistically I don’t think we’ve seen anything to indicate that we are on the verge of a huge breakthrough.”

The Times writes:

That the hopes of many across the globe rests on such a weak reed as the Nigerian military has left diplomats here in something of a quandary about the way forward. The Nigerian armed forces must be helped, they say, but are those forces so enfeebled that any assistance can only be of limited value? “Now it’s a situation where the emperor has no clothes, and everybody is scratching their heads,” another diplomat here said.

Western observers do not hide their view that the campaign against Boko Haram, which President Goodluck Jonathan announced last May, has not been much of a campaign at all. The military presence on some of the region’s most dangerous roads is light, with but a handful of checkpoints in places where villages have been attacked repeatedly. The soldiers manning the checkpoints are often not even wearing protective gear, and many of them abandon their posts at the lightest sign of danger.

Western military officials expressed serious reservations about the likelihood that any military operation would return the girls safely. Such an operation, to succeed, must rely on precise intelligence and military forces capable of commando-like stealthy, quick operation. The Nigerian military has neither the intelligence nor the forces to carry out such an operation.

A diplomat in Abuja said that since there is no military option to rescue the girls, and since, at least officially, Jonathan’s government refused to negotiate with Boko Haram, then “I think it’s going to be a slow burn.” Diplomats and military analysts told the Times that there is a growing sense that officials in Jonathan’s administration are dangerously out of touch with the realities of a brutal insurgency which, for years, had been ignored and minimized by the Nigerian government in the distant capital, until the abductions made ignoring it impossible.

Boko Haram has been an especially brutal Islamist insurgency. Its fighters attack civilians on purpose, reserving their most brutal tactics to attacking schools. Last June, at least twenty-nine mid-school students and a teacher were killed after the group attacked a boarding school – the Government Secondary School in Mamudo town in Yobe state — in northeast Nigeria. The Islamists set the school dorm on fire while students, aged 10 to 15, were sleeping inside. Most of the dead were burned alive inside the dorm. The militant waited outside the dorm, and shot those who tried to escape the burning building.

In September 2013, Boko Haram fighters drove into the campus of the Yobe State College of Agriculture, in a rural area just south of Damaturu, the state capital. They entered the dorm building after midnight, and then opened bedroom doors and fired in the dark toward the beds where students were sleeping. Seventy-eight students were killed.

A few days before the attack on the college, the Islamist militants killed 143 civilians in the northeastern town of Benisheik. Boko Haram rampaged around Benisheik for more than ten hours before the army even arrived.

Still, and inexplicably, President Jonathan’s aides expressed the hope that the group would simply free the abducted girls. “I have reason to believe Boko Haram will see reason and let these girls go,” Oronto Douglas, special adviser on strategy to Jonathan, told the Times. “I think they will have a conscience to let these girls go.”

Douglas also said the recent Boko Haram video which showed some of the kidnapped girls may, in fact, show another group of young women — even as parents have identified many of their own daughters on the video.

The government’s detachment from reality, the realization of how corrupt and dysfunctional the military is – not more corrupt and dysfunctional than all other state institutions and agencies, but not less so – and daily antigovernment demonstrations and increasingly critical news media coverage, have all contributed to a sense of growing malaise in the country.

“Now we know the army doesn’t function,” Jibrin Ibrahim, one of Nigeria’s leading political scientists, told the Times. “Many people are getting alarmed and frightened.”