Tackling terrorism intelligently

Also published in Daily Trust

A fortnight ago, I wrote in this column, about the dramatic resurgence of the Boko Haram insurgents, in a piece titled “Taming the terror”, and how the resurgence was obviously intended to challenge President Buhari who had vowed to eradicate them for good.

Yet, now that the terror attacks have not only persisted but have actually escalated over the past two weeks, I felt prompted to take another look at the situation from a tactical perspective, this time around, to assess the viability of the ongoing preparations to raise multinational troops from among the Nigerian military and its immediate neighbours, in what appears to be a massive military buildup to engage the insurgents in a conventional war that involves the deployment of regular combat soldiers and heavy military hardware.

By the way, even though the persistence of the Boko Haram attacks under President Buhari has further exposed the fallacies of the conspiracy theories linking the previous administration with Boko Haram, the conspiracy theorists are unfortunately still fabricating new theories to link some top officers within the country’s security establishments to the current wave of the terror attacks hitting the northern part of the country.

Anyway, considering what was said to be an overwhelming defeat suffered by the Boko Haram terrorists at the hands of the Nigerian military during the six-week intensified military offensives against them towards the end of former president Jonathan administration, I had assumed that, their resurgence at the beginning of Buhari administration was a desperate last move, which would simply be short-lived.

However, in view of the fact that ever since then, the terrorists have been intensifying their terror attacks on civilians and unleashing death and destruction indiscriminately, I have concluded that, though they had indeed suffered serious setbacks and even lost almost all their strongholds during the six-week intense encounters with the Nigerian military, their defeat wasn’t decisive, after all.

Apparently, they had deliberately staged a tactical retreat from their strongholds to avoid incurring further fatalities. However, they capitalized on the inexcusable failure of the Nigerian military to sustain the momentum it had built during its six-week concentrated military offensives against them, hence they tactically broke up into several secretive small terror units and dissolved in civilian communities across the whole region from where they manage their small terror cells scattered all over the region, recruit suicide bombers to launch terror attacks in urban areas and coordinate their guerrilla warfare tactics in which several small gangs of terrorists ambush innocent people and/or raid villages and settlements in remote areas.

Obviously, this worrisome development casts doubt on the tactical relevance of the conventional war strategies being prepared by the Nigerian military purportedly to confront the Boko Haram terrorists. Because, it is quite clear that, any war strategy that disproportionately focuses on conventional military confrontation with the Boko Haram terrorists under these circumstances is simply unviable.

Therefore, while this observation doesn’t necessarily downplay the significance and indeed the indispensability of drawing up and implementing better conventional combat strategies against the insurgence anyway, it seeks to draw the attention of the military strategists to the fact that, the dimension the war is increasingly taking underscores the imperative of focusing on devising appropriate combat strategies based on accurately collected intelligence about the terrorists, rather than excessively focusing on conventional combat strategies. 

This strategy entails, among other things, an integrated process of collecting, gathering and processing adequate and valuable intelligence about the insurgents e.g. their ideological motivation, organizational structure, chain of command, operational patterns and strategies, source of funds, source of weapons and logistical support and supplies, indoctrination and recruitment methods, foreign affiliations within the region and beyond, perceived, real and potential sympathizers within the country and beyond, means of communications, movements and possible hideouts.

Besides, it also necessarily requires the services of reliable undercover agents who are well-trained in their respective fields of espionage, since it is practically impossible to find an undercover agent with adequate expertise in all the aforementioned fields of espionage.

However, since the Nigerian security intelligence agencies aren’t adequately trained to tackle religious-based organized acts of terrorism, which Boko Haram terrorists who falsely claim to represent Islamic religion carry out, and also since a great deal of this delicate mission necessarily entails infiltrating the terror group, there is urgent need to engage some individuals who should be carefully selected and subjected to accelerated yet efficient professional training in infiltration tactics and security intelligence gathering, and who should also share not only the same ethno-religious, tribal and regional identities with Boko Haram terrorists, but also have considerable expertise in Islamic religious knowledge, which will enable them to easily blend into the socio-cultural environments where the terror group operates.

Meanwhile, government must all use all available and accessible modern means of intelligence gathering against the terrorists e.g. aerial and ground reconnaissance technology, phone hacking, internet and other technology based means of communication interception. 

This is how accurate, adequate and valuable intelligence could be gathered about the terror group, and it is only on the bases of such intelligence that the leaders of the terror group could be identified or even infiltrated, for that matter, which will make it easier to silently eliminate them one after another, while the troops carry out smart yet aggressive offensives to decisively eradicate the terrorist foot soldiers. This should be relentlessly sustained until appropriate circumstances for any possible negotiations with the remaining survivors among them, are created, which could be considered only when they prove their willingness to surrender and abandon extremism.

Nigerians have suffered enough from the Boko Haram terror attacks, and in view of their sheer expectation and confidence in President Buhari to end it for good, the President can’t afford to allow it to drag on beyond his first year in office, let alone fail altogether.