Boko Haram: Intelligence is the key

Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshal Alex Badeh

THE recapture of Nigerian territory from Boko Haram terrorists has brought relief to a battered populace but has also placed a responsibility on the authorities to re-think the anti-terrorism strategy. While the military has won praise for rediscovering its vaunted fighting prowess, the next phase of the war will be won more by intelligence gathering than by military prowess.

Terrorism has taken a horrendous toll on Nigeria. Estimates of 15,000 to 20,000 persons killed since 2009 have been provided by various agencies. Some over 1.5 million persons have been displaced, according to Amnesty International, with only a trickle now returning to their devastated homes. Before the Federal Government and the military suddenly rediscovered the will and ability to confront them after two years of turning tail, the terrorists controlled some two-thirds of Borno State, parts of Yobe and Adamawa states.

In their audacity, terrorists proclaimed a caliphate with headquarters in Gwoza. With their routing, however, henceforth, Boko Haram will resort to “conventional terrorism” and our over-politicised intelligence services need to regain their professionalism and protect Nigerians.

British Home Secretary, Theresa May, stated in May 2014 that 40 terror plots were foiled in the United Kingdom since the London terror attacks of July 2005. Between the September 2011 terror attacks and July 2013, 63 terror plots were foiled by United States police and intelligence services, according to Heritage Foundation, a think tank. Israeli security regularly uncovers plots that enable its commandos and air force to stage pre-emptive attacks, says a report in Haretz newspaper.

In the last eight weeks, however, the Nigerian military, helped by multinational forces from Chad, Niger Republic and Cameroon, have flushed the insurgents from the towns and villages they had occupied. Hundreds of women, teenage girls and children the crazed hordes had captured and enslaved are daily being freed, abandoned by the fleeing terrorists. Hopes are also high that their most famous captives, the 219 Chibok schoolgirls, will also soon be found and released from their year-old ordeal.

The plight of those maidens and the failure, after 12 months, to find and rescue them, expose the two fatal flaws in Nigeria’s counter-terrorism strategy. The first is the obvious lack of will by the Goodluck Jonathan government to tackle the terrorism threat. This allowed a ragtag gang of misguided fanatics to grow, link up with global terrorism, recruit and arm itself to become an existential threat. The second flaw has been the failure of, and inability of the intelligence services, to meet the terrorism challenge. The war against terrorism, according to the International Crisis Group, “is fought in the shadows.” It is a war led and sustained by spies and policemen, informants and military commandos.

Except in the spectacular adventurism of the Islamic State that has declared statehood by carving out parts of Syria and Iraq, and Boko Haram that seized parts of North-East Nigeria, terrorists are not combated by regular military forces. Rather, it is police and covert intelligence operatives that identify, infiltrate and track terrorists, often before they strike. Special police assault teams and military commandos are called in when necessary to rescue hostages, kill or capture terrorists or attack terrorist strongholds.

Nigeria must therefore restructure its security forces to meet the emerging challenges. The urgency is brought home by the suicide bombings, ambushes of civilians and attacks on markets and isolated villages by Boko Haram as acknowledged by the Army Chief of Staff, Kenneth Minimah. This is classical terrorism and governments across the world rely on intelligence to foil it and shut down terrorist networks.

Last month, Australia’s Federal Police foiled an IS-linked plot to bomb crowds gathering in Melbourne for the centenary of a World War I battle and arrested five teenage suspects following a covert intelligence operation. In the same month, German police and domestic intelligence service smashed an Islamist plot, while in France, police who had been watching a 24-year old student for months, foiled a plot to bomb churches in Paris. Similarly, intensive surveillance enabled MI5, the British domestic spy service, and London police to abort a terrorist plot to attack shopping malls. Saudi Arabia too recently arrested 93 IS suspects in coordinated raids across the desert kingdom that effectively foiled several ongoing terrorist plots. Not even the Vatican leaves terrorism to prayer: in April, police dismantled a terror cell, arrested nine suspects and hunted nine others alleged to be planning bombings and shootings in the Holy See.

The incoming administration of Muhammadu Buhari, therefore, should realise that only effective intelligence machinery can combat the asymmetric war against terror and immediately reorganise and restructure the Department of State Services and the Nigerian Intelligence Agency, the inefficient domestic and external intelligence services that, under Jonathan, became openly politically partisan tools. The DSS, especially under Ita Ekpenyong, has become notorious as a political enforcer, and both could not locate and recover the Chibok girls, one year after. The police special branch and its directorate of intelligence and investigation should also be reorganised and modernised while the military should do the same for their service intelligence units and the Defence Intelligence Agency.

One lesson learnt from others is to review and overhaul the intelligence services, especially in the area of coordination, intelligence-sharing, elimination of turf wars and cooperation with the intelligence services of other countries. Just as the US and the UK reorganised their intelligence services after 9/11 and 2005 respectively, Buhari has an urgent task to restructure Nigeria’s if we are to crush terrorism.