MY SAY: ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER? WHAT HAPPENED TO BOKO HARAM AND THE MISSING GIRLS?
http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-search-for-girls-disappoints-nigerians-1403133926
JIHAD, MASSACRES, FAMINES, PANDEMICS, KIDNAPPINGS, ATROCITIES IN AFRICA….THEY JUST HAVE THEIR FIVE MINUTES OF INTEREST ………RSK
Nigerians Despair as Search for Girls StallsFrustration Mounts as Students Remain Missing Despite American Intelligence Effort; Boko Haram Takes Bolder Steps
When Rev. Enoch Mark heard American drones were flying into Nigeria to find his two kidnapped daughters—among the 223 schoolgirls held hostage by Boko Haram—he thought his prayers for a speedy rescue might be answered. Two months later, he has lost faith.
As U.S. officials stitch together preliminary intelligence gleaned from the skies, the insurgency on the ground is rapidly seizing territory and eliminating Christians and Muslims who oppose it.
On Sunday, Boko Haram burned down a village called Kwaraglum near Chibok, the town where girls were abducted from their boarding school in April, said a local vigilante stationed nearby. That same day, they also struck another nearby town, Ndagu, said Simon Jasini, whose older brother was among 10 people killed in the raid. The group is suspected of a bombing on Tuesday that killed 14 people watching the World Cup in the city of Damaturu, said a resident who accompanied state officials to the hospital.
Back in Chibok, Rev. Mark and what family he has left head up a mountain each night so they can sleep hidden behind rocks.
“Boko Haram may attack at any time,” he said.
The gap between the public perception of American air power and what can be actually delivered in short order is on display in this remote corner of northeast Nigeria.
People here and abroad cheered the arrival of U.S. drones in May, hoping they could find 223 girls scattered across hostile territory. The drone operation has yielded little public information as to the girls’ whereabouts—or altered a lopsided battle between Boko Haram and Nigeria’s military, which has ruled out a mass rescue.
“We can’t go and kill our girls in the name of trying to get them back,” Nigeria’s defense chief, Alex Barde, told a crowd protesting the government’s response to the abduction in May. Commanders face more basic challenges, including disgruntled troops and equipment shortages.
Military spokesman Maj. Gen. Chris Olukolade didn’t return calls or emails seeking comment on the anti-Boko Haram campaign, but on Tuesday, he said his army “is tirelessly working to protect lives and property.”
Some see the U.S. drone effort as less a rescue operation and more an intelligence-gathering effort on Boko Haram, an Islamist insurgency that is seeking to establish a fundamentalist enclave in Africa’s most populous country and biggest economy.
“If it leads to the benefit of freeing those 223 girls, that’s a wonderful humanitarian benefit, but it’s not necessarily the top mission that these drones have,” said Cedric Leighton, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and deputy training director for the National Security Agency who has advised the Department of Defense on Boko Haram.
The wider conflict, he said, pits a well-armed and ideologically committed insurgency against a stumbling and divided military: “Whatever toys we can bring to the battlefield will have little effect on the eventual outcome.”
In the two months since the U.S. said it would park a small number of surveillance craft in nearby Chad. U.S. intelligence specialists have spent the past month methodically piecing together a broad, so-called baseline portrait of northeastern Nigeria’s topography, human geography, road networks and population centers, said one Washington-based adviser to U.S. intelligence agencies who is involved in the effort. It encompasses things like topography, human geography, road networks and population centers.
Nigeria’s military says that it has the manpower and will to push back Boko Haram—and that it mainly lacks intelligence the drones can deliver. But such intelligence gathering can take months, even years, before yielding actionable leads, said Col. Leighton and this adviser. America’s limited experience in Nigeria’s countryside, where hundreds of languages are spoken, also presents an obstacle, both said.
“The first hours are critical” in a kidnapping, said J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank. “Beyond that, trails go cold. And that’s where the reality is. By the time social media caught onto this, it was well too late.”
The U.S. military may also be reluctant to share sensitive raw intelligence with a Nigerian army whose soldiers have been accused of leaking information to Boko Haram insurgents, according to the adviser.
“The Defense Department is searching day and night for the abducted schoolgirls,” said Lt. Col. Myles B. Caggins III, a Defense Department spokesman. “Our team at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja meets frequently with their counterparts from Nigerian defense, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies. We condemn the recent vile attacks by Boko Haram and support the Nigerian government’s efforts to remove this scourge from northern Nigeria.”
He added that the Defense Department does not have plans to send troops into Nigeria to search for the girls.
The U.S. military’s efforts to aid in the search have been affected by the Nigerian forces’ “limited capabilities” to assess intelligence information, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel told lawmakers at a Senate hearing on Wednesday.
“The capability of the Nigerian forces to be able to carry out what we can give them in terms of intelligence or assistance is still their responsibility,” Mr. Hagel said.
Additionally, the Nigerian government sets the limits and parameters of where and how the military assists. The U.S. couldn’t help with the search until Nigeria requested its assistance, and the region’s terrain further complicated the effort.
“This is about terrain-wise as complicated a part of the world as there is. They have triple-, quadruple-canopy jungles,” Mr. Hagel said. “They move them around. These are deadly, smart guys, Boko Haram. So we’re up against that as well.”
Other nations have promised help. The U.K. sent a sentinel spy plane. China has offered satellite imagery. But it was word of U.S. involvement in the search-and-rescue effort that kindled hope among families of the missing girls.
“Americans, they’re a world power,” said Mkeki Ntakai, the father of a 16-year-old kidnapped girl named Hauwa. “Osama bin Laden: They were able to capture him. They invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. We all heard about what they did.”
A dwindling core of protesters in Abuja and on Twitter continue to press the government to rescue the girls, but prominent Nigerians keep repeating what a far-fetched sequence of events it would require to see all the girls freed.
“It’s inconceivable,” Nigeria’s former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, who led several failed negotiations with Boko Haram, told Nigerian news site Premium Times this week. “Do you think they will hold all of them together up till now? The logistics for them to do that, holding over 200 girls together, is too much.”
Back in Chibok, expectations have fallen. “We have lost hope on these girls,” said Ibrahim Dawa, an uncle to one kidnapped girl, Margaret Pogu. “We don’t believe they are alive.”
Many residents say they have shifted their concern to prospects of another Boko Haram raid. The brother of one kidnapped girl says he now sleeps during the day, so that he can patrol the outskirts of Chibok at night.
“If anything is not done by the world,” said the man, “they will just come and capture the place.”
—Julius Emmanuel and Felicia Schwartz contributed to this article.
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