How To Curb Boko Haram Insurgence – Ex-British Military Chief

For Nigeria to curb the Boko Haram insurgency and restore peace to the troubled northern states, the Federal Government needs to effectively combine hard and soft power in approach, says former commander of British forces in Iraq, Lieutenant-General Robert Fry. Fry, a former commandant of the British Royal Marines, said at the National Defence College (NDC), where he delivered the 2013 Africa Today Magazine Lecture on the relevance of special forces in contemporary military operations, in Abuja yesterday, that at no time would either of the two options solve the situation. He called attention to the need to be wary of granting amnesty from the point of weakness, stressing that amnesty should rather be given from the point of upper hand.
Answering questions from some of the participants at the lecture, he said: “The best position to offer amnesty is from a position of strength and not from a position of weakness.” Speaking on the Boko Haram problem, Fry called on the Nigerian government to utilise a combination of both hard and soft power, asking for a careful balance. “Boko Haram is an organisation that is trying to impose arbitrary laws by all means. It seems that the appropriate response in the first instance is the application, judicious, targeted and discriminate military force. That would be an approach from the onset. But that will never lead either to victory, the eradication, or defeat of the Boko Haram movement. The balance between hard and soft power is that the question of hard power should be sufficient no more. If it goes beyond sufficient, it has run the danger of being excessive, and one of the worst things that can happen is that legitimate government be accused of arbitrarily use of force. That is the same track that Boko Haram has already,” he said.

According to the former British military chief, “in a democratic society, the state has the legitimate monopoly on the use of force. But it must be used in the most judicious way. Beyond that, the battleground of this conflict is the minds of the people. That will be shelved on a framework on how force is applied and all the other effects that I spoke about brought together, and in a most effective combination. I am not making a prescription for Nigeria. I am making observations from what I see elsewhere, but those observations need to be very clear.”