Kerry says Nigerian offensive to rescue schoolgirls ‘risky’

[EC]

Secretary of State John Kerry warned that a Nigerian offensive to go after Boko Haram and attempt to free 219 kidnapped schoolgirls “could be very risky.”

Kerry, in an interview with PBS NewsHour’s Gwen Ifill, was responding to Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan’s vow to free the abducted students by ordering a “full scale-operation” against Boko Haram Thursday.

“I think an all-out assault — I’m not sure what that means; I’d want to know what that means — it could be very risky to the young women. And there may be a time and place for that but we need to look at this very closely,” said Kerry during the interview at the State Department.

Kerry said he hope to be speaking with Jonathan some time “over the course of today or tomorrow” and said he was not aware of any requests for the U.S. to participate in any such operation.

You can watch the entire interview on Thursday’s PBS NewsHour.

Via PBS. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/kerry-says-nigerian-offensive-rescue-schoolgirls-risky/


Yes John. It's a risk, and both the girls and soldiers are risking more than a scratch or three with Purple Heart bandaids. Yet if you ask them - "Which is better, the chance of getting shot or a life time as a sex slave" I figure I know what their answer would be.

[mountaineer]

We all know what an expert military strategist J. Effin' Kerry might be. 

[Chieftain]

If the US were serious about finding those girls and/or doing anything about it, and we clearly are not,  there would be a carrier task force off the Coast of Nigeria right now, ready to support a rescue.  It could be done if we chose to do it, and the US military is the only group even remotely qualified to pull off such a mission.

[EC]

Agree that the will doesn't seem to be there.

In terms of getting in and getting the girls out in more or less one piece, there are a few nations that have the capability to carry out the operation - Israel, the UK, France, Canada, Russia, and the USA spring to mind as all having forces who are skilled at both dealing harm and being reasonably careful not to shoot up the hostages.

But it's over 200 girls and removing them to safety rapidly is going to be a problem without serious air support. A carrier group would be most reassuring!

[Bigun]

Getting out of bed in the morning is risky!

Nothing worth doing is ever easy!

Just sayin

[Right_in_Virginia]

Here's Kerry's selfie:  #Bringing our girls home could be risky

Coward.

[Chieftain]

Agree that the will doesn't seem to be there.

In terms of getting in and getting the girls out in more or less one piece, there are a few nations that have the capability to carry out the operation - Israel, the UK, France, Canada, Russia, and the USA spring to mind as all having forces who are skilled at both dealing harm and being reasonably careful not to shoot up the hostages.

But it's over 200 girls and removing them to safety rapidly is going to be a problem without serious air support. A carrier group would be most reassuring!

Excellent comments and I agree completely.  The US just got around to putting an LPH off the coast of Libya to aid the evacuation of Americans....its one of the only aviation capable ships to do much more than transit the Med in the last 6 years or so.  DOD has slashed $1 trillion dollars since Obammy took office and a bunch of that money came right off the top of the US Navy operations fund.

Ronald Reagan used to say that Nimitz class carriers don't pay for themselves tied to a pier in Norfolk, and by God he meant it too.  When I was on Ike, if we were not underway flying airplanes, we were in port fixing something important.  We used to go to sea just to charge up and down the East Coast with an open deck, so any pilot on the East Coast that needed 10 day and 10 night traps to qualify for flight pay that month could come on out and play.  I made three back to back deployments to the Med on Ike, and our presence in the Med was what kept the cork in the bottle in the Middle East.  Being able to put F-14s over any hotspot on short notice kept the atrocities to a minimum.

Not any more.

 

[Fishrrman]

Get out of the way, Kerry, and let the Israelis handle it.

They know how to get the job done...

[EC]

I envy you in some ways - carrier groups are the absolute bedrock of force projection around the globe. Sure, the subs are important. SAC is important. But a full carrier group, complete with escorts and LPH's sends the message "We will bleep you up, but good!" I know we grunts tease you guys from time to time, but my God. Knowing that several thousand tons worth of munitions piloted by complete bleep lunatics are only a whistle away on their own floating island is immensely reassuring!

Landed on the Teddy Roosevelt once - you don't appreciate just how damned big they are unless you have stood on deck! Someone got a bit cute, we took a bit of shrapnel that chopped two fuel lines during an extraction and it were the closest safe landing space. By the time my guys had been checked over and fed incredibly well, the engineers and techs had my girl repaired (despite never having even seen one of these things before and making the parts pretty much from scratch), refueled and a fair number of the pilots wanting to have a go in her.  Not often they got the chance to play with Russian toys.

 

[Oceander]

Agree that the will doesn't seem to be there.

In terms of getting in and getting the girls out in more or less one piece, there are a few nations that have the capability to carry out the operation - Israel, the UK, France, Canada, Russia, and the USA spring to mind as all having forces who are skilled at both dealing harm and being reasonably careful not to shoot up the hostages.

But it's over 200 girls and removing them to safety rapidly is going to be a problem without serious air support. A carrier group would be most reassuring!

I'm not sure I'd put the Russians up there as being reasonably careful not to shoot up the hostages, recalling the debacle with the hostages held in that hotel by chechen rebels some years back.

[EC]

Alfa group are still rather effective. They don't exactly play pattycake though - their preferred method is to find the loved ones of the kidnappers and send various identifiable body parts until the hostages are released.

Brutal sods, but effective at what they do, which is deal with terrorists in a full and final manner. Not ideal for a rescue attempt - but ideal for making sure no further rescue attempts are needed in future. After 8 weeks, I have few illusions that the girls are either still in one place, or indeed alive in many cases. Finding the ones who have been sold or scattered will take information. There is only one real way to get that.

[Oceander]

Alfa group are still rather effective. They don't exactly play pattycake though - their preferred method is to find the loved ones of the kidnappers and send various identifiable body parts until the hostages are released.

Brutal sods, but effective at what they do, which is deal with terrorists in a full and final manner. Not ideal for a rescue attempt - but ideal for making sure no further rescue attempts are needed in future. After 8 weeks, I have few illusions that the girls are either still in one place, or indeed alive in many cases. Finding the ones who have been sold or scattered will take information. There is only one real way to get that.

Most likely they have been scattered - some killed, but many probably parceled out as favors and many sold off.  Getting the information tho' may take a little more sophistication than your typical physical torture routines.

[EC]

Most likely they have been scattered - some killed, but many probably parceled out as favors and many sold off.  Getting the information tho' may take a little more sophistication than your typical physical torture routines.

Physical torture has it's place in the tool box, though it is unreliable. It has to be unexpected though. People are tough. Breaking their bodies rarely gets you more than what they think you want to hear, which is why I think waterboarding is a complete waste of time. You break their minds so the filters are gone. You need to weed through stream of consciousness stuff, but you will get information.

Sorry - it is one of the more unsavory aspects of life. Rebuilding someone who's mind has been shattered by horror can take decades. Breaking that mind in the first place takes 12 hours - tops.

[SPQR]

I do not think that its a feasible raid. Too many logistical problems that will need to be sorted out. I could see the Israelis pull off this type of operation with minimum loss.

[Oceander]

Physical torture has it's place in the tool box, though it is unreliable. It has to be unexpected though. People are tough. Breaking their bodies rarely gets you more than what they think you want to hear, which is why I think waterboarding is a complete waste of time. You break their minds so the filters are gone. You need to weed through stream of consciousness stuff, but you will get information.

Sorry - it is one of the more unsavory aspects of life. Rebuilding someone who's mind has been shattered by horror can take decades. Breaking that mind in the first place takes 12 hours - tops.

I'm not so delicate as to think that it doesn't when the world is viewed solely through instrumentalist lenses.  That being said, unless one is willing to spend an awful lot of time "properly" torturing the subject in order to get reliable information, torture is likely to provide little if any really useful info, and with a situation like this, that time is a luxury not afforded.  Certainly one should "debrief" whomever one manages to catch, but using intelligence-gathering techniques other than physical torture as the primary means is likely to be the better course of action.

[SPQR]

I'm not so delicate as to think that it doesn't when the world is viewed solely through instrumentalist lenses.  That being said, unless one is willing to spend an awful lot of time "properly" torturing the subject in order to get reliable information, torture is likely to provide little if any really useful info, and with a situation like this, that time is a luxury not afforded.  Certainly one should "debrief" whomever one manages to catch, but using intelligence-gathering techniques other than physical torture as the primary means is likely to be the better course of action.

I can agree to that. Again logistical accounts and verifiable intelligence to rescue the girls need to be taken. By this time they are probably spread around Africa. The Israelis or South Africans are probably good candidates to gather intelligence in this area. They have had the most exposure to this part of the world. The South Africans also probably have good intelligence due to the proximity of the locations where the girls were taken.. The Israelis have the intelligence because this group is considered a terrorist group and its on their watch list.