United States of America (USA) Africa Command has said military action alone was not enough to end terrorism and called on the authorities to adopt a whole government approach to combat terrorism and other extremist violence.
The commander, Gen. Michael Langley, speaking at a virtual briefing for select journalists yesterday said kinetic approach alone cannot win the fight against insurgency which is ravaging Africa and Nigeria in particular.
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He said, “We discussed at the conference of the Chief of Defence, and I was giving my approach and articulating our ways of operational approach. I listen to those from various countries that have been affected, and they are changing some of their norms because we already know that the war on terrorism does take more than kinetic action.
“That’s only a piece of it and only when necessary. It’s a whole government approach. There’s a piece that we need to get to the underlying causes. The drivers of conflicts must be seen as the next step to the solution and assurance actions that will remedy that.
“In taking our summaries of discussions and turning them into summaries of conclusions that we need to identify. We need to build upon the overall governance within these countries to build capability and capacities and other channels that help out their populace because what they’re saying here is that there is probably a correlation between a weaker colony or lack of governance and some institutions.”
He added, ” That in effect will correlate to more recruitment across these organizations, these mushroom organizations preying upon the young generation to do nefarious activities in the name of terrorism or by false ideology of a particular religion. Those are some of the root causes that we discussed and addressed and trying to figure out how we map out interdiction outside of just military action.