Chris Smith: “Again, the great urgent needs for the Nigerian military are actionable intelligence and the capacity to know what is…”

“Again, the great urgent needs for the Nigerian military are actionable intelligence and the capacity to know what is going on where, when, in real-time, and training. There needs to be a reevaluation of the vetting process, the Leahy amendment which I absolutely agree with; but when good troops and good soldiers and, especially, good officers are unnecessarily excluded because of a taint that may be ascribed to their unit rather than their individual performance, that needs to be relooked at so that we can train. There is a battalion that is being trained by the U.S., but there needs to be far more training in counterinsurgency. I would say to my friend, I remember a trip to Darfur. The Nigeria military has been very robust in their peacekeeping. I remember I met with Major Ajumbo in Darfur who had also been deployed to Sarajevo. I was very active in the terrible Balkan war. I went several times to places, including with Frank Wolf, to Vukovar and other places that were under siege. When the peacekeepers got there, among them were the Nigerians. So peacekeeping is something they had been very generous in deploying their troops to try to help other countries deal with civil wars or wars of aggression and, of course, terrorist activity as we have seen in Darfur, but now that kind of training is not applicable to a counterinsurgency effort.…”