Daily Times

Since the so-called National Action Plan (NAP) was hurriedly conceived, proposed and cosmetically approved by the civilian government in terms of the 21st Constitutional Amendment earlier this year, more than 1,000 civilians and security personnel have lost their lives in various acts of terrorism across the country. The most recent and tragic occurred in Safoora, one of the less developed suburbs of Karachi, on May 13, 2015. Regardless of the claimants of this and other related heinous acts, the fact of the matter is that the government of Pakistan has miserably failed to implement the terms of NAP. The cynics question the financial, logistical, legal and institutional contours of NAP, e.g. did the government generate and allocate sufficient financial resources to civilian law enforcing agencies? In this respect, other journalists and observers have made it public that the Nawaz Sharif-led government has suffered from a priority syndrome in terms of allocating funds to infrastructural rather than human development. In other words, the incumbent government was financially forthcoming to invest in the Pindi-Islamabad (and previously Lahore) Metro Bus projects but miserably failed to generate and provide funds for human security by helping law enforcers, especially the traditional police department, equip themselves with modern weaponry, transportation and surveillance apparatuses.
Ironically — and tragically — Pakistan’s government is not suffering from an entire lack of internal and external funds. Internally, this present government has changed its strategy of borrowing money from commercial banks instead of the State Bank of Pakistan. Externally, money has poured in from multiple sources such as the much talked about Saudi largess, for which the Pakistan state has paid the price by indirectly participating in the Yemen conflict, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which agreed last week to release a fresh tranche to the national exchequer and the most recent and much hailed $ 45 billion Chinese investment to be realised over a period of 15 years. Moreover, the federal government was pretty much able to negotiate the Lahore-Islamabad Motorway (M-2) reconstruction project worth billions of rupees with a certain company. How unfortunate is it that the people’s physical protection is grossly ignored by investing hard-earned finance in less priority areas? After all, how many out of the 200 million people in the country use the motorway and highways? I have been a regular user of the M-2 for the past four years and, in my observation, the Lahore-Islamabad motorway only needed partial repairs in a certain beat i.e. Kallar Kahar where the extreme left lane is defected not by buses that carry the commen man but because of loaded trucks on behalf of the country’s industrial elite.
Additionally, another aspect that exposes the inaction of NAP is the problem of delegation of powers and responsibility. The responsibility of law and order, all over the developed world, is constitutionally and normally delegated to civil, armed institutions, such as the police, owing to their training and socio-strategic comprehension of, for example, the phenomenon of political violence. However, quite strangely, the responsibility of maintaining law and order, and even curbing terrorism has been assigned now, constitutionally, to entities such as the Rangers that comparatively lack in training when it comes to dealing acts of terrorism effectively. Little wonder, cases like Safoora provide people with enough doubt to question the Rangers’ ability and performance in this respect. Therefore, it would have been wiser if traditional law enforcing institutions had been strengthened financially and logistically.
Similarly, constitutionally, the responsibility to dispense justice, if any, has been delegated by the Nawaz Sharif government to the military courts. Such an understating on the part of the civil government belittles the existing, though poorly functioning, legal institutions of the country and, on the other, empowers again a non-civil organisation, trained and socialised quite differently, to sit, hear and judge terrorism and related cases. Not forgetting the sunset clause, has the civil government thought of increasing the institutional capacity of, for example, the lower judiciary? The May 12 protest by lawyers this year was enough to suffice that the country’s legal community is not prepared to reconcile with a parallel judicial apparatus. This is why the Supreme Court (SC) has also intervened in this respect by stopping the execution of certain terrorists as judged by military courts. Obviously, the legal debate over the 21st Amendment will be interesting and important, with consequences for the concept and practice of separation of powers.
Last but not least, in the specific context of imbalanced civil-military relations where the latter has emerged more powerful during the Sharif government, both civilians and the military are supposed to work in tandem in today’s specific security context of the country. However, the April civil-military relations monitor that I received from the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT) says differently. For instance, “the civil-military leadership, including the PM and the COAS, interacted six times during the month of April 2015, which included five meetings on the Yemen crisis, no meeting of the National Security Committee (NSC) was convened during the month. This is a blatant disregard of the forum, originally created to institutionalize ‘key national related decisions’”.
Moreover, “PILDAT has maintained that a review of the decision making role of the NSC (compared to a consultative or facilitative one) is required, lest the forum impinges on the powers of the Federal Cabinet (a constitutionally created body), along with reconsidering its peculiar full-time membership of the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC) and the services chiefs. Alongside that change, there is a need to amend the terms of reference of the NSC to mandate a regular periodicity of meetings. The latest meeting of the NSC was held on October 15, 2014, almost 19 months ago and, since its formulation, only four meetings of the NSC have been held.”
What can be concluded in view of the foregoing is that the present civil government, led by Nawaz Sharif, has delegated powers to the military to not only maintain law and order but also dispense justice. In the process, the federal government has prioritised infrastructure over the citizens’ physical security. In this respect, funds were diverted accordingly. Since the civil law enforcing institutions lack in funds and logistics, they cannot be expected to deliver as the government wants them to. On the other hand, the non-civil law enforcing organisations that are constitutionally and financially empowered can deliver to an extent on account of their peculiar training and socialisation. Moreover, the imbalanced civil-military relations have, on the one hand, rendered the civil government incapable of registering its agency of, for example, calling the NSC meeting on its own. The military, on the other hand, has assumed heavy responsibility to run civilian affairs too. If the latter remains unable to prevent another Army Public School (APS) type massacre or Safoora, its ability will be questioned. Perhaps Pakistan will require another NAP since the one in place has sadly morphed into inaction.

The writer is an independent political scientist and the author of Military Agency, Politics and the State in Pakistan.
He tweets @ejazbhatty