Daily Times

While not all would agree with the negative assertion that the future of the National Action Plan (NAP) is uncertain, the comment raises an important point. NAP itself has a clear institutional incentive to adapt and take on a counterterrorism role in order to ensure its own survival as a national security programme. Thus, the question that must be asked is whether NAP, which has been developed during this war as a response to the militant-based terrorism threat in the form of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and its splinter groups, is suited to this new counterterrorism role and whether it can make a significant and lasting contribution to the campaign against terrorism. Is NAP’s role in counterterrorism desirable and clearly beneficial or is this merely a quest by the government to maintain its relevance in a changed security environment?

In order to answer this question it is pertinent to assess the ability of NAP towards contributing to the national campaign against terrorism. The nature of the campaign against terrorism itself facilitates a strong NAP role in that it puts a priority upon national cooperation in the realm of defence and security. If “organisation, cooperation and coordination” are the keys to successfully dealing with terrorism, can NAP provide all three? There are four main realms where NAP can make a significant contribution to the campaign: diplomacy, military, intelligence-sharing and defence cooperation. Recently, successive visits by the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Raheel Shaif, to Kabul suggest that NAP can make a significant contribution to a multi-dimensional campaign. The second question outlines the two principal challenges facing NAP if it continues to develop a role in counterterrorism, a trend that, by all appearances, seems destined to continue.

Apparently, NAP’s military and political functions have been intertwined and argue that, at its inception, NAP was about more than just banding together against the state’s enemy; it was also about creating, consolidating and expanding a zone of safety within which common values and cooperative institutions could prosper. This fact opens room for a significant diplomatic role for NAP in fostering support from other political parties and civil society for the campaign on terrorism, which underpins the critical element of national cooperation. NAP can contribute in a number of different ways. Its comparative advantage is centred on its military clout but it is certainly not limited to it. If maintaining all parties’ coalition support and solidarity is a key element of the campaign against terrorism, then surely one role NAP can play is as a forum for the mobilisation of such support and solidarity, especially noting the strong, shared values that unite the leaders of all other political parties and civil society.

The importance of political solidarity in the campaign against terrorism is not just for its own sake; it underpins successful action in the military sphere. Potential roles for the military in combating terrorism have one thing in common: they require political support, a broad base of support, political as well as practical. The recent operations against the Taliban would not have been possible without the political and logistical support offered by a unitary all parties’ national stand against terrorism.

There are two primary roles NAP can play in terms of making a military contribution to the campaign against terrorism: it can take military action directly, conducting operations under the command and control of NAP itself or it can facilitate operations by acting as a toolbox from which interoperable forces can be drawn in order to conduct military operations. There are also two types of military operations in which NAP military forces may make a contribution to the campaign against terrorism: the first is by conducting combat operations against terrorist groups or their supporters directly and the second is a military operation in the form of a peace support operation designed to ensure stability, either national or regional, in an area of terrorist activity.

While NAP has not yet conducted direct combat operations in a counterterrorism role within an operation under military command, it does seem to be putting the requisite pieces in place, showing some potential to do so. NAP has developed a military concept for defence against terrorism and is currently developing an operational concept of operations to put it into effect. Critically, the military concept against terrorism underlines the government’s readiness to act against terrorist attacks or the threat of such attacks and to deploy forces as and where required to carry out such missions.

NAP should outline cooperation on two broad fronts: developing capacities to combat terrorism directly and developing capacities required to manage the social, physical and psychological consequences of terrorist attacks, especially those utilising a series of suicide bombings on the general public. It has also been suggested that the plan may also serve as an instrument for the dissemination and distribution of lessons learned in counterterrorism. To this end the plan calls for defence and security sector reform to aid the development of properly structured and well-equipped forces able to contribute to combating terrorism, force planning to that effect, information exchange about counterterrorism forces, joint inter-allied and inter-partner forces related to combating terrorism to improve capabilities and to share experiences, and the development of enhanced capabilities to contribute to consequence management and the sharing of information and experience in this area.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com