Daily Times

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has allocated in its annual budget Rs 300 million for Darul Uloom Haqqania. Describing the purpose of funding a controversial seminary, the chief of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Imran Khan, called it an effort to mainstream madrassas. This is the seminary notorious for having produced many of the members of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). On the other hand, in a recent meeting held on the law and order situation in Karachi, the civil and military top brass have decided that fresh recruitment in the Sindh police would be done by the army, and that 2000 ex-servicemen would be inducted into the force. The induction of an army officer in the police is not a new phenomenon; Punjab police has gone through this experiment. It is the recruitment of police officers in the supervision of military that does ring an alarm bell.

These two decisions in a span of one week is a reminder that the military’s power politics is alive and kicking.

Though police in every part of Pakistan has been considered a weak institution that has largely failed in maintaining law and order, the Sindh police take the cake. Highly politicised and recruited on personal likes with no regard to merit, the Sindh police has been involved in all sort of crime one could think of. In the face of this failure and the deteriorating law and order situation in Karachi, where almost 15 to 20 people were being gunned down on a daily basis until 2013, the Rangers were given the reign of power to rid the city of extortionists, kidnappers, and target killers. Labelled the Karachi operation, the Rangers-led police operation was, however, not a solution but a stopover arrangement to let the city be cleansed of criminals.

When it was finally decided that another operation had become inevitable to bring peace to Karachi, the police declined to lead even though it had all the information about the rogues eating into the fibre of the metropolitan city. History’s dark shadows had not left the memory. The police officers who had taken part in the 1992 and 1996 police operations in Karachi had been eliminated one after the other. Unless the Rangers or, for that matter, the military took the lead the police were reluctant, out of fear, to move against the criminals. Caught between the devil and the deep sea, had they followed legal action, either the ruling or the targeted criminals’ party would have had them killed.

That brought the Rangers with full force in Karachi. The absorption of the army into Karachi’s political affairs, however, began after the Army Public School massacre in December 2014 when the National Action Plan was swung into action, and four apex committees were made for each province to clean the country of terrorists. There were pledges by the Sindh government that police would be strengthened and reinvigorated. Rangers are not trained to understand the sensitivities of the civic life, and that too of a city like Karachi where the ethnic mix is of combustible nature. But the pledge is yet a promise.

Military’s effort to restore peace in Karachi deserves appreciation, but not at the cost of making the provincial government weak. The question could be raised on the performance of all provincial government and the space they had ceded to the army over the years. However, the question could also be raised about the unknown forces that had created space for itself. The so-called dharnas (sit-ins) by the duo, Imran Khan and Tahir-ul-Qadri, are said to have been orchestrated to create that space. The central government is a much weaker entity today. The foreign policy of which the army claims to be the rightful guardian is still in disarray. Any effort by the government to reach out to the world on its terms is sabotaged. The domestic politics is not spared either. Unless there is a “reason” to intervene, why would army get the reason to become the saviour?

At one end, we are fighting to stop terrorism, and on the other, we are supporting the same elements with funds and more resources. On the one hand, the military is helping the government to restore civilian rule, and on the other, it is throwing its weight around. So what are we looking at? A de facto martial law!

Pakistan is fighting a war against terrorism, and the one reason behind that terrorism is the religious extremism that the country played out in the name of jihad. The debris the country still finds hard to get rid of began accumulating when Pakistan experimented with jihad as its foreign policy tool to combat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan war. It could be that the military establishment progressed both technically and materially with the windfall Pakistan received from the US and Saudi Arabia — the unaudited dollars that went straight to the ISI to facilitate the Mujahedeen. It could also be that the diversion of the international community towards the Afghan war provided an easy path to the generals to develop the nuclear bomb. However, amidst all this, what the country has lost is far bigger and brittle, the taste of which is neither leaving us nor seem to be resolving.

From Karachi to Khyber, the country is facing a bad security situation. While we fought two foreign wars, during the 1980s and later after 9/11 we lost the country to Islamist radicals, profiteers, kidnappers, money launderers, racketeers and extortionists. Not surprisingly, these dark elements had the backing of the politicians and the police, but we cannot exonerate the army of this malice. During the military rule, especially during the tenures of General Zia-ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf, the darkness was rather allowed to thicken.

Just like two wrongs can never make a right, the funding of a seminary in the name of mainstreaming radicals, and usurping the power of the civilian government in the name of incompetence would never strengthen democracy in Pakistan.

The writer is a journalist. She can be reached at durdananajam1@gmail.com