Cutting the crap — again

NAP's 20 points are desirable, but beyond the competencies or will of those tasked with finding ways to make it work

December 16, 2014 was the watershed that never was. The day that everything changed except that it didn’t. The point at which a national corner was turned except that it wasn’t. The day after which everything would change and it would all be different but it isn’t.

The National Action Plan (NAP) was drafted, apparently lifted in large part from a previous document that had sat on a shelf for a year in a ministry best not to name. It was cobbled together in days and with little thought about implementation, modalities and costs. Or feasibility. The Taliban must have been doubled up with helpless mirth. The 21^st Amendment to the Constitution was also hurried through and military courts are on the horizon for better or worse. The moratorium on the death penalty was lifted and there has been a steady stream of hangings, mostly of men convicted many years ago. There are about 8,000 on death row at the time of writing and even if one a day were hanged, it would take nearly 22 years to see them all dead at the end of a rope. Any discernible deterrent effect on levels of terrorism as a result of lifting the moratorium? Nope. Is there likely to be? Nope. All a bit pointless then? Yup.

But back to the NAP, which is a mish-mash of foreign and domestic policy and always looked more like a wish list than an actual plan. There are a number of notable omissions not the least being a comprehensive counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency plan that was owned and implemented by a civilian government. The resource implications are nowhere even hinted at, and in the days following the launch of the NAP much of its implementation was handed off to the provinces which are already making a thorough hash of the devolved powers and budgets bequeathed to them under the 18^th Amendment. Adding the NAP was always going to be a stretch and so it is proving.

Implementing the NAP required leadership, courage and vision. The vast majority of those at the forefront of politics couldn’t lead their way out of a paper bag, have the courage of mice and all the ocular skills of a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat. Every one of the 20 points in the NAP are to a greater or lesser degree desirable, but they are all — to a greater or lesser degree — beyond the competencies or will of those tasked with finding ways to make it work.

The competency deficit has already been acknowledged if not explicitly as parts of the plan have already been quietly shelved… and yes, the parts that really really needed to get done like registering madrassas and reforming the curriculum in seminaries. True some funds have been seized, and probably avenues blocked for further funding, but in real terms little has been done, beyond the purely military, in terms of dismantling the terrorist edifice; and precisely nothing has been done to create a national countervailing narrative that addresses the wholesale radicalisation of an entire young generation. Nothing.

It is that failure that exposes the utter futility of the NAP, because without government at every level, federal and provincial, taking on board first a desire to commit to de-radicalisation and then the implementation of a years-long strategy that is appropriately funded — then the game is lost before it is begun. There is not the slightest indication anywhere in the country that this is at the forefront of the collective mind of governance. Indeed, the further we get from December 16, 2014 the fainter is the wording of the NAP and by the time we get to the first anniversary, they will have faded to a ghostly script, resurrected and restated for the natal day, and back in the ‘pending’ basket once the TV ‘specials’ are done and dusted.

Once again we have been hoodwinked, fooled, led up the garden path. There never was a plan to do things differently, but there was a plan to make it look like they were and it is succeeding magnificently. Prestidigitation elevated to the realms of statecraft. Not a bad trick if you can pull it off.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 2^nd, 2015.

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