To date, no funding had been allocated to the interior ministry for the NAP’s implementation
ISLAMABAD: Most critics agree that for the most part, the 20-point National Action Plan (NAP) has no teeth. Hurriedly drafted within a few days, experts pleaded for more time to define the specific actions to be taken for implementing the plan. Perhaps, to allay fears, and for the government to give the populace the impression that immediate steps were being taken to thwart terrorism in the aftermath of the Peshawar APS attack, the NAP was hurriedly published without much forethought regarding specific steps to be taken for its implementation and its funding.
Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan was assigned the responsibility of implementing the NAP. One of the primary responsibilities of the interior ministry is to ensure state security and yet Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has relieved the interior minister from implementation of the NAP for reasons that were grossly insulting, and totally inappropriate public statements were made by officials stating that the interior minister proved to be too inefficient and incompetent in handling such a big task.
Perhaps if the All-Parties Conference had taken more time in specifying actions to be taken and how the plan would be funded, these insults would not have been hurled at the interior minister and he would not have become the government’s scapegoat for a plan that was destined, in part, to fail from the outset. To date, no funding had been allocated to the interior ministry for the NAP’s implementation.
Dan Hanley
Published in The Express Tribune, April 10th, 2015.
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