True colours revealed

If there was ever any doubt as to where the sympathies of the current government really lie, then the recent budget has laid them bare. The government has not the slightest interest — or indeed intention — in creating a national counter-terror narrative nor in activating and empowering the single agency that is tasked with doing so — the National Counter-Terrorism Authority (Nacta). The budgetary allocation for the coming year is a paltry Rs109.42 million, the financial equivalent of a kick in the teeth and a staggering 90 per cent lower than the budget set aside for Nacta in the last financial year, when it looked as if, at last, it was finally going to be the robust entity it was envisaged as. The agency itself had requested Rs1.8 billion to meet needs for the coming year.



Considering that the fourth point of the National Action Plan (NAP) is the strengthening of Nacta itself, and that the agency has a primary responsibility for the implementation of many of the 20 points in NAP, NAP itself would seem to be dead if not actually buried. It must be assumed that the Joint Intelligence Directorate, which was to be formed under the Nacta aegis, is also stillborn. Why the finance ministry is reluctant to release funds to Nacta is a mystery, but in administrative terms, it comes under the interior ministry, and the prime minister, currently offline, oversees all Nacta operational activities. The Board of Governors of the body, chaired by the prime minister, has yet to meet despite being required to do so four times a year.

At a stroke, any move towards the development of a coherent and unified policy in terms of combating what is a considerable threat to the state, namely terrorism, in a variety of formats and contexts, is killed stone cold dead. A decision such as this can only have been taken in the highest reaches of government, and any protestation by the government that it is truly committed to wiping out terrorism (and banned groups) is nothing short of balderdash. The fingerprints of extremist sympathies are all over this latest example of crass governance.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 7^th, 2016.

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