Growing a consensus

The National Action Plan (NAP) hastily put together in the wake of the Peshawar Army School massacre in 2014 was little more than a sketch. At best it was a statement of intent and has proved to be difficult to implement nationally for a range of reasons, one of the principal among those a failure to formulate a civilian counter-terror narrative that could be applied countrywide. The military aspects of the 20-point NAP have in large part been fulfilled much as expected. The NAP has been advanced at provincial level unevenly, and two of the key initial bullet-points remain largely incomplete — madrassa registration and the shutting down of routes that fund terrorist organisations. Both have been partially tackled but remain very much a work in progress everywhere.

It is accepted that bringing together the many and disparate elements of the NAP was never going to be easy, there are no off-the-shelf solutions, and implementing the NAP in its entirety is perhaps the largest challenge faced by the state in the widest sense for decades. The relationship between civilians and the military is also a key to success, and there is a perception that the two have not been reading from the same page — or even the same playbook in some instances. Today there are indications of an improvement, and the most recent meeting between the two elements is indicative of that.

The subject for discussion at the meeting of civil and military leaders in Friday 3^rd March was the closure of the Afghan border and to review the gains made in Operation Raddul Fasaad. The leaky border between Pakistan and Afghanistan has served neither state well over the years, but paradoxically attempts at border regulation have met with both resistance and hostility from Afghanistan The Friday meeting decided that the border is to remain closed pending improvements in the security situation overall. This runs counter to the request from Kabul that the border be quickly re-opened, citing the loss of trade revenue.

The decision to keep the border closed is correct. That there is pain economically is undeniable, but there is no gain without pain and tightening/improving border security along its entire length and not just at the busiest legal crossing points is years overdue and all the more urgent in the current security environment. This is a decision that has to be owned jointly by both the civil and the military wings, and they have to act in concert.

In the course of the same meeting the civil and military leadership pledged to ‘press ahead’ with the ongoing anti-terrorist drive that is a follow-on from Operation Zarb-e-Azb, and while we have questions as to why the most recent actions were not taken sooner it is better late than never. The customary heavy-calibre rhetoric was wheeled out in the form of ‘the fullest might of the state’ and there will be ‘no discrimination based on geographic region, colour or sect’ — a signal that this is not, as has been suggested, an ‘anti Pakhtun’ drive. Rhetoric aside this was an indicator of a commitment to work from the same page. It may be in hindsight that the key to a closer working relationship was the decision to deploy Rangers in south Punjab, until recently strongly resisted by the federal and provincial governments. Circumstances in the form of a fresh wave of terrorist incidents forced governmental hands.

With the recent acknowledgement that Islamic State (IS) has an embedded presence in Pakistan there is all the more reason for a coherent joint working relationship between the civilians and the military to emerge, forced as it may be, because the nature of the threat is evolving faster than the capacity of those fighting it. Whether Pakistan evolves into a theocratic state or not depends on who wins the battle.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 5^th, 2017.

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