I’ve got a cunning plan…

We should send our police to terrorist training camps. Gather every mustachioed, chai panee collecting, potbelly hanging over his khaki’s policeman and send him to North Waziristan. Let them take part in those terrorism work-outs that al Qaeda loves releasing footage of. Make them run in the summer heat, wearing ski-masks and Russian army surplus fatigues left over from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Force them to crawl under barbwire and scale rope ladders. Teach them how to burst through a locked door while carrying the finest in black-market purchased weaponry. Make them disguise themselves as rocks and shrubbery to hide from drones. Instruct them on which end of the gun bullets come out of. Then, once the training is complete and they have lost all that biryani weight, deploy them on the streets as a new, svelte, competent police force.

We can help that competence along, of course, by giving them guns that work and body armour that doesn’t have the consistency of gauze. Maybe swell their ranks a bit by giving each politician just one or two policemen for security as opposed to an entire precinct worth to stand outside their house. In fact, to insure that even those few aren’t wasted, politicians should be granted security on a case-by-case basis. You can only be given a policeman to protect you if you have been shot at, at least once. If the bullet missed you entirely then you just need once policeman because your enemies clearly don’t hate you that much. If the bullet injured you then you can have two policemen (one to shield yourself with and one for firing at the attackers). If the bullet killed you then you get to be the victim of a conspiracy and your surviving relatives can enjoy hours of speculation as to how Enemies of the State wanted you dead because you were a noble warrior for peace and honesty and who doesn’t want that?

Either way that means more policemen doing what the taxpayer pays them their salary to do: protect civilians. Speaking of salaries, lets at least pay them more than the double digit sum we currently are, so that they can stop figuring out where to get lunch money from and focus on doing their jobs. Once all this is done and the policemen are qualified and capable and numerous and content, then we can ask them to make sure that a suspected terrorist on his way to the court doesn’t get to escape. If he wants to get back on the streets again, let the court release him. They probably will anyway. Although, given that the police in my hypothetical fantasy scenario are good at their jobs, they will collect evidence and have the paperwork in order so that judges who are keen on enforcing the letter of the law don’t have to make unpopular decisions because of the incompetence of the enforcers of that law.

There. See? And you people say I don’t provide you with any solutions. Apparently now it’s the job of the journalist to solve things (I know I’m not a journalist, but it’s my fantasy scenario. You can be whoever you want in your own fantasy). The Letters to the Editor section of every newspaper is full of people complaining about how the news only highlights the problems and doesn’t provide solutions. Maybe people are misunderstanding the job of the news. It’s about reporting information. Or maybe we have just gotten so used to looking to others to solve our problems for us, we are happy to shift the responsibility on the next passerby. So here I’ve stepped up to the plate. I have taken the time to offer a solution: policemen trained by terrorists. Don’t like it? Then maybe it’s time you started thinking of a better solution. Instead of looking for it in places where it isn’t meant to be.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 24^th, 2010.