Do the civilians lack coordination capabilities?

There is very little discussion on how we got into the FATF grey list in the first place

Pakistan is out of the FATF grey list. It took more than four years to comply with 34 action points. This was not for the first time that the country was so listed. The exit will facilitate the badly needed access to the global financial system. Most analyses and the official statements focus on the benefits. There is very little discussion on how we got into the list in the first place. How is it that the same donors that thrust upon us numerous regulatory reforms and the resulting set of institutions through various policy loans united behind FATF to force
us to do more? Under the ongoing programme, the IMF made it a structural benchmark. Indians may have their evil designs, but what about our response? The key objective of FATF is to control terror financing. Financial institutions, the State Bank, finance and home ministries, the concerned provincial departments and the intelligence agencies are the main players. Used as they are to working in silos and following the letter, not the spirit, of the respective governing rules, they lack the ability to produce a whole greater than the sum of the parts. This was left to a specially set up cell in the GHQ.

How the country faced up to the Covid-19 pandemic provides another example. Our health system simply lacks the capacity to launch a coordinated response to anticipated emergencies, what to speak of an epidemic or pandemic. At the initiative of the military, the National Command Operation Centre (NCOC) was set up in March 2020. It quickly became the nerve centre and a nodal agency that reached out to our otherwise non-responsive and disbelieving population with amazing compliance. The entire health system was documented with daily information on nearly all the relevant statistics. Effective coordination between all the players was ensured by the active involvement of the military leadership.

The outcome won applause of the international agencies. Recent floods again exposed the civilian disability to manage a coordinated response. With the success of the NCOC in view, the coalition government established the National Flood Response and Coordination Centre (NFRCC) in late August. Led by the Prime Minister, it comprised federal ministers, representatives of Pakistan Army, provincial chief ministers and experts. The Prime Minister told the first meeting that the Centre would act as a bridge between government institutions, disaster management authorities and donors to “ensure a seamless rehabilitation process of flood affectees”. The second meeting was held in this month on the 20th. The performance is nothing like the NCOC. While the military is involved in the usual relief effort, it is not actively engaged in the coordination effort.

It was not always like that. Pakistan’s most mentioned feat, the nuclear development project, was entirely a civilian effort. It was led by Prime Minister Bhutto himself, coordinated by secretary generals of finance, defence and foreign affairs, and executed by the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. The military took over the project during the time of General Zia. Before that, Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) pioneered industrialisation. What has gone wrong since? Why do the public sector players have to be nudged by the military presence to perform? When the market fails to coordinate, the government intervenes. What is to be done when the government fails to coordinate? Ricardo Hausmann of the Kennedy School at Harvard put it in a nutshell: “Anyone who has worked in government knows that guiding the public and private sectors toward a shared goal, while complicated, is a cakewalk compared to coordinating government agencies.”