Welcome to the hot seat, Mr Sharif

Let me begin by welcoming Mian Nawaz Sharif and his party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, to the hot seat. In the coming days, that seat will become steadily hotter. If Mr Sharif wishes to prosper, he will need to focus on economy, security and foreign policies — three areas requiring serious thought and decisions that cannot flow from optimistic assumptions but must bear in mind cold, hard realities.

The first thing that Sharif needs to do is to adopt a two-track approach to these policy areas. The government has its own organisations that deal with these policies. The functionaries who run these policies and have been running them range from average to outstanding. However, most, if not all, suffer from what is known as bounded rationality.

Decision-making is a difficult process. It is impacted by at least three main factors: no one can have perfect information, people approach issues according to their mental limitations and, in almost all situations, there’s finite time in which to make decisions.

The central problem, however, pertains to limited information. For instance, in foreign policy one is dealing with other state actors and it is not possible to have full information regarding what other actors are thinking or how they will behave. It is also very difficult to figure out intentions, which is why states generally base their foreign policy on the idea of other actors’ capabilities — a factor which is quantifiable.

Another variable here is that it is difficult to assess the optimal choices of state actors because actors very often act intransigently on an issue in order to secure gains on another. In other words, they play for what may be sub-optimal so as they can protect what is optimal.

Optimising decision-making is, therefore, a complex problem. Since the process can never be made fully rational, there is all the more reason to make it secure against emotions and irrationality. Yet another difficulty relates to deciding a course of action after looking at a complex picture. That is the prescriptive side. Decisions force one’s hand into simplifying choices, settling for satisfactory rather than optimal solutions. This approach, to quote Herbert Simon, relies on structures of the environment, the regularity that helps decision-makers feel comfortable.

So, decision-making becomes more a function of perceptions than reality. To put it another way, over a long period of time, the experts dealing with a problem become somewhat immune to changes in the environment in which decisions are to be made and fail to pick up new signals. Even if they do, they would sooner try to fit them into their pre-existing biases than reconfigure their existing templates.

The point is that while civil and military bureaucrats do their job well, they are weighed down by the problem of bounded rationality. This is the other extreme from the unreserved enthusiasm that a politician might want to display in order to solve a problem or get a breakthrough.

The reality lies somewhere in between. It is important for Mr Sharif to be aware of this problem in the three policy areas that I mentioned above.

This is where the second track comes in. There are many experts outside the government. There is no institutional mechanism that I know of which allows the proper participation of these experts in policy formation, the only exception being the recent exercise of getting some to appear before parliamentary committees. But that is not enough and it is sporadic. Mr Sharif needs to create institutional space for outside-the-government experts in various fields to have regular interaction with relevant governmental organisations. I say institutional because this cannot be left to the whims of the bureaucrats.

Lest I be misunderstood, deliberately or unwittingly, let me state clearly that such experts are not to be paid from the government kitty; they are not to be given flag cars. These are people happily employed. The idea is to create another track that can reduce the impact of bounded rationality and optimise decisions in the realm of national security as far as possible, since decisions in no way can be fully optimised.

These experts should come from various fields and this body, whatever it might be called, should have committees and sub-committees. It should be structured such that there is no incentive for people who are part of it to try and resort to the low cut and thrust that is the bane of the government machinery. The modalities of that are outside the scope of this article.

Once this body is formed, let it work out a national security strategy, just like the government should have its own body to do the same. At the end of the exercise, let there be reconciliation between the two documents. It will also help us see, as a nation, how two different groups approach the concept of national security — what are the differences, what similarities.

Such a document is vital since, for once, in our existence, we need to figure out who and what we are, how we perceive our place in the region and beyond, and what route we want to take to get to where we should be. The exercise could either change the determinants, require us to alter some and retain others or, on an off-chance, keep them intact.

Quite apart from the institutional requirement for such a body and its interaction with the governmental structures, it is also important to keep in check Mr Sharif’s default urge to play his hand in matters which require a stay rather than a hit.

Dealing with security means dealing with the security sector; dealing with foreign policy means getting briefings about the ground realities and understanding, given the threats, the link between foreign and security policies before taking a decision and tackling the economy means knowing what is already there and what experts have worked on. The idea is to avoid wild swings; the idea also is to shun the extremes of conservative decision-making and going unnecessarily radical.

Good sentiments do not make good policies. The American critic and writer HL Mencken said that poetry has done enough when it charms ... [but] prose must also convince. That’s the difference between wishes and is-es. Mr Sharif needs to first understand the environment in which he will be required to make decisions before playing his hand.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 15^th, 2013.