Busy doing nothing

Govt probably had little choice other than to do what it did with NAP because that is what they have always done

Those intent on bombing Pakistan back to the Stone Age — the Taliban — must have rubbed their hands with glee at the government response to the slaughter at the Army Public School in Peshawar on December 16. And that response was? Form a committee. Moreover, don’t just form one committee… form 16 and then bring everything together under the umbrella of perhaps the most unfortunate acronym of recent years. NAP — the National Action Plan. Whoever thought that gem up needs upending in a large wastepaper basket and shunting off to the back of beyond, there to take a prolonged nap.

Long ago and far away was my MBA. Some of the notes I took followed me to Pakistan and were deposited in the store-room. Something nagged at the back of my mind and I went digging and yes, there were the notes I took on how to avoid doing anything. Absolutely anything. And do it whilst giving the impression of being extremely busy addressing whatever the task at hand was. The word ‘committee’ featured nowhere — but ‘working party’ and ‘workshop days’ did. Management-speak for kicking an uncomfortably spiky football into the long grass for as long as the illusion of all scrambling to find it may be maintained.

Indeed and on a scale far smaller than that being assiduously beavered away at by the current dispensation; I was guilty of being busy doing nothing myself when it suited me as I tip-toed through the minefield of local government in the UK at the back end of the last century. So there was a sense of immediate recognition when I saw the 20-point NAP for the first time. Here was a fine list of things that nobody was going to get done this side of hell freezing over, and just to ensure that the good ship Going Nowhere was fit for purpose the list was copper-bottomed with a plumptiousness of committees.

Of course, all those committees need chairpersons, and members and administrative support and an office somewhere. Perhaps a dedicated vehicle or two… and travel allowance and an allowance for a 3G phone for everybody just so they can all stay in touch. The chairperson problem was solved in a single masterly stroke by giving the job to one person for the majority of the committees newly minted, a move virtually guaranteed to slow proceedings to the speed of a large boulder on sleeping tablets. As to where the members were to come from time will only tell, but there is a finite number of candidates who can walk and chew gum at the same time — so expect some duplication there, then.

The fact of the matter is as I am sure you, Dear Reader, will have long realised is that the problems that NAP seeks to address are massive, systemic, long-lived, in some parts woven into the national fabric and none of them open to early, easy or even do-able solutions. The NAP objectives are a wish list. To be sure they are wishes that many of us wish with all our hearts to come true, but they are old wine in a new bottle, wishes that have been wished before only to fly away unfulfilled stuck to the leaden boots of inertia… and committees.

The NAP objectives list is a summation of all that needs fixing and few would disagree with it. But to arrive at the position whereby those 20 points become a national agenda from which is going to come a functional tool to counter terrorism, is a wish too far.

To be scrupulously fair, the government probably had little choice other than to do what it did with NAP and the subsequent plumptiousness of committees — because that is what they have always done and they do not know how to do things any different. No thinking out-of-the-box for these people, nothing so dangerous as originality or truly challenging the status quo, and quite definitely no nettles firmly grasped.

Fifteen days after the bloodbath in Peshawar, there is every indication that no matter what the overt intent, little or preferably nothing is about to change — the saddest of reflections on which to bid farewell to 2014.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 1^st, 2015.

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