Dropping the hammer

The stage appears to be set for the hammer to drop on those who have brought terror to Pakistan

If the National Action Plan (NAP), which was developed after the massacre at the Army Public School in Peshawar on December 16, 2014, was ever going to be anything other than a wish list, it needed clear and decisive implementation. Although there are inconsistencies about its implementation across the country, there does — and this makes a welcome change — appear to be a decision to keep up the momentum that emanates from the top. There is evidence that government departments are actually working together rather than conducting turf wars, and the Ministry of Interior is to consult with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the preparation of a fresh list of proscribed organisations that will conform to national needs as well as international, harmonising with the UN Security Council list of proscribed organisations. In the last month, another 12 organisations have been added to the list, both national and international. The National Counter Terrorism Authority (Nacta) has also come off the back-burner and Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, who has been low-profile of late, appears to be the government’s point-man tasked with ramrodding the NAP.



The government has arrested at least 2,065 clerics nationally for the misuse of loudspeakers, and 547 cases of hate speech have been registered. Equipment has been seized in 1,281 instances — and the startlingly high number of 218,220 suspects have reportedly been picked up in 16,344 operations by law enforcers. Where these suspects were detained is something of a mystery as the 2010 Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) report says that the number of prisoners in 55 of the 91 prisons in the country far exceeds their sanctioned capacity, and that 27 prisons have more than twice the number of prisoners they are authorised to hold. There has been little or no improvement in the prison system since the HRCP report and if even 50 per cent of those suspects picked up were held in custody, then where precisely were they held? Presumably, the majority of suspects will have returned to the community because out of almost a quarter of a million picked up, only 12,462 have been formally arrested and of these, a mere 140 had links to terrorist organisations, which brings matters rather more sharply into perspective, and still begs the question as to where they are being held and when are they likely to be before a court.

The funding of terrorist activity has also attracted attention and 26 cases have been registered and 32 people arrested for using the hawala and hundi systems to transfer money, though there is no detail as to who is arrested or where the money they transferred was destined. The interior ministry is to fine-tune procedures surrounding the proscription of organisations, in particular to ensure that they are not re-badged to live again under a different guise. This has not succeeded in the past and without some steely resolve is no more likely to succeed this time around. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) is looking at processes to block “unwanted activity” on social media related to extremism, but given the prevalence of proxy VPN usage triggered by the YouTube ban, this will be a difficult area to police.

With the Punjab government finally admitting that some seminaries were receiving foreign funding, the stage appears to be set for the hammer to drop, albeit belatedly, on the organisations and individuals that have brought terror to Pakistan. The hammer has to drop even if in the short term, there are howls of protest from countries whose engagement in the affairs of Pakistan is far from the good of the sovereign independence of the state. If this is to be, then we strongly support the government in its attempts to tackle a national malaise. But if this turns out to be an exercise in look-busy-do-nothing, a blizzard of figures that add up to nothing, then once again our politicians will have failed us.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 12^th,  2015.

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