Beyond adhoc security

It’s time for the state of Pakistan to defend its own sovereignty and its national interests through parliament

Chairing a law and order meeting in Balochistan, the Chief of Army Staff on April 14 “warned foreign states, intelligence agencies against trying to destabilise Pakistan by supporting terrorists in Balochistan”. Reading Ayesha Siddiqa’s piece “Changing Times” on the same day in The Express Tribune, I was forced to compare her concluding remarks “debate our strategic options and re-set our priorities” with those made by our army chief. Both are right in how they seek to address the deteriorating security conditions of a country that continues to fight a war against terror that has now entered its second decade. The bottomline is that we cannot afford to stay in a permanent state of war. Waging a war, especially one which is as irregular as the one that we are fighting is one thing; sustaining it for a prolonged period is another.

To General Raheel Sharif’s credit, military operations against terrorists during his tenure as army chief have not only furthered and expanded, but have gained popular public support and appear more legitimised. The empowerment of the law enforcement agencies, including the Rangers in Karachi, and General Raheel’s latest announcement of extending the reach of Operation Zarb-e-Azb within the geographical boundaries of Balochistan speaks of the military’s current mindset of a targeted and focused approach that has visibly replaced the not-so-active approach by the army chief’s predecessors, which only allowed and helped breed more terrorists.

Military actions under General Raheel today are eliminating terrorists who must have been toddlers when Pakistan witnessed the ascent of General (retd) Pervez Musharraf to the most powerful office in the country. I know that circumstances change and you are never combating the same set of challenges and problems, but if ever there was an example of how a ‘military commander’s resolve’ can change the direction and course of a war, it is right here in Pakistan for everyone to see.

Had Ayesha Siddiqa’s recommendation to “debate our strategic options and re-set our priorities” been given any value and consideration in the decades past, we wouldn’t have those toddlers picking up guns now and fighting our security forces; we wouldn’t even have mounting troops and civilian casualties and the large military deployments that have become so essential to combating our internal and external threats.

Unfortunately for Pakistan, we continue to grapple with our security problems as and when they arise. The solutions are also individual in nature rather than institution-led. The contradiction stems, it seems, from inadequate civil-military relations. Such important national security questions such as ‘could we be a frontline state in a proxy war between two superpowers’? or ‘could we play host to such a huge refugee problem for such a long period’? were never put to public scrutiny and the decisions on them remained beyond the reach of the country’s elected representatives.

As a follow-up to a huge national and public debate when we did the right thing — allowing the country’s parliament to determine our policy response to the Saudi-Yemeni conflict — the result is visibly transparent and predictable, and is right in front of us. Can we guarantee the security of any state at the expense of our own? This was a mistake we committed in Afghanistan and with a resurgent democracy and the people’s representatives now at the helm of affairs, we may not be ready to commit the same mistake yet again.

Military responses are always prepared to meet contingencies arising from the constantly changing capabilities of adversaries and not their intentions. However, in case of Saudi Arabia, its knee-jerk reactions and the desire to acquire military support from Pakistan, only seem to be guided by a strategy to improve its own combat capability not against the military capability of Yemeni rebels, but against their perceived intentions. The danger under such an eventuality is that Saudi Arabia, through its ‘greater preparedness’ and ardent display of military bravado, may just influence and force Yemeni rebels and those who support them to actually alter and change their intentions. Under such circumstances, Pakistan would do well to maintain the ‘acceptable limits of neutrality’ — which obviously will not be possible if our combat forces are deployed for military action in Saudi Arabia.

We have had enough of ‘individual personalities’ influencing, guiding and responding to our security challenges. It’s time for the state of Pakistan to defend its own geographical territory, integrity, sovereignty and its national interests through the dictates of the most supreme institution in the country — parliament.

People like Ayesha Siddiqa and many other senior defence and security analysts will keep reminding the civilian and military elite about the fallouts and consequences of our defence and security policies. The concept of ‘security with’ and not ‘security against’ our neighbours figures prominently in what these analysts have been saying over the years. Writing in 1997 in his book Human Development in South Asia, Dr Mahbub ul Haq famously wrote the following: “security of people not just territory, security of individuals and not just nations, security through development and not through arms, security of all people everywhere — in their homes, on their jobs, in their streets, in their communities and in their environment.”

When I look at the border barriers (walls and fences) — one that India has already built along our eastern front, the one that we are building on our western front and the 10-foot wall that Iran is building on a 700-km front from Taftan to Mand on the Iran-Balochistan border I am inclined to agree with Ayesha Siddiqa — maybe we didn’t debate our strategic options enough in the past and that is why today we have borders that are either fenced or walled from all sides. That just about tells the story of our missed opportunities, as well as security failures.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 21^st,  2015.

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