A critical disjunction

The military has expressed a degree of frustration over the slow pace of implementation of NAP

There was always the potential for the civilians and the military to end up on different pages in the anti-terror playbook. They both remain in the same book but are currently in different chapters and not reading at the same speed. The National Action Plan (NAP) that was formulated in the wake of the massacre at the Army Public School in Peshawar last December started life as not much more than a glorified wish-list, and putting muscle on some of the wishes has proved to be difficult, the more so for the civilians than the military. The military has now expressed a degree of frustration over the slow pace of implementation of the NAP, and a corps commanders’ meeting led by Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif has called for “governance initiatives” if the substantial gains made by the military over the last year are not to be lost.

The general has a point, but we need to consider that there are a number of differences between military and civil spaces that in a fast-moving environment mean that the civilians are always going to lag behind in any race with the military to get anything done. The military is a disciplined force, trained to carry out orders at the double and deliver a result in the shortest possible time with a minimum number of casualties and a maximum gain against fixed objectives. The civilians are anything but. They do not like taking orders but are happy to give them right and left, are often unwilling to move in a united and well-ordered manner to gain any objective and are split into an infinite number of groups, all with competing loyalties and interests.

The political generals at the head of the government have little control over their troops, and have to proceed with caution if they are to retain their loyalty — their votes — and will prevaricate or simply sit on their hands if there is something to be done that is politically sensitive or might threaten the grip on power of those elected to serve. There is also the matter of competence. There is no entry qualification to the political club — beyond being wealthy — and not all knives in the political box are sharpened to the same edge. The military is the obverse, and its cutting edge now out-chops that of the civilians in the anti-terrorist kitchen.

There are elements of the NAP that have gone well for the civilians, mostly those that were the soft targets, but the harder targets, particularly tackling extremism in madrassas and truly circumscribing the activities of banned groups, trail behind. It is not enough to arrest no matter how many thousands of preachers for hate crimes, unless at the same time a counter-narrative is being plugged into the hole created by their arrest. If this does not happen, then nothing is achieved, and we are back to square one as soon as the offenders are released as they invariably are.

The Joint Investigation Teams appear to be asleep at the wheel, mainly because the civilian police running them have little interest in fulfilling the federal government’s agenda. The huge gains made by the military in Fata could disappear in months if the promised reforms for the tribal areas are not forthcoming and the resettlement process lacks resources and drive. Extremism will quickly take root again if the people that are rehabilitated find the quality of their lives no better and possibly worse than when they were so unceremoniously uprooted. There is a notable lack of prosecutions deriving from the Karachi operation that is Rangers-driven.

Harmonisation of two such dissimilar entities was never going to be easy, and it is no surprise that the military is ahead of the game. The civilians, if they are to win the peace after the war that the military is winning for them, are going to have to fight a lot harder to get a similar result.

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

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