Evaluating the National Action Plan

It is very time­ly to ana­lyze the exist­ing Nation­al Action Plan (NAP) meant to erad­i­cate extrem­ism and ter­ror­ism from the coun­try. At the begin­ning, I shall high­light that eval­u­at­ing both aspects – extrem­ism and ter­ror­ism in iso­la­tion will be a blun­der. Because extrem­ism, irre­spec­tive of its type and rea­sons, is the root cause of insta­bil­i­ty, intol­er­ance, unrest and ter­ror­ism in our soci­ety. Coun­ter­ing extrem­ism is in the nation­al pol­i­cy and strate­gic domain which is a long ardu­ous jour­ney like­ly to bear fruit in medi­um to long term time frame, while coun­ter­ing ter­ror­ism is main­ly tac­ti­cal actions or elim­i­nat­ing the symp­toms which involves imme­di­ate and short term mea­sures. Since mass­es look for con­crete actions and imme­di­ate effects, the nation, media and pub­lic at large fall in line behind the counter ter­ror­ism actions con­sid­er­ing them to be the end itself. These actions must be viewed not by the num­ber of ter­ror­ists killed or cap­tured, but by the effects or results.

The Estab­lish­ment of Mil­i­tary Courts
The mass­es’ biggest griev­ance against the state is that of poor gov­er­nance which gives rise to trust deficit. Has the for­ma­tion of the mil­i­tary courts helped in bridg­ing this deficit? Will these courts act as deter­rence to the poten­tial ter­ror­ists from under­tak­ing future ter­ror­ist acts? Will these courts be able to stop the fresh recruits from join­ing the ranks of the ter­ror­ist groups? All of these ques­tions may have answers in neg­a­tive. If we look into the rea­sons behind poor gov­er­nance, then the issue of less or more democ­ra­cy must be viewed in a dif­fer­ent man­ner. Democ­ra­cy is sup­posed to be a form of gov­ern­ment where the mass­es are sim­ply not only meant to have a choice in elect­ing their rep­re­sen­ta­tives but be a stake­hold­er in the preva­lent sys­temin that coun­try. So democ­ra­cy is meant to be for ‘the good of the peo­ple’, not for the busi­ness tycoons and peo­ple of vest­ed inter­ests. Have we been able to pro­vide a lev­el play­ing field for mar­gin­al­ized seg­ments of our soci­ety, minori­ties and under priv­i­leged? Has the present demo­c­ra­t­ic dis­pen­sa­tion for the last 7 years been able to pro­vide even sym­bol­ic good gov­er­nance? If none of it is vis­i­ble then the ques­tion needs to be re-framed? Has the Par­lia­ment shown any sagac­i­ty in car­ry­ing out the 21st Amend­ment to the Con­sti­tu­tion which in my opin­ion is not ‘The Solu­tion’ or ‘Amrit Dhara’ for either coun­ter­ing extrem­ism or ter­ror­ism? Indeed theP­ar­lia­ment has proven to be a rub­ber stamp of vest­ed inter­est peo­ple who are only doing the bid­ding. In my opin­ion we move for­ward by improved and bet­ter gov­er­nance and not by a more or less demo­c­ra­t­ic but dys­func­tion­al gov­ern­ment.

Reg­u­la­tion of Madaris
Edu­ca­tion is the prime respon­si­bil­i­ty­of the state. Not only madaris but the entire edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem in the coun­try needs to be reg­u­lat­ed. Var­i­ous streams of edu­ca­tion sys­tems have to be trans­formed into a uni­form edu­ca­tion sys­tem. As a min­i­mum a uni­form cur­ricu­lum upto 8–10 ini­tial years of edu­ca­tion should be imple­ment­ed. Edu­ca­tion must empow­er indi­vid­u­als to at least be self-employed for sus­te­nance of self and the fam­i­ly. Present sys­tem of madaris needs the fol­low­ing:

• Reg­is­tra­tion with dis­trict admin­is­tra­tion (Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment) in a giv­en time frame (could be 3–4 weeks), includ­ing all pri­vate edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions.
• Sub­mis­sion of their finan­cial state­ments (Start­ing 1 Jul 2014) giv­ing com­plete assets, sources of income and expen­di­tures. An amnesty can be announced for those who declare how their assets were made. But for future every pen­ny must be account­ed for.
• Unreg­is­tered insti­tu­tions be closed down after the dead­line. Stu­dents in such madaris be the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the state to sup­port them in reg­is­tered and reput­ed­ly good madaris.
• Present sys­tem of award of degrees on reli­gious edu­ca­tion be stream­lined with uni­ver­si­ty degrees, pos­si­bly through exams con­duct­ed by respec­tive uni­ver­si­ties.
• All direct for­eign fund­ing to madaris or their phil­an­thropic wings be strict­ly banned. Coun­tries like KSA, Gulf and Iran be con­veyed firm­ly through diplo­mat­ic chan­nels to stop it or donate through the Min­istry of Auqaf who should main­tain com­plete trans­paren­cy by mak­ing all accounts pub­lic. Once the madaris start receiv­ing finan­cial sup­port from the gov­ern­ment, reg­u­la­tion will be eas­i­er.

Good and Bad Tal­iban
The phrase is coined by the West and the US. In Pak­istan we have to agree that pol­i­cy of spon­sor­ing non-state armed groups will always be counter-pro­duc­tive. All over the world, states and gov­ern­ments con­tin­ue to use non-state actors as lever­ages to fur­ther their nation­al inter­ests. How­ev­er, no state pro­vides its own land or arms its own peo­ple to launch them in oth­er coun­tries.

All armed groups in Pak­istan must be dis­armed and dis­band­ed. Those who do not agree have to be forced to accept the law of the land. All these mil­i­tant groups must only be addressed as ‘mil­i­tants, ter­ror­ists or dehshat­gard’, nev­er as Tal­iban or Jeha­di groups. They may call them­selves by any name but the state and media must nev­er address them as Tal­iban. A large num­ber of our peo­ple link it with a reli­gious strug­gle; this link­age has to be bro­ken. There is no good or bad ter­ror­ist but one must leave a door open for ref­or­ma­tion and main­stream­ing those foot sol­diers will­ing to give up. The tim­ing is such that one hopes that the old poli­cies will be giv­en up for good.

More­over look at the con­duct of US itself in this region. In 80s they spon­sored and encour­aged armed resis­tance in Afghanistan based on reli­gion (spe­cial­ly facil­i­tat­ing Mus­lims to con­verge here from all over the world) thus lay­ing the foun­da­tions of Islamist mil­i­tan­cy, which got out of con­trol and AlQai­da turned its guns against US and the west. At that time the US Pres­i­dent equat­ed the Jeha­di Afghan lead­ers with their ‘Found­ing Fathers’ and host­ed them in White House. Hav­ing suf­fered at their hands and also being unable to crush Afghan resis­tance for over 13 years, a trans­for­ma­tion is again being wit­nessed. Before pulling out in Decem­ber the White House ini­tial­ly announced that the Tal­iban lead­er­ship will not be sought and tar­get­ed any more. Now on two con­sec­u­tive days the White House spokesper­son kept defend­ing their posi­tion that Afghan Tal­iban are no more to be con­sid­ered as ‘ter­ror­ist group’ rather they are ‘armed insur­gents’. While on the oth­er hand, TTP remains a ‘ter­ror­ist group’. Pak­istan only recent­ly hav­ing with­stood the US pres­sure for 12 years agreed to term the Haqqa­nis as ter­ror­ists and banned them. So the Amer­i­cans have changed their out­look. It man­i­fests the pre­vail­ing inter­na­tion­al norm that what is impor­tant remains your nation­al inter­ests while friends and adver­saries keep chang­ing. We have to sin­cere­ly decide and under­stand that no dis­putes (inter­nal or exter­nal) can ever be per­ma­nent­ly resolved by use of overt or covert force.

Lack of Polit­i­cal Will
Unfor­tu­nate­ly the polit­i­cal cul­ture in the coun­try has not matured enough. Dynas­tic pol­i­tics under­mines the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a true democ­ra­cy. Feu­dal cul­ture and mind­set pre­vail all over and any­one in author­i­ty becomes and behaves like an auto­crat. Ram­pant cor­rup­tion, nepo­tism, self-cen­tered approach to per­pet­u­ate one’s rule lead to com­pro­mis­es. No hard deci­sions can be tak­en in such con­text. The pol­i­cy of appease­men­tand of rid­ing the tide rather than lead­ing the way result in a lack of polit­i­cal will. Such poli­cies and prac­tices need to be changed.

Trans­paren­cy
In exist­ing sys­tem there is only selec­tive trans­paren­cy, while account­abil­i­ty has nev­er been our forte, whether in civ­il or mil­i­tary insti­tu­tions. The gov­ern­ment announced 13 to 15 sub-com­mit­tees to fol­low up on the NAP but who knows what they have done so far. It has been report­ed that the Nation­al Apex Com­mit­tee has met to review NAP, but the peo­ple will nev­er get find­ings of that meet­ing. We are in a state of war but the gov­ern­ment is not work­ing on war foot­ing. An unend­ing mil­i­tary oper­a­tion is con­tin­u­ing for over 6 months and nobody knows the time­line when it will con­clude. No ini­tia­tive has been tak­en yet to dis­man­tle any of the armed mil­i­tant groups in the main­land.
We have to ask for effects, effects, and effects.