The Rs230 billion question

Capital suggestion
Major-General Bilal Akbar, DG Pakistan Rangers (Sindh), for the first time in Karachi’s chequered history, has managed to quantify the collective financial magnitude of Karachi’s criminal empires. Lo and behold, each and every resident of Karachi is being made to cough out Rs11,500 a year every year for a total of Rs230 billion a year every year.
Major-General Bilal Akbar, during his 28 years of military service, seems to have acquired the top traits of generalship but the mathematician in him came out on June 11. Mathematicians, I have been told, “seek out patterns … and then use these patterns to formulate new conjectures.” Mathematicians, I have been told, “resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proof.”
Karachi produces 20 percent of Pakistan’s GDP and one Pakistani out of every ten lives in Karachi. Karachi has 30 percent of our industrial capacity and Karachi is where the FBR collects 53 percent of its revenues. Resultantly, Karachi’s economy is valued at some Rs6 trillion and the conjectured Rs230 billion criminal empire is a mere 4 percent of Karachi’s GDP. Meaning: Major-General Bilal Akbar is in the ballpark.
Even more importantly, why has Major-General Bilal Akbar been forced to use the media as his mode of communication with Sindh’s political government? Answer: All other private modes of communication must have broken down (between the GHQ and the PPP). On May 16, Lt-Gen Naveed Mukhtar dropped the first hint that the military may also be interested in the financial affairs of the Sindh government – that’s expanding into the domain of economic terrorism.
As far as the game theory is concerned, PM Nawaz Sharif, Co-Chairman Asif Zardari and Quaid-e-Tehreek Altaf Hussain are all status quo players (read: they are all content with the existing state of affairs). Lo and behold, the GHQ, in its new incarnation, happens to be anti status quo.
Here’s how the GHQ decides. The Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) has seven components: “receipt of mission; mission analysis; course-of-action development; course-of-action analysis; course-of-action comparison; course-of-action approval; orders production (M.A.D.A.C.A.P).”
Then there is The Military Appreciation Process (MAP) in which “objectives are predefined; much of the plan is provided by a superior HQ in the form of specified tasks and control measures; there is a period of inactivity followed by a defined period of activity and the flow of intelligence is top-down.”
I am assuming that Major-General Bilal Akbar has been given predefined objectives (separation of politics from crime, for instance). I am certain that Major-General Bilal Akbar has gone through M.A.D.A.C.A.P. and MAP.
For the record, all status-quo players with vested interests – including a set of politicians – are offering active resistance to Major-General Bilal Akbar’s course of action.
Co-Chairman Asif Zardari’s resistance is out in the open; PM Nawaz Sharif’s is not. If the GHQ’s resolve “to bring the Karachi Operation to its logical conclusion” is steadfast then PM Nawaz Sharif is up against a “situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two alternatives”, PPP or GHQ, whereby both alternatives are almost equally undesirable. That’s the Rs230 billion question.
The third choice for the prime minister is DD, delay-and-derail.
“It’s choice – not chance – that determines your destiny”– Jean Nidetch
The writer is a columnist based in Islamabad.
Email: farrukh15@hotmail.com. Twitter: @saleemfarrukh