For control or vanity?

Legal eye
The writer is a lawyer based in Islamabad.
The Inter Services Public Relations issued a press release after the November 10 corps commanders conference, quoting the army chief as having “underlined the need for matching/complementary governance initiatives for long-term gains of operations and enduring peace across the country.” It further stated that, “progress of National Action Plan’s implementation, finalisation of Fata reforms, and concluding all ongoing JITs at priority were highlighted as issues which could undermine the effect of operations.”
The content and purpose of the press release is unambiguous. We are being told that the military is doing a great job to fight terror and extremism, and that it is doing so with the nation’s full support. But then it goes further to bifurcate the credit and discredit for successes and deficiencies of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, attributes the credit to the military and lays the blame at the civilian government’s doorstep. The bottom line is clear: if Operation Zarb-e-Azb flounders, it will be due to our incompetent civilian regime.
Press releases are meant for public consumption. They are not instruments for internal correspondence between different arms of the executive. The Foreign Office proposes foreign policy measures to an incumbent political government, which are accepted or rejected. Can the Foreign Office issue press releases stating that effective foreign policy will remain a pipedream unless X, Y and Z is done? The question is whether public critique an elected government’s performance by its subsidiary arm a legitimate instrument of accountability in a democracy?
It was widely reported that Pakistan’s civil-military leadership congregated at the PM house on Monday, discussed NAP progress threadbare and noted that more needed to be done. Why then did the corps commanders and the army chief feel the need to educate the public that the ‘more’ part of NAP review relates to the civvies? The ISPR has done a swell job in perpetuating the GHQ’s narrative on terror, its causes and solutions as the dominant one in Pakistan. But are ISPR releases, as a policy measure, the right instrument to regulate civil-military relations?
Who can contest the argument that our structures of governance are sickly, our institutions moth-eaten and the state is not holding up its end in the contract with citizens. And that fixing the processes, ethos and institutions that build a functional governance system doesn’t seem to be the government’s priority. There is also nothing to gainsay that with Pakistan being a ‘weak state’ (in the political science context), an organised and disciplined military is a major source of strategic and physical strength and security.
Weak states struggle to enforce their writ and assume control of the overall national direction. In external relations, they find it hard to cope with sudden geo-strategic shocks. The Pakistan military’s development, discipline and functionality surpass that of civilian institutions. Notwithstanding whether this is due to disproportionate allocation of resources, our history of prolonged khaki rule or simply better organisation, accountability and work ethic, the military can be the stabiliser in situations where Pakistan might otherwise falter being a weak state.
Our military has the ability to enforce the state’s writ when it wishes to as has been evident during Operation Zarb-e-Azb. Being the most powerful state institution, it has the wherewithal to use its leverage with political parties and the media and its monopoly over the concepts of ‘national security’ and ‘patriotism’ to forge a national consensus around the direction it identifies for the polity. The merit of khaki vision for the nation’s future or its preferred solutions to problems we face aside, its ability and discipline to implement them is indisputable.
Thus when it comes to terror and extremism, allocation of credit and blame between civil and military institutions isn’t straightforward. If we do get into the unnecessary blame game, the issue of whether the causes of the mess we are in and the solutions proposed to clean it up are extensions of the military’s vision for our polity or that of the civilians need scrutiny. And further, in view of our civil-military imbalance, we must determine whether an issue area falls within the khaki power domain or that of civvies.
Since the military decided to launch Operation Zarb-e-Azb, expanded in through NAP in the aftermath of Peshawar, communicated to the ruling politicos that it won’t view foot-dragging on the issue kindly and forced the 21st Amendment and military courts through, there has been agreement that all credit and discredit for NAP belongs to khakis. The problems afflicting its implementation now aren’t just consequences of weak execution of agreed tasks by civilians, but mainly products of the policy confusion and contradictions in the military’s vision for the state.
The civvies are not in charge of our external or internal security policy. It is the military that has overarching control over these policies, and parts of our foreign and economic policies that intertwine with security policy. It is the military that has monopoly over intelligence gathering, what to do with it, who to share it with and how much. As a country we no longer pretend that the military doesn’t enjoy a veto when it comes to Afghanistan or India or even the US and the Middle East in relation to security matters.
Our policy towards Afghan Taliban and whether we are going to try and lead them to the negotiation table, proscribe them as an extremist group practising terror in our neighbourhood and fight them or support them surreptitiously viewing them as a lever of power in the regional security game is the military’s call and not that of civilians. Can we have one policy towards the TTP and another towards the Afghan Taliban, when both employ the same ideology and terror methods, and claim that we now have an unequivocal policy toward extremism?
Our policy towards India and whether we are to keep open the option of using India-focused non-state jihadi actors to ferment trouble within our neighbour’s territory should the need arise (or should India be found using similar actors in Balochistan or Fata), is also the military’s call. Our policy towards non-state actors and what means to use in pursuing national security goals is then linked to the existence and treatment of proscribed organisation and madressahs. Can the civvies freeze the assets of JuD – a proscribed organisation – without military’s instruction?
The other contradiction hovering around NAP relates to the means chosen for its implementation. Detractors of military courts weren’t arguing that our criminal justice system is perfect. They were stating that military courts and summary trials of terror suspects are no panacea to the larger problem of our broken justice system. That to fix it, we need to fix all its components – investigation, prosecution, trial courts and prison – instead of presenting military courts as an alternative, which would weaken and delegitimise the existing system without addressing the problem.
We now hear from the ISPR that JITs aren’t working as they should. Well, they were never going to work. For to make them work we would need to focus on building civilian law-enforcement agencies for proper forensic and intelligence-based investigations, develop prosecutorial teams, protect witnesses and courts and streamline laws of procedure and evidence. What we opted for instead of painstaking but essential institutional reforms was Band-Aid. Was NAP ever focused on developing civilian institutions to provide ‘complementary’ support?
When the khakis conceived and put together NAP, what civvies essentially did was step aside. They didn’t bicker about civilian control of military, about judicial independence, about due process concerns under military courts or abhorrent constitutional changes, or about political expediency in Karachi etc.
NAP is a khaki game plan. Its success wasn’t meant to be contingent on the execution ability of rusty civilian structures. Isn’t it late in the day and too disingenuous to ask civvies to shoulder blame in case NAP doesn’t work as designed?
Email: sattar@post.harvard.edu