Anti-terror policy

Part - I
Legal eye
The writer is a lawyer based in Islamabad.
Should we talk to terrorists or fight them? Should we oppose drones or support their selective use? It is time to move beyond these misconceived either/or narratives that confuse tactics with policy. Instead let's debate the principles that should guide a comprehensive anti-terror plan. We need to locate our anti-terror policy in a larger vision for the country's future and its place within the comity of nations. We need to agree on the principles that ought to guide our defence, national security and foreign policies, which in turn would provide a solid foundation to construct an anti-terror policy that is not marred by contradictions or hypocrisy.
We need to put in place institutional structures that can formulate prudent national security and anti-terror policies and we need to rebuild state capacity to implement such policies. Once we agree on the vision, the principles directing the policy and the required institutional structures, we can craft strategies best suited to pursue and implement the policy. In this scheme, whether or not we talk to terrorists falls within the domain of strategy and tactics. If talking to terrorists is the most effective means to pursue our anti-terror policy, let's talk. But if talking undermines the principles guiding the policy, let's not.
Let's start with the vision. Every choice Pakistan makes must be that of a nation state whose raison d'être is to promote the prosperity of its own citizens as opposed to that of the wider ummah. The state should be pro status quo in the medium term ie it neither seeks to directly take on world bullies to create a just international order as perceived by collective Muslim consciousness, nor surreptitiously tries to export religious ideology or violence to other states through non-state actors. If we believe we have tremendous untapped potential as a nation and state, let us nurture and exploit such potential before getting more ambitious about our international role.
The state ought to be secular in two senses: one, it must define success in worldly terms ie the strength of its economy and the prosperity and happiness of citizens in this life and not in some abstract moral sense; and two, it must neither prefer nor seek to enforce any interpretation of religion on a deeply religious society that lives within it. A secular state is not one that denies the existence of God or prefers no religion to religion. It can facilitate religion and enable citizens to order their lives in accordance with their religious views. It is simply required not to interfere with the belief system of citizens or exhibit preference for one belief system over another.
Let Pakistan come to be recognised and celebrated for the traits that expatriate Pakistanis are recognised and celebrated for: their industriousness, common sense and dogged perseverance. As a state let us stop negotiating with a world while holding a gun to our heads. Let us stop telling ourselves that we are too big too fail or that it is in the interest of the world to come to the aid of a nuclear-armed poverty-ridden country of 180 million threatened by religious extremists from within. Let us be of interest to the world due to our positives and not our negatives. Let's be the country whose passport is a source of convenience and not discomfort.
In the region let us be the country that seeks to get along with its neighbours. This doesn't mean giving up our stance on Kashmir or distribution of water in dealing with India or accepting the Afghan position on the Durand Line. It means that we act as the pragmatist that vociferously pursues its interests, but while playing by the rules framed by the international legal order that defines and sustains the nation-state system. If we feel that India has become much stronger or that armed conflict is not an option to resolve disputes, we must develop other levers of power. But use of non-state actors terrorising civilians in India can't be one of them.
If we believe that the worldview and ideology of the TTP is destructive and backward and can have no place in defining Pakistan's future, we must not support the same worldview and ideology across the border by contriving false distinctions between the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban. If we share a long porous border with Afghanistan, we certainly have an interest in ensuring that we have friendly terms with the regime in Afghanistan and enough leverage with such regime to protect our interests. But why must pursuit of such interest translate into a wish to install desirable regimes in Kabul?
Let us be a country that pursues a foreign policy grounded in principles. Let it possess a minimum moral content. If we are loath to US playing Big Brother why must we imitate such behaviour in dealing with Afghanistan? Why don't we practise what we preach to the Americans? Why can we not invest in building a working relationship with all political and ethnic groups across Afghanistan to guard against the danger of a hostile regime on the western front? And in that sense why can we not be to Afghanistan what Turkey is to us?
Forget for a moment the Afghan paranoia that blames the ISI for everything that goes on in Afghanistan (we see CIA's hand in everything that happens here). How has our Afghan policy promoted the interests of the Pakistani state and its citizens? Forget strategic depth, our Afghan policy has lost us control of Fata as well. We have a refugee problem, gun and drug trafficking, a well-entrenched terror infrastructure and an increasingly radicalised society. Must we continue pursuing a blundering policy toward Afghanistan that has made state defences more vulnerable while inflicting immeasurable cost on the society?
Let us become a country where national interest is defined as the interest of the maximum number of its citizens (of course while strictly abiding by fundamental rights guaranteed by the constitution to the individual citizen). Let us be the country where pursuit of national security means maximising the physical, financial, social and food security of its citizens. Such conception of national interest and national security would require that our existing defence and foreign policies be subjected to a cost-benefit analysis and reordered. We must abandon amorphous notions of state interest and replace them with tangible interests of the society.
And in terms of balancing the collective preferences of the society versus the rights of the individual, let Pakistan be a country that errs on the side of the individual. In the context of terrorism this must mean two things. One, the state must protect the right of the individual to abide by his belief-system and practise his faith without the fear of being persecuted. And this will require zero-tolerance also for groups that don't perpetrate terror themselves but incite hatred in the name of religion, preach bigotry while calling it education and transform impressionable youth into raw material for terror factories.
And two, the state must abide by rule of law and uphold fundamental rights even in dealing with hardened terrorists who exhibit no regard for the rights of others. The distinction between the use of force by the state and the use of force by terrorists lies in the fact that the state's authority springs from the law, and whatever moral authority the law possesses in turn springs from its claim to producing justice. Thus no matter how vicious or savage the terrorists it is fighting, the state cannot come down to the level of the terrorist or employ his tactics.
It is from a larger vision of the character of the state and where we wish to take it that the principles and strategies comprising our anti-terror policy will emerge.
(To be concluded)
Email: sattar@post.harvard.edu; Twitter: @babar_sattar