The Quetta report

Last December, a one-man Supreme Court commission inquiring into the twin attacks on a lawyer and hospital in Quetta in August 2016 released a scathing report about the incompetence and lethargy of the government in fighting the war against militancy. The government immediately disputed the report, particularly Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan who had been singled out for meeting with Maulana Mohammed Ahmed Ludhianvi who heads three banned militant organisations. A three-member Supreme Court bench looking into the findings of the report has heard the defence provided by the interior minister’s lawyer. It is the job of the Supreme Court to carefully examine the commission’s findings before ruling on them and, as the bench has observed, it is not the job of the judges to set policy. But the work the commission did was comprehensive and the controversy over one aspect of the report should not distract from its many worrying findings. The report gave a detailed criticism of how the police botched their response and investigation into the attacks and how the hospitals in Quetta were not ready to deal with an attack of this magnitude.

On a broader level, the commission report confirmed that the National Action Plan is far from being implemented. The report has a lot to say about banned groups beyond just one meeting with a known militant leader. It points out, for example, that militant groups are often not banned and even when they are banned they continue to operate freely. And the interior ministry is not the only ministry taken to task, with the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Inter-Faith Harmony called out for not regulating madressahs and taking action against the message of hate spewed by so many. The Quetta report covered everything from lack of intelligence-sharing between agencies to the fact that the National Counter Terrorism Authority, meant to be the clearinghouse of all efforts in combating militancy, barely ever meets. The government may feel that the language in the commission report was too pointed and that it went too far in calling for resignations and dismissals and the Supreme Court bench may agree with that. The larger picture, however, should not be obscured. The government’s response, not just to the attacks in Quetta but the militant menace as a whole, has been far from satisfactory.