The funding trail

It seems fairly obvious. The best way to stop terrorism or other illegal activity would be to cut off the line of funding that sustains it. But as a three-member bench of the Supreme Court first pointed out in June – while hearing a case of fraud involving NGOs set up in KP – this has not happened. The SC, after observing at the hearing early this month that the federal and provincial governments appear to be totally indifferent to the task of dealing with terrorism as laid out under the December 2014 National Action Plan, and had done very little to look into the matter of how and from what sources terrorist outfits were funded, demanded a full report into NGO accounts as quickly as possible. In response to this the State Bank of Pakistan has now asked all the hundreds of NGOs working across the country to give in details of their accounts. As the SC had observed, it was also shocking that the governments appear to know so little about how these NGOs run even though they are all registered under four distinct pieces of legislation. The court has also asked the federal government to explain why anti-terrorism bodies remain so poorly funded and are not able to function as per the vision laid down under NAP.
We must hope the SC succeeds in gathering information that is badly required. We must know from what nations funding for various NGOs comes in and how it is used. Of course it should apply to NGOs financed by western powers, but given our present problem it is perhaps most urgent that we work out where organisations that directly or indirectly support extremism receive their funding from. This has been suggested in the past; but nothing has been done about it. Funding is of course the key to the operation of any organisation. If we can discover where the money used by specific NGOs comes in we may be able to do more to prevent unwanted activities. This is relevant in a number of areas, but is perhaps most important, as the SC indicated, as far as terrorism goes. We know that bodies that support terrorist activities receive money from sources that lie outside our own borders. We must understand what these sources are so that we can then work with other governments if necessary to try and stem them and by doing so prevent terrorism growing in our country.