Why NAP can only fail

Let me lay it out right in the beginning: this nation is not made for implementation of something as complex as the National Action Plan. Something that envisages the administrative, law-enforcement, military and political setups at all levels of functioning to integrate in fighting terrorism is simply impossible when even getting them to sit together is a function enforced only through the good offices of the country’s army chief.
What the prime minister says as the chair in such meetings is more or less what the army chief is likely to have proposed to him a day earlier in an exclusive one-on-one. Such is the buy-in of the politicos and their administrative machinery.
This now is the established modus vivendi. A sad parody of these one-on-ones making rounds on the social media claim the PM offering the army chief his resignation for not being let to function his way; the chief suggests there will no more be any political martyrs and the PM rather get his act together and get on. The next two-and-a-half years could be painful, not for the chief as Ayaz Amir suggests, but for the politicos. These will be a rather long two-and-a-half years; of that there is little doubt. The die then is cast.
A breakaway point comes in November 2016 when the incumbent is meant to retire and another army chief gets inducted. As far as I can tell this entire political class awaits the moment with barely repressed glee. Shun the thought of any consideration for the chief being the most successful in recent history or in his commitment to go get the army and the country to give up on its laissez faire and find direction on some existential issues. The political chiefs of this nation have their own North Star, different from the rest, that beckons them to keep both hands roiling in the till for the duration of their charge. I don’t know who suggested including corruption as an action-point in the NAP, but whoever it was, was surely naive to the point of irrationality. Sadly, some in the military and its retired regiments took it to heart.
9/11 may be a day to remember for other reasons but it also is the date when the time for the Quaid was called. The state was still lurching without stability. In fact it was in a state of war in Kashmir that the Quaid had himself ordered. The story goes that had he lived longer we just may have been a different people. In the event, he did not and we lost the chance to be different than what we are. Nehru, his counterpart in India, lived on and led India for 17 years after gaining independence from the British and firmly rooted the direction that India has taken as a polity and society. Changes occur but those always will as nations continue to grow and evolve and the global environment mutates.
It is true that the Quaid for a long time did not see the breaking up of India as an inevitability; he only wanted a share of the piece in the centre in Delhi after the British left. The Hindus in Congress did not oblige and the English at last were happy to let a piece be carved as a separate state. The elites accompanying the Quaid, mostly from the Muslim-minority provinces in India, were the true drivers of the political struggle for a separate homeland – otherwise they would have been subsumed into the dominating Hindu polity. By creating Pakistan they carved for themselves a position of unquestioned authority and note. When Pakistan became inevitable, those who were willy-nilly going to become a part wanted in. These mostly belonged to the established political families of Bengal and Punjab. It is sad that the politics of Pakistan has never really ventured away from these families.
This sense of entitlement to positions of power and its subsequent delinquency over time in partaking of the state riches has tied the two into a perennial pattern in Pakistan’s political system. Political power was never a public service here; far from it. It was always, and only, the means to fill your personal coffers. In this country when an arbiter wishes to cleanse the stables, he delves in the vestiges of this great power-pelf combine that has always had an unchallenged run at the helm. Their ire at the extended domain of the Rangers in Karachi is thus natural. The pervasive monopoly of the elites over the political system has held at bay any intervention meant to seek greater fidelity. The dictators in their turn have had to ingratiate the same power elites to run their governments. The creaming thus has gone on unabated for the elites, regardless who held the helm.
The National Action Plan, lacking a central hand with only a perfunctory buy-in, has thus meant different things to different people. In Sindh, it found the ire of the political government when the over-exuberant Rangers began tracing terror to crime to money to corruption. That has invariably meant stepping on some sensitive toes. To them the Karachi Operation is intended to kill and eliminate, not delve deep since that brings power elites of Sindh right in the middle of the frame. What was kosher when the MQM alone was in the crosshairs for its terror-crime mix is now heresy when the crime-money-corruption nexus has also emerged as a reason for Karachi being mauled over the years to the point of dysfunction.
The provincial government, under pressure from its sponsors, thus sits alienated along with its entire administrative spectrum even as the Rangers, and implicitly the military, seem to be the lone rangers out on a noble mission. Even if the Rangers were to finally declare success one day, unless the politicos and their administrative setup own up to their responsibility to keep it that way and give eminence to rule of law – and change their way and purpose of politics – it will be a swift ride down to the dumps with manipulation and exploitation resurfacing in all its might.
In a nation whose people want to fail the state there is little that the state can do to resurrect its existential authority.
When in the meeting last week the prime minister assembled all under the tutelage of the army chief to incorporate the clergy and mend the madressah, what did they walk out with? Not an assurance to register and disclose the funding and make audit a regular part of their business, and stop the production of the terror fodder, but an added carrot instead to write down the magic narrative for this nation that will defeat the religious extremism on the ideological plane. How naive can we get? Do we not understand that as focus arrives on Punjab and its various mutations of extremist strongholds, this government has provided a convenient escape to the religious elites incorporating them as bona fide stakeholders on the side of the state; while adding to their relevance and preserving their fiefs.
With the elections on, you can hardly expect a political group to act differently. Those that are a problem will now bring you the solution. Wait with abated breaths. This is classic politics, the Pakistani way.
Except Balochistan where both the military and the politics have found common cause, elsewhere there are but only inane mumblings by distant political setups treating Operation Zarb-e-Azb as an alien undertaking.
Stop the baloney; for God’s sake. The NAP review was led by a diabolic political mindset. I don’t know what will change these political behaviours, but surely one tenure of Raheel Sharif or one Zarb-e-Azb will not. This nation must change for its leader to change; and till the leaders change our fortunes will not.
The writer is a retired air-vice marshal, former ambassador and a security and political analyst. Email: shhzdchdhry@yahoo.com