Pakistan: Fighting out terrorism

EDITORIAL: THE FRONTIER POST

The two counter-terrorism legislative measures the federal cabinet has approved for parliamentary approval are worth it. Those indeed were long overdue. The measure aiming at stiffening the anti-terrorism law to come heavy on terrorism funding should help snap the financial lifeline that aids terrorists to acquire deadly weapons and munitions, and recruit the brigands and suicide bombers as well as carry out their murderous strikes. The bill that provides for investigations and collection of incriminating evidences by modern techniques and methods and holds emails, SMSs, phone calls and audio-visual recordings as admissible evidence should go a long way to bringing the terrorism suspects to justice, who otherwise had been getting off the hook in the courts. The measure is sure to raise heckles from sections of the rights groups, civil society and commentariat. But if adequately plugged off with tight safeguards against its misuse, the measure will certainly leave the courts with very little reason to release the suspects on the ground of insufficient evidence. But these measures would just scratch the surface. They would, at best, tackle a few symptoms, not root out the scourge goring the nation so horribly. The monstrosity of terrorism afflicting the country is too complex and multifaceted and accordingly needs a comprehensive multidimensional strategy to counter it and throw it out from its roots. Yet, appallingly, the ruling echelons are still to put in place such a strategy. A fairly comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy was hammered out at a top-level inter-provincial conference in Islamabad soon after the new rulers made their debut, which if put under execution would have certainly long ridded us considerably of the monstrosity that is clobbering our nation, our people and our country so devastatingly and fatally. It rested on security actions, political initiatives and development works. But for reasons best know to the ruling echelons, they threw the strategy into the archives to gather dust and came out with no alternative either. Not just that. They just made a hash of the worthwhile idea of creating a national counter-terrorism authority to act as the focal point of the state’s entire effort to combat terrorism and extremism. And consequently what was envisaged to become a nodal agency is lying crippled in some embryonic form in some obscure official corridor despite the passage of nearly four years. Furthermore, the move to modernise the curricula of madrassas to help produce their pupils as fuller human beings imbued richly in spirituality and modernity is now since long a wholly forgotten enterprise. Worse, the provincial administrations appear to have given themselves to the belief that fighting terrorism is exclusively the job of the federal government, particularly its military and intelligence agencies, not theirs at all. None seems to have thought out and carried out any special administrative or security plan, leave alone bigger things, to combat terrorism on their domains whereas maintenance of law and order, fighting urban terrorism and curbing extremism in their territories is primarily their job. There indeed is a queer kind of hiatus to the entire act of the ruling echelons. They are still to imbibe that fighting out terrorism is not the exclusive responsibility of the military or the federal agencies. Wherever it has been overcome successfully, it is by combining the might of the state’s military power and the civil power. But, here, while the military power is out fighting terrorism, the civil power is simply resting along with its security apparatus. Worse, systematically the military and the federal agencies are being run down at various forums, including state forums. In fighting terrorism, they are incurring huge losses in lives and limbs. Yet, quite dangerously, they are being painted as a villain of the piece and being driven to a tight corner. And wittingly or unwittingly, with gaudy shows of ostentatious self-righteousness the terrorists are being encouraged at the cost of demoralisation of the military, paramilitaries and federal agencies. Mere insinuations with no evidence to substantiate are blithely being peddled as facts of the agencies’ collusions with terrorists. And the men in uniforms are being deemed as necessarily liars and their accusers as necessarily truthful. The things are really going very bad. And if they continue like this, the country is sure to hit to rock, sooner than later. Someone has to take control of the things right now to avert this horrific eventuality. A robust counter-terrorism strategy needs to be evolved and put in place at once. The wholesale vilification of the military and federal agencies, too, must come to a halt. There are no angels staffing any of the state institutions. And none should behave as such. Human infirmity is not any particular institution’s monopoly. It spreads across all the state institutions, unexceptionably and measurably.