Pakistan: For better or worse, cluelessness as leadership

By Ayaz Amir

We all know this government has no policy on terrorism - unless dithering passes for policy. Yet in the name of combating terrorism it has managed the impossible: a near-revolt in the Police Service of Pakistan (PSP) Punjab. PSP officers haven’t come out on the Mall holding placards. But their mental state is little short of rebellious.

The cause of grievance: a half-baked move on the part of the prime minister’s secretariat to set up a new-fangled counterterrorism division, banking heavily upon the induction of army personnel and bypassing the regular police force.

I went and saw things for myself, over a hundred police officers (the PSP being the officer cadre of the police) gathered in the Central Police Office where the inspector general (IG) sits, minus the IG of course against whom there is a good deal of ill-feeling for having let the force down by not standing up to the government’s ill-conceived move (ill-conceived as they see it). I thought they would be guarded in their comments but there was no reticence at all, the mood very defiant.

PSP discontent is not the same as army discontent. It does not mean the march of the Triple One Brigade on Islamabad. But it’s serious nonetheless. As if we didn’t have enough problems already…and this at a time when the country is virtually in a state of war, or should be, against the forces of zealotry as exemplified by the Taliban.

But this is a self-created problem and a wholly gratuitous one. And I can bet anything that it comes from the District Management Group (DMG) whizz-kids in the PM’s Sectt. There are some DMG samurai there perfectly capable of such harebrained ideas. To be sure, the principal secretary, Javed Aslam, again from the DMG (there being no escaping this nuisance) is a sensible guy. How did he allow such a proposal to get through?

Nothing will come of it, I am reasonably certain. The Sharifs keep getting such brainwaves, mostly tutored by their DMG advisers on whom they seem to excessively rely (there is a treatise on psychology here waiting to be written). It’s like that great brainwave about digging a tunnel through the Margalla Hills and creating another Islamabad on the other side of the mountains, the idea riding the prime minister’s imagination soon after coming to power. Terrorism, the Taliban, energy crisis, state of the economy…all these paled before the vision of that feat of engineering. Where is it now? In that great dustbin reserved for bizarre ideas. Judging by that yardstick, the fate of this police scheme is likely to be no different. But needless damage has been done. And the IG has been made to look like a pliant instrument in the government’s hands. Doomed command. Will his officers look up to him anymore? None of this is earth-shaking stuff but it does reflect a bigger problem: a lack of capacity at all levels of government. Institutional reform we find difficult. So we go for shortcuts. Some bright DMG officer close to the PM or the chief minister Punjab prepares a working paper. There is little political input because no one has time for that and with this government there is little political input to begin with. Only this time a wishy-washy idea has struck the hard rock of PSP resistance and the government doesn’t know what to do.

The Sharifs have a presentation problem, and something to do with the English language as well. A good presentation is eye-catching and DMG boys are good at this. I have seen it myself…the promotion and adoption of a measure no matter how fanciful and unrealistic, provided the presentation is skilful. And DMG unity is exemplary, officers protecting each other’s flanks and covering for each other.

All the dumb ideas mooted in Punjab in the last five years – sasti roti, sasta tandoors, daanish schools, aashiyana housing schemes, etc – schemes barely mentioned nowadays, came about in this manner, the intellectual seeds scattered by the mostly young officers around the CM. The Punjab governance got away with all this because on the other side we had the disaster which was the PPP. Anything looked good, even heroic, in comparison. Another thing to note: between the DMG and PSP exists a rivalry for one-upmanship and supremacy more bitter than Indo-Pak rivalry. The DMG is no good looking after its own work – revenue, for instance, and other departments which come under its purview – but as a tradition it is eloquent at pinpointing the failings of the police. I am no admirer of the PSP. No man in his right mind can be an admirer of any government department (save perhaps the Post Office which used to work so well but we’ve managed to destroy it, even as we managed to destroy our railways). The last district police officer in Chakwal was a talkative clown, given to the kind of bootlicking of dumb politicos that an average thanedar would have found beneath his dignity. But then I have seen district coordination officers (usually from the DMG) keeping goats and buffaloes in their official houses and having men from the agriculture department looking after them. From personal knowledge I can say that DMG officers are not above getting cuts and commissions, ingeniously to be sure, from the line departments, like road-building, etc. Call this the steel-frame of any empire? Whatever name we give to this state of affairs it doesn’t entitle any DMG officer to cast stones at the police department. In their respective spheres both luminous services are about equally corrupt and incompetent (which doesn’t make the journalist or the politician any better but that’s another tale to tell).

As pointed out by Ejaz Haider on this page, the Punjab police is a large force, at over 170,000 in its ranks equal to about three corps of the Pakistan army (the strength of the British army today is 80-90,000). You can’t keep interfering in the working of this force and then expect it to perform like a well-oiled organism. What if regimental and brigade commanders in the army were appointed on the advice of politicians. Would anything be left of the army? Similarly, if an IG is not master of the force he commands and the CM’s secretariat keeps interfering in its working all the time how does anyone expect him to deliver? These are the things that need looking into.

It would also help if half the Lahore police were not employed guarding so-called VIPs. If there was one residence to guard that would be different. But when there is an extended family and hangers-on and different wives and so on, and a string of establishments to protect, people start talking and that’s not good for any organisation, least of all a supposedly disciplined one, especially when ordinary cops and thanedars and even police officers die in the line of duty, victims of terrorism, and the priorities at the top are different instead of making the fight against terrorism the number one priority.

Tailpiece: After only six months not even the government’s wildest detractors would have brought up the subject of mid-term elections. It just wouldn’t sound right. Trust Ch Nisar, this government’s gift to brevity, to mention the unthinkable and make it a familiar topic of public conversation. But the opposition walking out of the National Assembly when Nisar uses the word ‘tamasha’ to describe their performance…since when was this a word of abuse? Walkouts should be for exceptional things, not variations of language. The art of the riposte, the telling counter-attack, when will our heroes learn that?

Tailpiece Two: Considering the frequency with which the new army chief is calling on the PM, and the PM looking so pleased when he meets him, the army chief may consider having a permanent office for himself in the PM House.