Pakistan: PMLN's Cabinet: Leadership efforts

TAKE charge. Own the mission. Provide leadership. Six years into a transition to democracy and days into what is perhaps the most significant military operation ever undertaken on domestic soil, the government’s diffident, lackadaisical response is difficult to accept. In terms of an explanation, there is at least one that has often been presented: the government did not want a military operation because it feared the consequences of militant blowback in the PML-N’s heartland of Punjab. Yet, if true, that would hardly amount to a justification for the PML-N slipping into the background and allowing the military to take the lead. To begin with, the PML-N threw its entire weight behind dialogue with the outlawed TTP and those talks did not fail for lack of an effort on the government’s part. What, then, was the alternative? The PML-N itself had always maintained that talks were the preferred, but not the only, option.

Even now, with the prime minister making belated attempts to provide leadership, such as by way of the boilerplate press release issued by the Prime Minister’s Office on Tuesday, the fundamental problem remains unaddressed: the PML-N government is behind the curve, being shaped by events rather than shaping them. Part of the problem appears to be the way Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has structured his cabinet and those he has picked to occupy key positions. Take the absence from the scene of Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan, previously indefatigable and keen to court the media spotlight. Is the interior minister unwell? Is he sulking? If so, why? Just when it needs a full-time interior minister to urgently marshal the civilian law-enforcement and intelligence resources in the cities to prepare for militant blowback, the country seems to have an interior ministry running on auto-pilot.

Have a look at other key ministries. The law ministry is officially being run by the information minister, who seems uninterested in doing much beyond responding to taunts by Imran Khan. Perhaps the PML-N would argue that its first choice for the law ministry, Zahid Hamid, was forced to step aside because of a Musharraf-related controversy and he is doing his best to unofficially steer the affairs of the law ministry from his official science and technology perch. But is that really good enough? That it is either Mr Hamid and a barely-there Pervaiz Rashid or no one else? Defence Minister Khawaja Asif is among the walking wounded, having been personally targeted by the very forces he is supposed to be in charge of. The foreign ministry has two heads and no minister — and now even reaching out to Afghan President Hamid Karzai is done through a special interlocutor. Is it really possible to provide leadership if the cabinet itself is not complete and some of its members are unwilling or unable to deliver?