Pakistan - Why Chaudhry Nisar gets an ‘F’ for his performance as interior minister

By Irfan Husain

WHEN you have very low expectations of somebody, you are unlikely to be surprised or disappointed when the person fails to deliver.

But even with this minimal bar, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, our ex-interior minister, is in a class of his own. For years, instead of a sound counterterrorism strategy, we have had countless press conferences justifying his string of failures. Clearly, this is a man who likes the sound of his own voice.

In a recent interview, he uttered this gem: “Politics, especially governance, is both an art and a science.” Sadly, he could master neither, with his recent stint in government serving as a lesson in what not to do when in power.

When he went on to say that “he had always tried to manage things”, we can only give him an ‘E’ for effort. For the rest, he gets an ‘F’ for failure. As jihadists slaughtered hundreds on his watch, he had to be dragged to sign off on the National Action Plan. Before the bloody attack on a school in Peshawar in December 2014 that killed over 130 children, he was the keenest proponent of talks with the militants, together with Imran Khan.

But even when a sensible plan had been hammered out, our hero dragged his feet over its implementation. Out of the scores of committees and sub-committees set up to monitor progress and implementation, one wonders how many actually met.

We can only give him an ‘E’ for effort.

Thus, of all the lofty goals of reviewing curricula to eliminate extremist content; controlling the thousands of madressahs that have proliferated across Pakistan; preventing hate speech from being broadcast from mosques and TV studios; boosting intelligence-sharing between agencies and provinces; and improving the legal system, none have been met.

Whenever he was asked about NAP’s progress, Nisar would shrug his narrow shoulders, and pass the buck on to the provincial governments; he was probably not pressed too hard by his cabinet colleagues. If ever there was a candidate for dismissal, resignation, or, indeed, hara kiri, it was our ex interior minister.

I have never met him, but his lack of contact with reality was revealed when, in response to our new foreign minister’s sound advice that we needed to put our own house in order, Nisar replied: “With friends like him, who needs enemies?” So clearly, he remains convinced that he did a great job, and our ambivalent attitude towards jihadists and, more generally, towards extremism, is sound. Dream on, Chaudhry Sahib.

And remember the Axact scandal? When the New York Times broke the story of this Pakistani company that was in the business of selling fake degrees worldwide in 2015, Nisar was furious. The Federal Investigation Agency was sent to raid Axact’s Karachi headquarters. The owner, Shoaib Ahmed Sheikh, was arrested. The TV licence the firm had acquired for BOL was revoked, and we all thought that was the end of the road for this alleged conman.

But lo and behold! the channel resumed its controversial operations as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile, a senior Axact executive, Umair Hamid, has been convicted and jailed on money-laundering charges in the United States. Apparently, our courts act on a different concept of right and wrong than their counterparts elsewhere.

This is true across the board, especially when it comes to terrorism. In the UK, 379 people have been arrested on suspicion of being involved in terror plots of one kind or another over the past year, a rise of 68 per cent. No doubt many of them will be released for want of evidence, but the scale of the arrests gives an idea of how seriously the threat is taken in Britain. This is equally true for most other countries where laws have been stiffened, sentences lengthened, and security services beefed up.

In Pakistan, however, it’s business as usual, with alleged killers being released on bail, or being let off on some technicality. Take the shocking release of five suspected terrorists involved in Benazir Bhutto’s murder. The fact that they had confessed did not influence the anti-terrorism court judge; a technicality weighed more heavily in their favour. This judgement made headlines around the world, and sent a clear signal to terrorists that they were free to carry on with their murderous activities.

This was the kind of ‘justice’ a part of NAP was directed at. But to the best of my knowledge, Nisar did not recommend any new laws to fix the gaping holes in our law-enforcement system. I suppose he was too busy making unending speeches.

His exit from the interior ministry raises the hope that finally, we will see a serious attempt to tackle the terrorist threat. But this being Pakistan, and with a neo-fundo party in power, I won’t bet on it.