The No-Action Plan

The writer is former executive editor of The News and a senior journalist with Geo TV.

Our record of making complex issues out of relatively simple ones is unbeatable. As if cursed by Daedalus, the mythical inventor of labyrinth, we are forever pushing ourselves in landmines of challenges, never taking roads that promise easy exits.

Nowhere is this tendency more pronounced than in how governments have wielded power in this misruled land of ours. Planners expend energies in going over known facts; policymakers dig deep for what is already on the surface; experts waste precious mental and physical resources on discovering the already discovered. Disinterested in pre-emption, slow in preparation, and high on flamboyance after the event – this is how governments have always functioned here. This is how the system is functioning even now.

If these tendencies among policymakers weren’t so prominent and pervasive there would not have been any need for the National Action Plan, and all its dispiriting controversies. Read all of the twenty odd points of NAP again and you are bound to ask: Is there anything that state machinery and a government in its right mind would not do in the normal course of discharging its duties?

From bringing peace to Karachi to de-weaponisation to registration of religious schools to terror financing to everything that this document promises to do, you will not find a single item so complex that a supra-democratic governance order – of apex committees – had to be devised for tackling it. Hanging criminals and speedily prosecuting the accused isn’t something that would necessitate amending the constitution.

But there it is: We have a National Action Plan that overrides all legal arrangements even though much simpler decisions at the right time could have gotten us equally good results at a fraction of the cost. But we don’t like to do things in a simple way. We like to reinvent the wheel.

Karachi’s mafias were known to everyone. Plunderers of national resources, land grabbers, and terror financiers were obvious characters that lived and flourished in our midst. Altaf Hussain’s speeches were a cause of concern for ages. The MQM’s hold on the media was a household story. Everyone knew what was happening with the militant wings. They all had the power to make sure it did not happen. Yet they all waited for hell to break loose, unhinging national life for years, before they could wake up and think of national interest being in jeopardy.

Now that we have NAP (conceived and ‘planned’ – in seven days, not more – all in bullet-form pointers without any research and documentation), even this is becoming a headache to enforce. Even though everyone, we are told, is on the same page (meaning they are not pulling each other down and for a change are doing their own work) we seem to still be stuck on issues that should be easy to resolve.

As anti-terror operations move towards urban areas of other provinces, the establishment and the federal government have just been jolted into realising that here they would need the help of other institutions – provincial administrations, coordination bodies, and of course the police.

These three elements, however, were least emphasised when NAP started making strides. Provincial coordination was the only subject that was mentioned in official statements but even that was more with reference to Sindh than other units of the federation. Police reform and revitalisation – the most critical element in any law-enforcement plan – was not even mentioned in NAP. This premier institution, with its 15 bodies and human resource strength of half a million, has normal operational jurisdiction in every nook and corner of the country. No constitutional amendment was needed to get it up and running. But no one cared!

We want to create complexities under fancy titles for challenges that can be tided over using nothing more than common sense and guidelines. A deep incurable fetish for the exotic kicks in just when a plain idea can work perfectly well. So the police as a department is what it is at the moment – a problematic footnote in the large plan to ‘fix the country’.

Other institutions aren’t doing so well either. Nacta, the National Counterterrorism Authority, was supposed to embody all policy guidelines besides being the hub of counterterrorism related information. This has been in slow motion for years now. Rehman Malik, the ex-interior minister with a penchant for back-end manoeuvres as insurance for his own survival, kept it in chains; Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, his successor, did not exactly liberate it either.

Even now as officials claim Nacta is being revived, its head wears two hats. Ehsan Ghani is also managing the National Police Academy. As a core body in counterterrorism efforts Nacta has almost zero public footprint. It is invisible.

This may change. It takes a crisis, or a crash or a striking tragedy, to shake the system out of its abnormal cycle, causing basic wisdom to take the lead role in shaping our response. Now that enforcement of the basic objectives of NAP is staring us in the face, there is a hurried focus on getting the support of other key institutions. This is how we do it: never put a stitch in time and always wait for nine.

Recall the background of NAP to understand the point. Terrorists were at deadly work for years: they were having a great time attacking everything and anything that stood in their way. They killed for pleasure and inflicted endless pain and torture upon this hapless nation.

But we didn’t do the obvious – knock them out completely by choking their support system – and instead took refuge in silence or half-action by dubbing it strategic planning.

It was the world’s worst-kept secret that terrorists were using illegal mobile SIMs, and that mobile companies were raking in billions by issuing unverified SIMs. How certain religious schools had become hideouts for terrorism planners was also a known fact. Outside support, smugglers’ connivance, the car-lifting business, kidnapping for ransom networks – all of the core elements that made the terrorism industry thrive, and throttle the country, were out in the open.

It was also obvious that by fighting different criminal gangs independently and by carrying out reforms in different sectors, terrorism’s profile could be deflated. Yet this was not done.

This neglect lasted till the barbarism of terrorism came on full display at the Army Public School in Peshawar. We then pretended as if this were the first time we had seen carnage that shamed even animals and then expressed the commitment (all over again) to eradicate terrorism at its root.

Operation Zarb-e-Azb would not have been required if we had completed all the other many-dozen operations on time and connected their successes with the larger national objective of genuinely cleansing Fata of all undesirable elements.

Even in smaller pursuits delays and foot-dragging has become a typical official response. The Nandipur Combined Cycle Power Plant fiasco had been brewing for months. There were media reports, the opposition’s hue and cry and, above all, enough material on official record to suggest that wrangling over award of the contract for the project’s operations would cause it to shut down. Yet it stayed there till it exploded in the headlines, making the Punjab and federal governments jump around to explain what had gone wrong with this enterprise.

These are just a few of the many examples that prove how combative policy planning has become against commonsense, basic reform and routine management. Officialdom does not move without an earthquake shaking the ground under its feet. Tremors and other such subtle warnings are treated with contempt.

Our idea of governance is that something really bad must happen for good things to happen. Crisis is the fuel that makes the double-decker of establishment and the government to move an inch. Unless a crisis emerges, our National Action Plan is a simple one: take no action.

Email: syedtalathussain@gmail.com

Twitter: @TalatHussain12