EDITORIAL: Hopefully, the security establishment understands that Nacta’s (National Counter Terrorism Authority’s) idea of establishing a federal level organisation on the lines of America’s Homeland Security Department will require that body to hold regular meetings, unlike the Authority itself.
Otherwise, they will just add one more opaque bureaucratic layer to a security landscape already littered with intelligence agencies, which will do the fight against resurgent TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan) terrorism no good. This was, after all, the first time Nacta’s board of governors bothered to meet in more than two years, even though the Section 6(4) of the Nacta Act 2013 mandates the board to “meet as and when required but it shall meet once in each quarter of a year”.
The wakeup call owes to TTP’s unilateral (though not at all unexpected) withdrawal from the ceasefire arrangement, no doubt, and daily terror attacks up and down the country after its threat to resume its “war”. Surely, Nacta’s research would have revealed that Homeland cited inadequate intelligence sharing among different agencies as the main reason for the 9/11 oversight.
And since our own National Action Plan (NAP), hammered out in the aftermath of the Peshawar army public school nightmare, also identified similar lack of coordination among dozens of security outfits as one of our core problems, it seems there is a greater need to implement existing laws and procedures than add more.
Separately, Nacta also presented a report to the Senate Standing Committee on Interior which blamed the recent “peace talks” for TTP’s return to its old ways. These negotiations were always controversial and, as often warned in this space, bound to fail right from the beginning. The nation only found out about them, after sending more than 80,000 Pakistanis to early graves because of TTP’s war on the state, when the then prime minister, Imran Khan, inadvertently mentioned them during an interview with a foreign news channel.
And parliament’s fuss about being left out of the loop, raised mainly by the opposition of the time, was rewarded only with periodic briefings from the army about on-ground progress; not any debate about who was talking to whom, why certain individuals and jirgas were selected to represent the whole country, or the very rationale of the negotiations in the first place. That is why what little of civil society was still able to mobilise continued to raise very serious objections to this strategy.
Nevertheless, there can be no more denying that the same war has come back to haunt and hurt the country. And the Afghan Taliban’s return to power across the border, clearly facilitated and welcomed by Islamabad, has indeed been its main cause. The Taliban did not crack down and flush out the TTP, as promised, and it was their idea that we talk to them instead of finishing them off.
Yet it is our security establishment that must take the blame for falling for this tactic and sending delegations to meet TTP even when they refused to budge from their demands of rolling back the FATA-KP merger and handing over South Waziristan to them lock, stock and barrel. And here we are now, with reports of suicide attacks and beheadings returning to the headlines; just like those dark days when nobody was sure of returning home in one piece, not even school-going children.
The situation requires prompt and decisive action, which puts the entire leadership to a very stiff test. The military proved itself up to the task when it took the fight to the enemy last time, and there’s no reason to expect a different result this time. The political elite, though, seriously needs to get its act together. The government-opposition cleavage has never been this wide and the political atmosphere never nearly as toxic. This whole lot has also never been as blatant in its own naked lust for power and riches as it is now, and unless these people learn to put the country’s interests ahead of their own, the people will continue to suffer. It’s not just Nacta that needed to be jolted out of its slumber, it’s the whole system.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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