Descent of anarchy?

Besides Pakistan's fiscal woes, corruption in state offices (exposed almost every day), maladministration, and ever-present threat of terrorism, a more dangerous developing distortion is people's loss of faith in the integrity and capacity of the law enforcers to catch criminals, credibly interrogate them, establish the truth and then present them before courts of law for appropriate punishment.
Instead of augmenting the integrity and investigative abilities of the police and streamlining its processes and procedures, all we saw was the creation of the Citizen-Police Liaison Committees and call centres, while crime reporting and investigation procedures progressively became more politically biased, unfriendly, and unreliable, thereby diluting people's faith in the police.
This loss of faith is inducing people to 'administer' justice on their own - a lethally dangerous trend that foretells the descent of anarchy. The latest examples thereof were the incidents wherein two alleged robbers were beaten to death by a mob in the Korangi, Karachi, and the very next day, three robbers were thrashed to death by a mob in a retail market in Faisalabad.
Business Recorder's editorial "Mob justice" on this developing trend aptly pointed out that since "the grip of law is not firm, law-enforcement miserable, and violence rampant, it is only natural that the people tend to act both as police and judge" - reminiscent of the events of the French Revolution portrayed by Charles Dickens in his famous novel "A tale of two cities".
The JIT report on the fire in a Baldia Town factory in September 2012 - Pakistan's biggest industrial accident to-date - is the second inquest into this tragedy but wasn't disclosed for two years. The first investigation had attributed the fire to 'short-circuiting' but the JIT report blames it on 'terrorism' by extortionists, relying on the evidence provided by just one (Rizwan Qureshi) of the several alleged culprits.
What is odd is that Rizwan Qureshi wasn't connected to this crime and no one knows his present whereabouts although the JIT report is based on the evidence he provided. The JIT may have done a thorough investigative exercise, but what hangs big question marks on its authenticity is the delay in its release and its being based primarily on non-forensic evidence.
This doesn't reflect an overnight slide in the abilities of the investigative agencies; it is the outcome of how, over decades, all regimes ignored it by not maintaining a rational police-citizen ratio and by under-funding and under-equipping the police force, above all, by keeping it subservient to provincial governments instead of an independent police authority, as recommended by the Police Reforms Commission in 2002.
After independence, Pakistan's landlord politicians replaced the British rulers as the absolute masters of the police. Every in-power regime used the police force to achieve its political objectives - the most shameful of them being subjugating its opponents. Instead of protesting against this trend, the other political parties responded by organising militant wings in their ranks.
Besides this response, the more powerful economy-damaging route the political parties adopted has been the show of 'street power', which continues to tarnish the face of democracy. But now far more worrying is that, allegedly, law enforcers are committing extra-judicial murders in the name of law enforcement. While the ordinary were likely to become lawless in the prevailing scenario, should the police have followed suit?
The latest instance of this unfortunate trend was witnessed in Sukkur on Sunday wherein the police killed four individuals in an 'armed encounter' but the survivors of those killed denied this charge and the mob protesting against this tragic incident was bashed by the police. Why must the police kill those it calls criminals? Why can't it just injure (if at all unavoidable) and arrest them for being taken to the courts of law?
Inadequacy of the police force is witnessed frequently because mobs succeed in creating chaos on the streets. Reason: even those not sympathetic to the causes of the mobs opt to side with them because of their own frustrations over the failure of the state in almost every walk of life, and hatred for the police whom they see as the agents of the regime.
Besides crippling of the police service, what made things worse was the near-zero accountability of the lower judiciary whose failure to punish criminals escalated corruption in the frontlines of state offices, and made terrorism as big a threat as it now is. All that the regimes did was to seek Rangers' or the Army's help when chaos reached regime-threatening dimensions.
The fact that military courts are now being set-up to try the terrorists for their sins proves beyond doubt that successive regimes failed (on purpose?) to augment the police service on a continuing basis for confronting the rising security threats although, courtesy our involvement in the 'Jihad-e-Afghanistan', and its subsequent deadly fallout, this was imperative.
Not surprisingly, the stigmas that now characterise Pakistan are lawlessness and corruption. But do political parties or military dictators who administered the state since 1977 accept this unforgivable continuing failure? While they refuse to do so, the fact that schoolteachers in KPK must now carry handguns to protect students against possible acts of violence establishes this failure.
Although the huge manpower, weaponry, gadgetry and investigative skill gaps (created over decades) in the police service can't be plugged overnight, the state's constitutional obligation to provide security to the people is being diluted by arming them; it will only strengthen the gun culture that Pakistan suffers from. The remedy lies in quickly plugging these critical gaps, not arming the masses.
For years, the media has focused unsuccessfully on this subject, but it can't be ignored any longer. The slide in law enforcement capacity has gone on whose consequences have finally forced the hurried implementation of the National Action Plan (NAP) - an effort that may fail, given the opposition thereto (via street power) by the religious leaders whose main achievement has been dividing the Ummah into warring factions.
This response of the religious leadership may succeed because instead of having confidence in the neutrality and capability of the law enforcers, people distrust them. If this distrust isn't remedied, enforcing law will become near-impossible the last thing any society, more so as disorganised as ours, can afford. The tragedy is that the rulers can't see this stark reality.
It is high time the distortions in law enforcement were addressed to forestall the descent of anarchy. As it is, there are forces out to dismember Pakistan using terrorism in their own countries as the justification there for, and these fears are being discussed openly in forums such as America's Council on Foreign Policy.