What the Army Chief General Raheel Sharif has said in his take on the implementation of the National Action Plan was an observation, a kind of wake-up call, and not a reservation about the otherwise all-too-obvious inability of the civilian leadership to put up a matching performance. Under the 20-point NAP it was the government's responsibility to introduce legal and administrative reforms in Fata following its clearance of terrorism and rehabilitation of displaced people. Has it been done? The civilian set-ups had agreed to bring in police reforms to help de-politicise the force. Where are those reforms? Then, the government was to introduce madrassah reforms in order to check radicalisation and curb extremism which plays out in horrifying incidents every other day. But what happened - not only the religious political parties forced deletion of words "religious extremism" from the text of the NAP, and why a campaign is now being launched "to safeguard the sanctity and freedom of seminaries". If not 'religious extremism' what then is the mass murder at Safoora, genocide of the Hazaras and continuing sacrilege of shrines, mosques, temples and churches? And why all those who confess targeted-killings, blowing up police stations, and admit acting as cat's paw of foreign intelligence agencies do not get punished? All of it falls in the jurisdiction of civilian authorities, and more so in the context of jointly agreed National Action Plan. But their inability to put up matching responses is no more a state secret. What is the problem then if the Army Chief has put his finger on it? Yes, implementation of NAP is 'shared responsibility', but who is in deficit. Certainly not the armed forces who have cleared the tribal areas of terrorism, restored normalcy in Karachi and apprehended scores of hardened criminals, hired assassins and foreign-funded proxy killers. But what to do when shooting from the hip has become a trait of our political culture.
The government was expected to rise to the challenge, admit its incompetence and recommit to play its part as a shareholder for effective implementation of the National Action Plan. But it did not. And instead of making its response from the floor of the National Assembly it chose to go public through a statement by an unidentified 'spokesman', and in the idiom of blame and counter-blame. The fact is that much before the military top brass called for "matching/complementary initiatives on the part of the government" the vox populi was aghast at the civilian stakeholders' nonchalant, if not deliberate, foot-dragging in charging and prosecuting the accused. It was a gross misperception that the ISPR statement was a prelude to some kind of coup as the government spokesman's shooting of the hip tends to suggest. Maybe, the hawks in the prime minister's camp entertain such doubts, but that has nothing to do with realities obtaining in today's Pakistan. If the army were to take over it could when the government insisted on negotiating peace with terrorists. In fact the armed forces even didn't ask for imposition of Emergency, for which there was plenty of justification under the Constitution. There was no need for this ill-conceived and ill-timed riposte by the federal government, and if it is being exploited by the political opposition the government must live with it. Maybe, the government spokesman would like to clarify its remarks, which unfortunately tend to suggest - to great joy of Pakistan's enemies - that the military and civilian leaderships of the country are not on the same page.