http://www.mosharrafzaidi.com/2010/01/02/where’s-that-counter-terrorism-strategy/
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=216509
Where’s That Counter-Terrorism Strategy?
Saturday, January 02, 2010
by Mosharraf Zaidi
The challenge of indiscriminate bullets and bombs in our markets, our universities, our places of worship and our police stations is not going to be met with verbal diarrhoea. Yet, that’s all we can seem to muster in the face of this challenge. The problem is not that Pakistan is incapable of responding to this challenge. The problem is that too many Pakistanis, especially in government, seem to want to counter live bullets and detonating bombs with speeches about the ideological and existential nature of this threat. Tom Jones adjures us to fight fire with fire. Pakistan’s generic response to this challenge seems to be to fight fire with spitballs.
What lies behind the obsession of right and left, progressive and traditional, liberal and conservative to collectively want to mutilate this conflict into an ideological war that it is not? Perhaps it is the overwhelming instinct ingrained in an irrational public discourse.
Forget conceiving of a viable response to the challenge, Pakistan’s national discourse doesn’t even have a widely agreed upon nomenclature to describe the conflict. Serious people, for example, would not use the word Taliban in every sentence, because the term Taliban is a deeply imprecise and inaccurate summation of the plethora of terrorists that the Pakistani state (among others) has helped gift to the Pakistani people.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) is not the Taliban. And the LeJ, as much as it may share part of its name with the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), is not the LeT. And neither of those two organisations takes its orders from Jalaluddin Haqqani, or from Jaish-e-Mohammad’s Masood Azhar. It is safe to say that the origins, sources of financing, and even pool of recruits for these organisations will sometimes put them at crosshairs with each other, as much as their shared appetite for the blood of innocents will often put them in synchronicity.
The term Taliban itself is imprecise. Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is not simply the Pakistani “version” of the Kandahari Taliban. No mater how thick and deep the connections between Mullah Omar’s core team and Pakistani intelligence may be, these are specific, separate and distinct groups. In fact, the TTP and the Kandahari Taliban have serious political differences.
With that kind of stark disparity across the different terrorist groups that operate in and around Pakistan, the notion that Pakistan is in an ideological war with “the Taliban” is disingenuous. Even the notion that Pakistan is in an ideological war with terrorists is unhelpful. It sacrifices nuance and accuracy. No wonder carpet bombing seems to be such a popular solution to this challenge. Pakistan is in a conflict in which it needs to counter terrorism.
In 2009 alone, more than 2,227 civilians have been killed in terrorist attacks in Pakistan. One thousand soldiers have laid their lives on the line defending this country. How did this country of 180 million people, with a middle class of more than 30 million and with a purchasing-power-parity GDP that ranks it as the 26th largest economy in the world, get here, kneeling before the cartoon-bravado of cave-dwelling terrorists? Worse still, how can this country with so much at stake, still have no counterterrorism (CT) strategy?
On July 25, 2008, I wrote an article prematurely celebrating the advent of Pakistan’s CT strategy. That was informed by conversations and news items that confirmed the prime minister’s intent to formulate such a strategy. The prime minister should know that since that promise almost 18 months ago, a total of 3,603 civilians and 1,327 soldiers have died in terrorist attacks. That is a total of 4,930 Pakistanis. The blood of these Pakistanis is squarely on the hands of terrorists, but in all societies, those that are in charge must bear some responsibility. The prime minister is in charge.
The prime minister’s task is not an easy one. The challenge of constructing a set of civilian institutions that are not just resilient to being repetitively bombed, but also robust in preventing such bombings and proactively rooting out perpetrators is massive. One way to try to begin understanding just how grand the scale of the challenge is, is to consider data points in other countries where police services work reasonably well.
I recently had a chance to visit the Australian state of Queensland. Queensland is a state of about 4.4 million people. The Queensland Police Service (QPS) has a total of about 14,000 employees. That comes to about 314 citizens per cop.
In the province of Punjab, there are 170,031 sanctioned police posts for a province of roughly 90 million people. The citizen-to-policeman ratio is not flattering at roughly 530 to one. In Karachi, a much more desperate situation exists. For a population estimated to be close to 18 million, there are 26,873 policemen giving this grand metropolis a citizen-to-policeman ratio of 670.
The ratios clearly indicate that Pakistan doesn’t have enough cops. But it gets worse if we start to compare police salaries.
The basic pay scale level for an Inspector, which is the senior-most non-commissioned police officer in Sindh, is roughly Rs16,000 per month. The senior-most non-commissioned policeman in Queensland is a staff sergeant, and earns about AU$85,000 a year, or roughly Rs530,000 per month. That is more than 33 times what his policeman brother in Karachi makes. Even at BPS 22 level, which is the head of the Sindh Police, average monthly salary and allowances are set at about Rs56,811. Or 1/10th of what a non-commissioned Aussie cop makes. Of course, these comparisons are often unfair. Australian and Pakistani costs of living are as far away as Melbourne is from Lahore. But the discrepancy is still huge.
Let us put this fiscal challenge in perspective. There are 670 inspectors (which is equivalent to the staff sergeant level in Queensland) in Karachi. To provide less than half the level of salary made by Queensland cops to only those 670 inspectors alone, the government of Sindh would need to come up with an extra Rs2 billion per annum in funds. The entire annual budget for the Sindh Police? Less than Rs24 billion.
A CT strategy will need to think through not just the verbal anti-Taliban bluster that Pakistanis (myself included) are so keen to demonstrate. It will need to get serious. One small aspect of such seriousness will be to think through the fiscal implications of how Pakistan’s provincial police services will be retooled, and refinanced. Not just for today, but for the long-run, in terms of the pensions liabilities that such a retooling will imply. And it will have to re-layer such a retooling with an FIA that is more Tariq Khosa and less Rehman Malik. In short, we’ve not even begun to scratch the surface of a viable CT strategy in Pakistan.
4,930 Pakistanis deaths may not have been entirely avoidable, had Pakistan drafted a CT strategy back in July of 2008, when the prime minister said he would. But the confidence of a nation would have been buoyed by revisiting that document, every time the country was attacked. If nothing else, it may have held incredible inspirational value.
In the absence of a coherent, cogent and organic CT strategy, it is no surprise at all that Pakistanis on the progressive side seek the comfort of an ideological war, and Pakistanis on the traditional side seek comfort in the bosom of conspiracy theories. In the aftermath of killing fields that truly stretch from Khyber Agency to the gates of Karachi, it doesn’t really matter who is killing innocent Pakistanis. It matters that they are being killed. The killing needs to stop. The prime minister is in charge. And stopping the killing is the job of those in charge.
Couple of points:
1. Not sure what the relevant of police is here. I’m sure they matter, but they don’t matter nearly as much as (a) political parties [to fill the institutional space that the Taliban and their allies have filled], (b) the army [to physically fight them], (c) intelligence [to intercept them], and (d) the courts [to show that there is such a thing as the Pakistani justice system for people who've had their goat or bicycle stolen but can't get justice because their case has been back logged for 3 years]. Those are the four elements of any CT strategy.
2. The “Taliban are a multifaceted group” is true but beside the point. All catch-all terms lump different sets of people together; the point is to ask whether the level of aggregation connoted is appropriate. What do all the subgroups that you laid out have in common? A particular ethos, a reliance on violence, fairly common roots, and a common enmity (at this moment in time) toward the Pakistani state and its citizens. That is what matters.
I may say: all Asians are not the same. And yes, it’s true. But if we’re talking about math scores, it helps to consider Asians — whether they be Chinese, Singaporeans, Indians, or whatever — as one. Similarly, I know LeT is different from the TTP. But at present, for OUR purposes, they have more similarities than differences. This does not mean that they must be dealt with in exactly the same way, but they are all part of the same problem, and that is what matters.
Posted by Ahsan | 02. Jan, 2010, 8:49 amIt would have been more useful if you had compared the Queensland police sergeant’s salary to the per capita income of the population; and the same number for Pakistan.
O. Yousafzai
Sydney
Posted by O. Yousaf-zai | 02. Jan, 2010, 9:47 amVery true Mr. Zaidi and well said as always. I wish that our government cared sufficiently or at least somewhat adequantly, but they do not seem to care.
Little concern, no strategy, those who care are mocked at, those who do not care seem to be the ones in important positions. The solution has become to get out of Pakistan, but that has made Pakistan worse.
Although the problems have gotten worse, they are not unfamiliar. This was a problem even before 9/11 happened. The seeds of the 1980′s started to take roots in the 1990′s with the violence. Those that cared, got killed or fled for overseas or just left the government.
I will say this in response to Pakistan not having a good counter terrorism strategy, while we talk politics, we are discouraged to get involved in politics. How many times have you heard people discouraging many capable leaders to get involved in Politics in Pakistan, plenty.
We have an educated Pakistani American community, yet our Pakistani American organizations are weak, compared to Indian American organizations. There is even an Indian American Governor.
We have to take more interest in Politics in Pakistan. Our Politicians need to learn from our father Jinnah, that Law and Order is the first duty of each and every government that comes in power. Yet, no government with the exception of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, has been able to do that.
Posted by Munzir Naqvi | 02. Jan, 2010, 9:51 am@Ahsan: I think the four elements you mention are important, but they don’t constitute a strategy. Neither, in isolation, does the police. But what the police is, that none of the others are, is a physically potent force with purely civilian authority. In short, I want the Pakistani military to be concerned with enemies of Pakistan that are not Pakistani. Enemies of Pakistan that happen to be Pakistani belong in the civil and criminal institutional space in Pakistan. In that space, the hammer is the police. Whereas the courts and the judges are the, I don’t know, triggers, in the heat of the analogy, at least.
The point is that a short set of numbers demonstrates, I hope, the long road toward understanding what it would take to finance and equip, in terms of people, a viable police force. This is far from comprehensive. In fact, it barely touches the surface. This is an op-ed, not a policy memo. The point is to question whether such memos are being drafted, who is drafting them, what are the contents and when, in God’s Pure and Gracious Name, will we ever get to see a draft–not to mention, some semblance of coherence in how the Pakistani state protects its citizens from fires, bullets and explosions. That protection is a police function. And that function, is at the heart of a good CT strategy–though it is by far, not a comprehensive or complete summation of what’s required.
On the second point, I have Ayesha Siddiqa’s agreement that the distinctions are important. And yours too, I think. There is too much diversity within the galaxy of terrorist groups in Pakistan for us to “feel” that we are at war with all of them. The reality is that the state probably continues to feel comfortable with some of these groups. And that is part of the reason there is no CT strategy.
Posted by admin | 02. Jan, 2010, 2:24 pmNo one is sugegsting that we are at war with all groups
We need to identity the two most important threats
01-Malakand Swat where the threat was from a militanmt group wanting to impose their political and religious views
on by force whichw as not acceptable and was a threat to the political fabric of Pakistan
02-the other militant group in S Waziirstan is waging war on the State of Pakistan which so far is content on being bombed havingg womend children being blown up and now
also having business centres being torched.The threat is Pakistan specific
03-Anyone who knows counter insurgency strategy would do
three things immediately
-seal the 200 odd choke points on the Afghan/Pakistan
border to slow down the influx of weapons/men and supplies
into Pakistan especially thru Bajaur by mining the border.
and then bottling up all supply routes in and out of S Waziristan
02-Too cut of the finances to the militant group which
comes from u know where ? Anyone in pakistan acting as a conduit to these funds should face life improsonment
and have all assets confiscated which would go the
\war vicitims
03-then declare a State of Emergency and go for the sleeper cells in the cities -If Pakistan lacks the know how to do this strategy call on the Algerians they had worse urban bombings then we are facing and they controlled the bombings
This is not a war which allows English speaking apolgists
for the Militants to come on Talk Shows or be allowed to write appeasement article in The News
Even some one with an IQ of Daffy the Duck would realise that Pakistan is heading for the cliff end while everyone
is talking.Even in our military operations we are taking casulties which could be avoided if we unleashed the full
firepower of the Pakistan State then hitting one area today another
area tomorrow and going around in circles
best regards
yusuf Agha
Posted by mirzayusufagha | 03. Jan, 2010, 1:32 pm“Even the notion that Pakistan is in an ideological war with terrorists is unhelpful”
The Pakistani state is in an ideological war with any terrorist organization that is willing to take up arms in order to establish Shariah. Even a cursory look at all of these tanzeems’ websites and publications will be sufficient to understand that each of these groups from whatever SSP’s current iteration is, to LeT, to LeJ, to TTP to the Afghan Taliban does advocate this line. While groups like the LeT and the Afghan Taliban (or the “Kandahari” Taliban as you like to call them) are currently willing to tactically ally themselves with the Pakistani state to achieve their objectives in India and Afghanistan respectively, their fundamental long-term objectives remain the same as groups currently gone rogue like TTP, LeJ, JeM, SSP. For this simple reason it is suicidal for the Pakistani state to cultivate these groups (LeT and Afghan Taliban) as allies unless it shares the same long-term vision of Pakistan as they do. The idea that Pakistan is clever enough to tactically ally itself with these groups while disregarding their long-term vision of Pakistan is essentially suicidal.
Posted by Rabia | 04. Jan, 2010, 6:55 amQuote: In the absence of a coherent, cogent and organic CT strategy, it is no surprise at all that Pakistanis on the progressive side seek the comfort of an ideological war, and Pakistanis on the traditional side seek comfort in the bosom of conspiracy theories
@Moharraf While and elaborate counter terrorism is much needed, the state authroties need to quit playing “Good Cop” “Bad Cop”, we need recognize that volince by non-state actors is devastating, as we combat them on various fronts we need to formulate a descicve strategy which is result oriented
Posted by Ammar | 04. Jan, 2010, 5:46 pmMr. Zaidi,
How can we expect to feel the pain of all the non-taliban innocents killed in drone attacks when we still cling to unsubstantiated stories that the 9/11 incident was actually an American consipracy to malign the muslims and attack Afghanistan/Iraq. I believe sympathy begets sympathy
Posted by Mo Razak | 07. Jan, 2010, 2:37 pm