Civilian law enforcement agencies in Pakistan have long been the butt of cruel jokes, even if the sarcasm and anger towards them is sometimes well-founded. The deliberate targeting of Pakistani law-enforcers by terrorists, however, is no laughing matter. Yesterday’s attack on the emergency respondent headquarters in Lahore was at least the fifth attack on police in Lahore. The Lahore FIA offices were attacked less than two years ago, followed by a suicide bombing on a police post near the Lahore High Court, followed by the attack on the Sri Lankan team, followed by the attack on the Manwan police academy. This is not counting numerous attacks on the FIA and police posts in Islamabad and in interior Punjab. And of course, by now most Pakistanis have lost count entirely of how many times the paramilitary forces and police have been targeted by terrorists in FATA, in settled districts in NWFP and particularly in Peshawar. Whatever the terrorists may want in terms of ideological riff raff, it’s clear what they want operationally. They want to terminate the Pakistani state.

Many analysts are often sceptical of the capacity of terrorists to successfully take over Pakistan. They are even more sceptical of the notion that the nukes that Pakistan has built are lying around waiting to be seduced by Bin Laden and his Taliban cohorts. The scepticism is well-founded on the back of the Pakistani military. For decades, by consuming the lion’s share of resources in this country, Pakistan’s formal military has built up a massive infrastructure that will, when push comes to shove, successfully prevent terrorists from stealing Pakistan, or its nukes. In Swat, since May 8, we are seeing exactly that thesis play itself out. When motivated, the Pakistani military is more than capable of destroying the resistance of terrorists.

That’s why the terrorists are targeting Pakistan’s law enforcement entities. Decimating the physical resistance of the Pakistani police and destroying their mental and emotional resolve is the terrorists’ way of getting around the military. Pakistani cops are poorly paid, deeply stigmatised and severely under-equipped. They are a soft-target.

Investing in more equipment, raising police salaries and moving towards eliminating the Brahmin-Shudra divide in the Pakistani police services are the quick fix things that governments (federal and provincial) have clearly already begun doing. Doing that has produced results visible to anyone watching the drama play out in Lahore, live. The speed with which the police system responded to the attack was impressive, relative to its recent track record.

Quick fixes will not solve the problem for the medium and long term, however. Pakistan’s police forces suffer from structural dysfunction of several kinds. Local authority over police forces, vested in indirectly elected district nazims, has not really worked — either because local politicians are too prone to using the police to settle petty rivalries, or because not enough authority is vested in them.

But we also know that the old commissionerate system was hardly a beacon of light — either from an integrity, or a law-enforcement, or an administrative perspective. The colonial model of command and control local administration was not only undemocratic, it actually never really worked.

Of course, one of the core issues is that the police officer that makes decisions is always on loan when making those decisions. The All Pakistan Unified Grades (APUG) of the civil service essentially ensures that a federal employee makes executive decisions in both districts and provinces — all the while pretending to be a subsidiary resource. But subsidiary resources should be invested in the location of their jobs — instead of looking to their mothership, the Establishment Division in Islamabad. This then raises the issue of whether there is really such a thing as a provincial police force at all, what to say of district police services. Every key official of these forces is a federal civil servant, not a provincial one.

Some major technical issues will persist even if structures are sorted out. Investigative capacity outside the FIA is virtually non-existent. Standout examples of innovation and service delivery (like Rescue 15) tend to be politically driven, and are entirely dependent on fiscal pump-priming. The intelligence and counter-intel capacity of the police is also limited.

To repulse the deliberate targeting of Pakistan’s increasingly heroic police forces, legislative measures empowering the police need to be taken, direct executive oversight needs to be strengthened, and dramatic increases in investments in intelligence capacity, investigative capacity, and raw firepower need to be made.

Ultimately, all the behind-the-scenes investment needs to be buttressed with raw firepower that becomes a visible manifestation of legitimate state muscle, like in Turkey. Large, Gladiator-esque young people manning police posts should be tooled with armoured personnel carriers, Kevlar vests, more sophisticated weapons, and an air of overwhelming self-confidence. When a law-abiding citizen sees a cop, she mustn’t feel pity. She must feel secure. When a criminal or a terrorist sees a cop, he should feel his knees buckle with fear — fear of God Almighty, and fear of the bruising he will suffer if he’s out of line. Pakistanis would much prefer a police all dressed up with nowhere to go, rather than to leave them out in the cold, as we have for so many years.

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When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk. ~ The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly