Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Action but not enough
ON a day when the TTP struck yet again against the military, the government finally appeared to stutter into some kind of action. On Sunday, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced he would cancel his upcoming visit to Switzerland to stay back in Pakistan and deal with a security crisis that has gone from long brewing to slowly exploding. Then yesterday, the federal cabinet convened to consider Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan’s much-touted and long-awaited internal security policy. At last, some kind of seriousness seemed to be on display — and not just in talking somberly about the overall dynamics and present situation of dialogue with the TTP. This is precisely what is expected of a government faced with a monumental challenge that has only grown on its watch so far.
So much for the good news. The less welcome news is that seriousness of purpose has not yet translated into serious policy. The interior minister has much to say about his plan to combat terrorism, but the details known so far — either leaked to the media or whose contours can be made out from public statements of various government officials — suggest that the simplistic approach of taking on militants who have taken up arms against the state continues to dominate official thinking. Surely, the outlawed TTP needs to be — to borrow a phrase made fashionable by American officials — disrupted, dismantled and defeated. But that is only to try and address a problem that has already exploded and is impossible to ignore anymore. The roots of militancy and terrorism are deep and complex — and any long-term policy to defeat terrorism must attack those roots too. That means a gamut of measures beyond the strictly kinetic that run from socio-economic reforms to strengthening governance and state regulation in problem areas.
Nevertheless, sitting down and taking stock and trying to formulate some kind of national policy against militancy is the desperate need of the day — and the government should be encouraged to continue down this path. The politics of it aside — the PML-N worried about the blowback in Punjab and the pressure that Imran Khan and the political right can bring to bear on the government — it is perhaps as important as the other aspect: a civil-military understanding on what is the best path to pursue. That the TTP has refocused its attacks on security targets after a spell of attacks against soft targets will have surely added some tension to civil-military ties when one side wants to try dialogue first and the other side is absorbing bloody blow after bloody blow. While the anti-militancy policy must be of the civilians’ own creation — at least from the democratic, constitutional perspective — no policy will succeed if one of the main instruments necessary to defeat the TTP is not in sync with the military.
No progress in education
THE findings of the Annual Status of Education Report, 2013 are not very encouraging, showing a continuously high trend of underachievement in Pakistan’s schools, particularly in Sindh. There are several depressing statistics, such as the fact that 57pc of grade five students cannot read a grade two English sentence, or that half of such students cannot read a grade two story in Urdu, Sindhi or Pashto. The survey, which covered 138 rural districts and 13 urban centres, found that Punjab has the best educational indicators, while Sindh is at the bottom. The study shows that there are more out-of-school children in the rural areas while children studying in private institutions performed relatively better than their peers in state schools. If our children continue to show such poor levels of literacy and numeracy, it is difficult to imagine how we will survive in the 21st century.
A large amount of funds and numerous interventions have gone into trying to fix the education sector. So why do we continue to perform so dismally? Many educationists cite corruption as the number one reason for the failure of the education system, particularly in the public sector. For example, teachers in many state schools can’t or don’t teach while teacher absenteeism is also high. Yet these same individuals continue to draw monthly salaries without fail. There are also serious questions about the teachers’ abilities, especially in Sindh, as ‘educators’ are inducted under political quotas with no effort to judge their capabilities. Unqualified individuals will only produce barely literate students. The infrastructure of schools, or lack thereof, is also a key factor in keeping children away. Can youngsters really be expected to regularly attend school and learn anything when school buildings are bereft of basic facilities such as drinking water and toilets? Ever since devolution the provinces have had greater control over education, yet in most respects they have failed to deliver. To turn the situation around, teachers must be recruited on merit and updated with the requisite skills while there also needs to be strict accountability of all stakeholders in the education sector. The sector is a time bomb that will explode soon if left unattended.
Egypt’s constitutional farce
WILL the constitution approved through a referendum that was hardly transparent give peace and stability to Egypt? The entire exercise is suspect because of the political ambitions developed by army chief Gen Abel Fattah al-Sisi, who overthrew Egypt’s first democratic government and crushed the opposition with an iron hand. The campaign for what the anti-military activists have called a “sham referendum” was rocked by anti-government violence and the arrest of thousands of dissidents, both Islamist and liberal, who had called for a boycott of the vote. The approval of the draft constitution will now be followed by a programme for presidential and parliamentary elections, and it is obvious they will, like the referendum, lack credibility. Egypt is now a police state, Adly Mansour is acting president only in name, and real power rests with the army, whose chief announced recently that he could run for president “at the people’s request”.
The Egyptian army has a vested interest in controlling the political process because of its huge business and industrial stakes. The new constitution, for instance, has a clause which provides for trials in military courts of civilians working in businesses owned by the army. The constitution also restricts demonstrations and protests, and rights NGOs say the basic law will give birth to a political system that does not guarantee citizens’ rights and liberties. No wonder that the opposition calls it “the military’s illegitimate constitution”. When the election campaign begins, the Muslim Brotherhood will not be there, because the military-led government has declared it a terrorist organisation. If history is any guide, parties banned by the military have invariably re-emerged with greater strength. The Brotherhood government had made many mistakes, but a subversion of the constitution was hardly the way to rectify matters. Egypt now seems to be headed towards a Mubarak-type dictatorship, and the fruits of the Tahrir uprising seem all but lost. The system the constitution will give birth to will hardly be able to last long.