Moeed Yusuf

Published 2014-04-01 081:13

IT was expected that the release of the National Internal Security Policy (NISP) would generate debate. And the document does a decent job of presenting the myriad challenges at hand in a fairly coherent manner, identifying problems and highlighting aspects that need to be worked on.

But the document seems to have drawn its most significant conclusion even before the writing began: the interior ministry should lord over everything internal security-related.

Had the exercise been done objectively, the document’s own situation analysis and proposed solutions should have led it to acknowledge that the ministry would be punching above its weight by posing as the kingpin.

The most refreshing part is that the document does not downplay the reality that we’re in a mess that requires us to comprehensively address the supply (education, societal narratives, intolerance of diversity, etc) and demand side (militant infrastructure, etc) of terrorism and the limited state capacity to course-correct.

This implies that the policy toolkit must comprise traditional hard security measures and other responses that fall outside its ambit. To its credit, the NISP document acknowledges so; it lists the various aspects that need attention, and presents a specific coordination plan with Nacta, the counterterrorism authority, at its centre.

But rather than acknowledging that the interior ministry forms only one important part of the toolkit, it seeks to position the ministry as the supra-body that owns NISP and that ought to coordinate all functionaries and specialised agencies even though some of them are not under its command and deal with issues it has no expertise in.

Even as you read through the document, it is clear that aspects that fall within the traditional purview of any interior ministry have been properly thought out. Others dealing with national narratives, education reform (which incidentally is limited to madressahs), broader criminal justice reforms, reconstruction, etc that the ministry is neither well versed in nor has the credibility to handle are dealt with far more superficially.

The organogram of Nacta that embodies all these aspects makes for a comical read. We are told that bureaucrats, sitting in this body effectively run by an executive committee headed by the interior minister (the Nacta Act puts it under the prime minister but this has been diluted by a mere notification that it will be handled by the interior ministry administratively) will steer the national coordination of anti-extremist narratives, madressah reforms, legal reforms, physical reconstruction, dialogue with extremists, etc.

Has anyone paused to ask why would these organisations and agencies that are being asked to take their lead from the ministry play ball? And how in the world will the ministry pull this off?

I have yet to study this more thoroughly but a quick check with some of these entities tells me that none have bought into the bureaucratic restructuring and subtle shifts in clout, in favour of the interior ministry that NISP necessitates. All seem to see NISP as the interior minister’s baby that stretches way beyond his ministry’s remit or capabilities.

We’re back full circle. Remember the 2009-10 tiff between Tariq Pervez, the founding Nacta coordinator, and then interior minister Rehman Malik? It was exactly about this: is Nacta coordinating everything that is relevant to internal security or only those internal security functions that rightfully lie in the interior ministry’s domain? If the former, should it not be housed in the Prime Minister’s Office? This was Pervez’s view at the time but he lost the battle with the result that Nacta remained a political football.

Here is a specific way forward.

The current document needs to be renamed the ‘National Counterterrorism Strategy’ (‘NCS’) and parsed of all parts but those dealing directly with things that fall under the traditional purview of the interior ministry which should own only the ‘NCS’.

A truly empowered Nacta, focused only on strategic coordination (but with no law enforcement operational mandate) and run by the national coordinator on the prime minister’s directions should then be tasked to work with relevant ministries/provinces to produce coherent strategies on each of the aspects identified in the current document that falls outside the ministry’s traditional remit. These plus the NCS will form NISP that will now have given equal weight to all supply and demand side and state capacity issues linked to internal security.

Each relevant federal or provincial ministry/agency will be the lead in its area of constitutional authority/specialisation. Nacta will coordinate these efforts — but with the prime minister’s weight behind it and without any one-line ministry lording over it. This is the only formulation that the military, crucial to internal security restructuring, won’t see as a joke.

The writer is a foreign policy expert based in Washington D.C
http://www.dawn.com/news/1096919/flaws-in-nisp