The Defence Committee of the Cabinet (DCC) met May 25, three days after the brazen attack on PNS Mehran and reportedly directed the “security, defence and law enforcement agencies to use all necessary means” to fight terrorism. The DCC, we are told, wants all state institutions to coordinate their efforts to this end.
A statement after the meeting said that “The DCC expressed full confidence in the ability and the capacity of the armed forces and law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in meeting all threats to national security.” This was the second meeting of the DCC in a month, the first called after the US incursion into Pakistan which, according to reports, killed Osama bin Laden.
Now what?
I ask this because while it is good to see the DCC active, two points need to be considered. One, the DCC’s current activeness is not proactive but reactive. It has responded to two events, both different in nature but of extraordinary nature. The DCC, as I have written elsewhere, needs to become proactive – i.e., it must not wait to be convened in reaction to extraordinary events. It must, given what we are going through, meet regularly to monitor and calibrate the counterterrorism policy.
Two, not only is it not sufficient to respond to audacious attacks by expressing confidence, full no less, in the ability and capacity of the security apparatus, it goes against all available facts. The security apparatus, as configured currently, is ill-suited to the kind of war we are fighting and it makes no sense to sweep facts under the carpet. Consider.
The enemy has repeatedly proven that he is confident, audacious, highly trained, motivated and ready to strike at will. While this war is not of the regular kind, the one basic postulate of victory applies here as much as to inter-state war: victory comes when the enemy’s will to fight has been broken. By no stretch of the imagination have we been able to do that so far. The enemy’s actions prove this.
Let me here state for clarity that military operations in Malakand and other parts of FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), which captured territory, comprise just a fraction of what is needed. Terrorist groups, when faced with a superior force, will not try to hold territory. Those operations were important. But they do not constitute victory. They are a necessary but not sufficient condition to gain advantage over the enemy.
In fact, the enemy has now dispersed to prevent the security forces from finding and engaging a concentrated centre of gravity. By losing territory the enemy has gained his essential advantages – dispersal, surprise, mobility. It retains enough trained numbers to form small cells and inflict disproportionate losses on the state. PNS Mehran is a case in point: four highly trained terrorists, backed by meticulous planning and security loopholes, managed to inflict terrible financial and human loss on the state.
The attack also shows the enemy will now target equipment to try and degrade the capability of the state to be effective against it. This is its reaction to losing territory; it has brought the war to the urban centres and will strike at hard targets to signal to everyone that it retains the capability to attack security forces. What we will see now is urban war and we are totally unprepared for it: bomb attacks; suicide missions; armed raids; and even assassinations. All of this has already happened; the impetus will now increase.
This kind of war first and foremost requires effective intelligence and policing. The police has very little capacity to respond to this threat. Nor are its intelligence agencies up to the task, lucky breakthroughs notwithstanding. The force needs drastic reorganisation.
What about the army? The answer again is no. No part of the security apparatus is ready for this phase of the war. The government cannot ignore this. Therefore, it is not enough for the DCC to come up with platitudes about what great work the security apparatus is doing and, in the same breath, emphasise the imperative of coordinating efforts. At the minimum it shows that currently that is not happening.
We need for the DCC to tell us (a) whether there is a comprehensive counterterrorism policy ( if there is, its declassified parts should be up for debate); (b) is there a proposal to reconfigure the security apparatus, or at least those forces that are to be directly involved with counterinsurgency and CT; if no, why not? If yes, what are its contours; (c) if a reconfiguration is on the cards or is being done, what kind of budget is provided for it; is there a thought about the equipment that is needed; if yes, is it being procured etcetera. This last point is important especially if it is accepted, on the basis of some reports, that in the case of the attack on Mehran, the attackers were equipped with NVGs (night vision goggles) while the responding force was not. And this is just one example and at the low end of the spectrum.
Of course, not everything can be put out in the public domain. For instance, some capabilities, in order to be effective, must remain secret. But the issues up for debate are the broad ones. They may not deal with finer details which for reasons of secrecy should remain hidden from the public eye. However, an informed debate does not always require perfect information; nor does it deal with the minutiae. What it does require is some information, the irreducible minimum, to help one understand what is happening.
Moreover, the government, as I have suggested at another place, needs to put together a group of experts from various fields which can liaise between the government and the security apparatus. This is a must. This group can not only give external input but also carry the information necessary for interaction with the public through the media. It is crucial for the government to dominate the narrative, something it has thus far failed to do. And that is why we have not even gone past two basic questions: whose war is it, and why we are fighting it.
The writer is Contributing Editor, The Friday Times.
