NAP implementation needs more than meetings
The meeting of the National Internal Security Committee decided the formation of Expert Working Groups for the implementation of the National Action Plan. The meeting also reviewed the FATF review carried out by its Asia-Pacific Group of the greylisting, raising the suspicion that the meeting was not meant genuinely to review the National Action Plan, but to prevent blacklisting without really doing anything. Is it a coincidence that the lead ministry on the NAP, Interior, is headed by a minister of state who has been named as one of the four ministers with militant sympathies? Another, the Finance Minister, is a member of the Committee.
The composition of the expert working groups is not known, but it is likely that they will comprise the same policemen whose colleagues have not tackled the proscribed organisations in the districts, which the APG has found to be laxer than the paper criteria of legislation, regulation, data collection and notifications. Theses of purpose. Prime Minister may have said that Pakistan will not allow militant outfits to operate on its soil, but the NAP needs to be implemented for this. It was not merely to combat terror, but also to combat the kind of mindset that leads to terrorism. The meeting took no decisions on madrassa reform, extremism or hate speech, indicating an absence of seriousness of purpose.
Is the Committee meeting an attempt to water down the NAP out of existence? It should not be, because the NAP was approved at an all-parties meeting, and only such a meeting can approve changes in the plan. The Interior Ministry’s proposals to change the NAP to reduce the gaps between its targets and the achievements of the government may be convenient, but impossible if the other parties are brought on board. NAP was not just about handing over terrorist cases to the military courts or removing the moratorium on the death penalty. It was national reaction to the APS Peshawar massacre, not so much to the massacre itself, as to how it symbolised how out-of-hand militancy had become.
NAP implementation remains a crying need, and is not just a requirement to avoid FATF blacklisting; it is a process to which all strands of political opinion contributed, including the present ruling party. Therefore, NAP amounted to a promise to the people that the policy would be multi-partisan, so the only option for any government is to implement it.