January 09, 2007	Tuesday	Zilhaj 18, 1427

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PESHAWAR, Jan 8: Barring the short Motorway stretch, the road from Islamabad to Peshawar is as bumpy as the law and order situation is in the North-West Frontier Province.

Don't go by the all-okay mantra of the chief minister, for that is what he is expected to do, despite seeing the murder of his uncle by militants in Bannu and then losing his deputy inspector-general of police as recently as last month, just a stone throw away from Peshawar.

The bottom-line is; all is not well. Owing to its own peculiar geographical situation, the law and order situation in the NWFP has never been good. Its proximity with Afghanistan and the tribal region that straddles the border, the decades of internecine war in the neighbouring country and the millions of refugees, have all had its impact. But the worrying thing is that it has worsened.

Law and order is a complex game and no one should know it better than the new provincial police chief, Mohammad Sharif Virk, who left his job in the Intelligence Bureau in Islamabad to replace Mr Riffat Pasha to head the police force in the NWFP.

No novice to the NWFP because of having served in almost all of the districts of the province, Mr Virk would not need much time settling in. But the challenges ahead for him are daunting.

The morale in the police force is at its lowest ebb. For critics, Mr Riffat Pasha, the-now-former-police-chief and his predecessor, Mohammad Saeed Khan would long be remembered for overseeing a force raven with internal squabbling, leg-pulling, intrigues and factionalism.

While one failed to act and exert himself as a provincial police chief, the other, who had set himself the goal of winning the heart and minds of the people, could not even win over the support of the majority of his own officers.

His failure to connect with his own senior officers and win them over, led Mr Pasha to rely heavily on junior and inexperienced officers. His three-and-a-half-year term in the NWFP saw him granting shoulder promotions to SHOs becoming DSPs and DSPs becoming SPs and so on.

The result: law and order deteriorated. Kidnappings and kidnapping for ransom saw an unprecedented and alarming rise. Car-snatching and car-jacking registered an upward trend, robberies increased and murders became the order of the day.

Worse still, militants began seizing control of the law and order in some of the southern districts of the NWFP and in the north, the defunct Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat Mohammadi that had been suppressed after putting up an armed rebellion against the state in Malakand, started raising its head again. And Hangu saw one of its worst sectarian violence.

More closely to home, some of the areas in Peshawar turned into a virtually no-go-areas for the police when their officers were shot and murdered. Indeed it was after much reluctance that the police launched an operation in Regi to flush out criminals.

So, Mr Virk, who assumed the charge of his office on Monday, has his plate full. He will find out that his cozy office in the Central Police Office is not exactly a bed of roses, nor is it the arm-chair kind of job he was doing until recently in the Intelligence Bureau's K-Block in Islamabad.