FOLLOWING a troubling spate of abductions of doctors in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the provincial government last week announced that it would issue arms licences to the medical community.

This decision puts the province’s doctors in charge of their own safety, and is thus an abdication of the state’s basic responsibility to provide security for all citizens.

Sadly, the provincial government’s decision should not come as a surprise. At multiple levels, the state has long outsourced security provision, undermining a key aspect of its statehood — the monopoly on violence. By allowing the number of actors who can legitimately (or illegitimately, but with state sanction) use physical force to proliferate, the state has fuelled rather than checked cycles of violence.

Interestingly, this tendency to outsource the provision of security — as well as the use of force to enforce order — is more an indictment of Pakistan’s democratic institutions than of the security environment.

The KP government is not the first to outsource security provision to a professional community. In 2011, Karachi’s traders complained to then interior minister Rehman Malik that they were being threatened, abducted and in some instances killed by extortionists.

Rather than devise a strategy to tackle extortion rackets, Rehman decreed that traders and businessmen would receive expedited access to arms licences in order to protect themselves better. On various occasions (and often in the midst of calls by his party or coalition partners for deweaponisation), Rehman also promised to grant special arms licences to political parties to secure their workers against targeted attacks — a counterproductive consideration given the contours of violence in Karachi.

Before starting to task local communities with their own security provision, the government, which is meant to oversee civilian law enforcement, had already outsourced the resonsibility to paramilitary or military forces. For example, since Operation Clean-Up in the early 1990s, the Rangers have been tasked with maintaining the semblance of law and order in Karachi. Similarly, the Frontier Corps has long displaced the Balochistan police as the main security presence in the province.

More broadly, the massive growth of private security firms in the past decade has underscored the state’s shrinking mandate for security provision. There are approximately 350 private security firms in Pakistan, employing more than 300,000 guards. The government’s failure to regulate this sector or demand greater transparency from security companies indicates a willingness — or at least a ready resignation — to disperse the responsibility of keeping Pakistanis safe.

The outsourcing habit is not confined to the civilian government alone — the military also has a track record of passing its security remit on to other actors. The use of militant proxies during the anti-Soviet ‘jihad’ and against India in Kashmir could be perceived as a form of security outsourcing.

Presumably, these ‘strategic assets’ were cultivated to further Pakistan’s security goals while putting the least number of Pakistanis at direct risk (of course we all know how that turned out).

In an ironic twist, having proved unable to keep certain militant groups in check, the establishment has it seems outsourced security provision to the United States. The US, in turn, executes that responsibility in the form of drone strikes against militant hideouts in the tribal belt.

The erosion of the state’s capacity to provide security and maintain order — as manifest in the above examples — is equivalent to the erosion of the state. This is not only at a conceptual level where statehood is threatened once the monopoly on violence is squandered. This is because security outsourcing becomes a convenient substitution for institution-building. The fact is, in each instance where the state could not provide security it was because the democratic institutions that oversee security provision were not up to the task.

Security provision fails when the government infrastructure that nurtures healthy institutions falls short. For example, policing is not only about having and carrying the right weapons. It works in the context of legislation, regulation and oversight mechanisms necessary to promote the growth of robust, uncorrupt agencies that are both proactive and accountable to the public. Shortfalls of policing should therefore be seen as the result of governance failures.

Similar logic applies in the case of state security. Strategies of outsourcing security to the Frontier Corps in Balochistan or to anti-India militant groups are driven by the failures of inclusive democracy and diplomacy, respectively.

Sadly, outsourced security leads to a downward spiral of institutional decline. No one can be held accountable for the failure to provide security when it is outsourced.

By asking doctors in KP to take up arms, the provincial government is seeking to renounce responsibility for providing security in the first place. And by outsourcing security provision to paramilitary forces and intelligence agencies in Balochistan, the government can delay the urgent need to develop local, accountable institutions that are better placed to address the grievances of the population.

In sum, the chronic habit at various levels of the state of outsourcing security provision points to a fundamental crisis in democratic institution-building. This is worth pointing out at a time when Pakistan’s democratic consolidation is being widely praised, not least because of the recent appointments of a new army chief and Supreme Court chief justice and ongoing local government elections.

Though significant, these developments will not signal true progress unless they lead to the maturing of the institutions that deliver public services, of which security is arguably one of the most important and state-inherent. By reframing shortfalls in security provision as a democratic challenge, we can hope to address the problem more efficiently and coherently.

The writer is a freelance contributor.

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Twitter: @humayusuf