THE National Counter-Terrorism Centre near Kharian, Gujrat, inaugurated by army chief Gen Raheel Sharif on Tuesday is a good time to raise an old question: what is the civilian-led law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus across the country doing to play its part in the fight against militancy?

Expectedly, the military has talked up its purpose-built facility meant primarily to train army troops, but also foreign troops and local paramilitary and police personnel. While the military does have a legitimate and necessary role in specialised counterterrorism operations, the consensus in the world of anti-terrorism expertise is that dense, urban and built-up environments require civilian-led law-enforcement and intelligence operations.

Consider though the state of that civilian-led apparatus across the provinces. In Punjab, an abortive and ill-advised attempt to create a parallel counterterrorism police force has been followed up with no real reforms of the existing police force.

In Sindh, the operation in Karachi has seen the Rangers play a much bigger role than the police themselves.

In Balochistan, the old problem of so-called A and B areas has left the police irrelevant and operationally confined to a tiny percentage of the province’s land mass.

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a strong police leadership freed from the most intense aspects of political interference has restored some morale, but the police force as a whole has been battered and bruised by years of attacks by the Taliban.

In Islamabad, the increased terror threat earlier this year required police from Punjab to be drafted in and, unhappily, Muhammad Sikander, the lone gunman on Jinnah Avenue in August 2013, has come to define the capital territory’s true policing potential.

If a picture of weaknesses — and severe ones — on the civilian front were not dismal enough, the sense of near failure is reinforced by the drift in the policy arena.

Nacta, the much-touted but mostly neglected National Counter-Terrorism Authority, remains in limbo, despite repeated promises by successive governments to re-energise it. The National Internal Security Policy launched with much fanfare by the PML-N government appears to have been forgotten altogether.

Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan, who propelled the creation of the NISP and is principally responsible for its execution, disappears for stretches of time over matters of politics. The revamped and renamed Cabinet Committee on National Security (formerly the Defence Committee of the Cabinet) was launched with much fanfare but has become a victim of civil-military discord and civilian apathy.

Where then is counterterrorism policy to be debated and articulated on the civilian side, much less led operationally by the civilians? Is it any surprise then that the military is seeking to take the lead in yet another area where international experience and logic suggests the civilians ought to be leading? Winning the fight against militancy is as much about the right leadership as it is about the right strategy.

Published in Dawn, October 2nd, 2014