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THERE are no winners in Justice Qazi Faez Isa’s one-man commission report into the Aug 8 attack on Quetta’s Civil Hospital. The interior ministry, intelligence agencies, FC, provincial government, provincial health department, media, VIPs, and the Nacta are all found to contribute to an environment in which militancy and extremism thrive, and in which the aftermath of violent incidents is bungled, leading to loss of life, with no lessons learned.
Even the judiciary — despite producing a comprehensive report — is facing questions about impartiality for choosing to investigate an incident that primarily affected the legal fraternity, rather than the thousands of other attacks that deserved similar scrutiny.
Damning as it is, the report is a welcome reminder of all the promises made and broken since the APS attack, when Pakistan united in a cry of ‘never again’. It is also well timed, coming when Pakistan has championed its counterterrorism successes to such an extent that complacency was beginning to settle in, and attentions were drifting eastward, despite repeated indications that the battle against homegrown militancy is far from won.
The report is a reminder of broken promises.
But the report’s findings hardly come as a surprise. The criticisms levelled have been made ad nauseam by rights groups, the media, and even the different indicted organisations against each other. The interior ministry’s response to the commission’s findings — that it should not be judged on the basis of one incident — is particularly egregious as the report is illustrative of at least a decade of counterterrorism failures.
The most shocking reminder is that there is still no means for accountability when terrorism strikes. No single office or entity must claim responsibility for the failings that lead to continued carnage and, by extension, none claim ownership for implementing existing counterterrorism laws and strategies.
How horrifying to learn the path towards proscribing militant groups. The Balochistan home ministry’s request to the interior ministry in order to have Jamaatul Ahrar and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi al-Alami banned was left unheeded and unanswered. Nacta approached intelligence to verify claims in order to ban the groups, only for that process to go astray. Such bureaucratic convolutions to ban a group that, in the case of Jamaatul Ahrar, claimed not only the Aug 8 attack but dozens others, including the Easter Sunday Lahore bombing and the 2014 Wagah border attack.
If our democracy worked as it should, full responsibility would rest with the interior ministry (the commission notes that the federal government has the power to proscribe organisations under the Anti-Terrorism Act. But with the civil-military imbalance this is not true in practice. And the untouchable nature of the security establishment makes accountability impossible in that realm.
It is evident that the ownership-accountability problem is a fundamental flaw in our counterterrorism strategy. Responses to the inquiry have primarily comprised stakeholders passing the buck to others who abetted their failings, which means that the commission’s eminently sensible recommendations will soon be put to death by committee.
But we cannot keep dodging the problem. Certain recommendations — madressah registration, development of a counter-narrative, legal action against hate speech — must be taken up as part of a broader strategy to tackle the extremist mindset that now prevails in Pakistan. Military operations and improved agency coordination are needed at the tactical level, but the real challenge before us is ideological.
Resistance to Punjab and Sindh’s recent flirtation with the centre in the form of progressive laws on women’s and minorities’ rights has only highlighted the depth of societal regression. State efforts to challenge extremist viewpoints are further undermined by politically expedient attempts to accommodate them — think of Chaudhry Nisar hobnobbing with SSP and ASWJ, the PTI government’s Rs3 million grant for Darul Uloom Haqqania, and the Sindh government’s apparent backtracking on its recently passed law against forced conversion.
Sectarianism is not the preserve of banned militant groups; it runs deep in society, as evidenced most recently in the disgusting aftermath of the Dulmial attack, with even those condemning the violence caveating their comments with disdain for Ahmadis.
The examples are endless, and well documented by now. While we pretend Pakistan has recovered from a decade of horror and regained its senses as evidenced by public support for Zarb-i-Azb, the social fabric continues to fray, tear and rot, with deep-seated hatred along sectarian, ethnic and gender lines coming to define our attitudes toward each other.
Can a judicial inquiry investigate these more nebulous social and identity dynamics? And who will take responsibility for changing a national mindset, when no one even wants to claim the burden of implementing the law and establishing the state’s writ?
The writer is a freelance journalist.
Published in Dawn, December 19th, 2016
