“The National Action Plan (NAP) empowers the military, ‘the performing institution’, whereas the government is characterised by its ineptitude and poor performance.”

This simple statement-of-fact came from a person no less than the former army chief, Gen (retired) Mirza Aslam Beg in immediate response to the NAP. He wrote: “The performance gap ... would widen, creating a 1976 and 1998 like situation, when of necessity, military courts were established by the elected governments, but were soon struck down by the judiciary, and the same judiciary didn’t hesitate for a moment to award the ‘law of necessity’ when the military struck.”

The former army chief who has been associated with attempts to correct the straying politicians in the past was thorough in his analysis. He thought that “the military is also being over-burdened with responsibility,” and he considered it necessary to distinguish the interests of the army from that of the country. In his words “…the resultant over-stretch may harm the interests of both, the country and the military.”

Is it all merely an exercise in public relations?

Let’s recall a little bit more of what Gen Beg said at the time since in the context of military thinking and widely held popular belief it helps us to understand what parameters have defined the debate raging since then. It is a debate, essentially, about the military — which has ultimately usurped the title of ‘sincere’ that the PML-N has assigned to itself especially in recent years — acting in contrast to the lackadaisical, even deliberately dormant and, worse, a terrified, civilian setup.

“The legal authority awarded to the military undermines the judiciary,” Gen Beg observed, in the process concurring even if superficially with so many of those worried about some basic damage NAP could do to the system. In fact he must have made a lot of sense to those calling for civilian supremacy when he remarked that “This over-stepping would be detrimental to the cause of both the institutions. Rather, the Action Plan should have come-up with ideas to correct the delays in dispensation of justice and the development of modalities to deal with corruption…”

“The emphasis,” the former chief confirmed, was “on the military courts” and he had “no doubt the military will deliver.” But at the same time he was constrained to ask, “What about the remaining 19 points?”

What about them?

Pakistanis are still asking more than one-and-a-half years after the action plan had come about in the wake of the horrifying school attack in Peshawar in December 2014. The general perception, backed frequently by the tone and the drift of the public debate, is that an overwhelming majority of Pakistanis had thought that the military will get everything right — including the one and the 19 points.

Indeed one prediction right through has been that while NAP established the army’s command on the issues in a more prominent way, the messiah, the army chief, himself will be compelled to take control through a formal takeover. Many had disagreed that NAP was likely to hasten a coup yet there was a consensus that NAP was certain to have politicians and the various governmental setups they were associated with falling over themselves to show just how committed they were to carrying out NAP orders.

One thing the NAP has predictably led to is the bickering between politicians and division of the country along areas ruled by various parties. There’s no centrality and cohesion between the provinces other than the theme provided by the army. To further discredit elected souls, the credit — where it is due — is claimed by the army. For instance, in Karachi and Balochistan, where at various points in time, the situation was projected and accepted to have improved in spite of the dirty politics.

Crying out when targeted by the army’s reforms, after all these months, the political parties are still busy proving their loyalty to NAP, and through NAP, to the army. There are various versions to subscribe to, such as an official version (provided by an APP story from Peshawar not too long ago), but the inherent message is the same. The story had the lawmakers of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly hailing “the successful actions and operations” under NAP claiming these had “isolated terrorists by reducing space for them to reorganise and operate freely.”

“[The KP lawmakers] said the terrorists were on the run … as the successful Operation Zarb-i-Azb has broken their back and their sanctuaries were destroyed.”

If this was an account dominated by the PML-N’s members of the KP Assembly, others in other parts of the country had their own reasons to appear to be diligently following the diktats of NAP. More than it being a point-wise pursuance of the agenda set by NAP, it’s been a question of who among the executing arms — the federal, the provincial governments and the agencies operating under various commands — has been better able than others to satisfy the overarching authority — the army.

Take Sindh, where Governor Dr Ishrat Ul Ebad had this to say in January this year: “[The] Karachi operation is being conducted in letter and spirit and according to the parameters of National Action Plan.” Dr Ebad further said that up to 80 per cent progress had been made in eliminating culprits involved in terrorism, extortion, kidnapping for ransom and target killing.

Did he say 80 per cent? The agony caused to some clerics by the sight of a new law on the registration of madressahs would indicate that seven months after that victory speech by Dr Ebad, Sindh was still trying to meet some basic NAP requirements.

Thus began a news item in August 2016: “With the objective of implementing the National Action Plan against terrorism in letter and spirit, the new Sindh cabinet has approved the drafts of two bills to adopt a mechanism to register religious seminaries and monitor their funding as well as for keeping an eye on non-governmental organisations in the province. The cabinet … with Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah in the chair, accorded approval to the draft of the Sindh Deeni Madaris Bill 2016 and the Sindh Voluntary Social Welfare Agencies’ Bill 2016.”

Whereas the newly appointed chief minister most obviously was hoping to flaunt this as his mission statement, the move had a federal government ally, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, vowing to unleash hell on the Sindh government. The Maulana, whose JUI-F may claim to have small pockets of support in the province, was insistent that the religious scholars had to be won over by reason rather than by force — a statement we’ve heard ad nauseum that had echoed all through the NAP years, just as the clerics had been a major opposition to reform in the time prior to this action plan.

On the day Maulana Fazl roared from the newspaper pages with his threat to the Sindh government, provincial home minister Rana Sanaullah sat in Lahore explaining some of the salient features of NAP in Punjab. And whatever grand projections and figures he came up with in support of his argument, there was no obfuscating the reality that the ‘religious elements’ were the most difficult part of the problem to overcome.

In fits and starts, Punjab has taken its own course to following the NAP. It had its critics from within the province and from outside, just as it had been keen on pointing out the ‘blunders’ committed by non-PML-N governments in KP and Sindh.

The Shahbaz Sharif administration had surprised many in July 2015 when Malik Ishaq, a militant leader said to be close to the Sharifs, was gunned down in Muzaffargarh along with two of his sons and a bunch of his associates in the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LJ).

The incident showcased how the ‘cleaning up’ had been taken up without first giving confidence to an extremely important plank in the anti-militancy war: the police. Everyone seemed to believe the police was not quite capable of executing a plan as sensitive and dangerous as taking out Malik Ishaq. Resultantly, while a group of policemen were publicly given credit for the Muzaffargarh action against the LJ, the general belief was that it was only the army which could ‘handle’ these hardcore extremists.

These were the kind of remarks that further pulled down an already despondent police force. It was not uncommon for senior police officers then to complain how their work had been trivialised since NAP was introduced. The police, which are ideally placed to play a vital part in NAP by virtue of their experience of working at the grassroots, blame this on the establishment and a media which must make fun of a particular set of people in uniform.

There were other signals sent out by Malik Ishaq’s killing — one of the most significant in the campaign also saw the revival of executions by the state and some quiet efforts at controlling religious and sectarian outfits.

Many of these signals turned out to be false. Those who were encouraged by the incident to loudly forecast an indiscriminate cleanup operation were soon proven wrong amid allegations that the old policies that separated the ‘good’ militants from the ‘bad’ continued.

The policy continues in various shapes and it is likely to in the future as well. Solutions and victories in wars and insurgencies are dependent on those in charge of battles being able to tell the one who can be reformed and rehabilitated, and who is thus worth conserving apart from the irredeemable. That’s how the campaigns are launched and won. This is the course we are likely to be following, NAP or no NAP.

The writer is Dawn’s Resident Editor in Lahore

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 28th, 2016