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| India-Pakistan |
| Low bar on terror |
| 2017-09-17 |
| [DAWN] WHEN you have very low expectations of somebody, you are unlikely to be surprised or disappointed when the person fails to deliver. But even with this minimal bar, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, our ex-interior minister, is in a class of his own. For years, instead of a sound counterterrorism strategy, we have had countless press conferences justifying his string of failures. Clearly, this is a man who likes the sound of his own voice. In a recent interview, he uttered this gem: “Politics, especially governance, is both an art and a science.” Sadly, he could master neither, with his recent stint in government serving as a lesson in what not to do when in power. When he went on to say that “he had always tried to manage things”, we can only give him an ‘E’ for effort. For the rest, he gets an ‘F’ for failure. As jihadists slaughtered hundreds on his watch, he had to be dragged to sign off on the National Action Plan. Before the bloody attack on a school in Peshawar in December 2014 that killed over 130 children, he was the keenest proponent of talks with the militants, together with Imran Khan. But even when a sensible plan had been hammered out, our hero dragged his feet over its implementation. Out of the scores of committees and sub-committees set up to monitor progress and implementation, one wonders how many actually met. Thus, of all the lofty goals of reviewing curricula to eliminate extremist content; controlling the thousands of madressahs that have proliferated across Pakistan; preventing hate speech from being broadcast from mosques and TV studios; boosting intelligence-sharing between agencies and provinces; and improving the legal system, none have been met. Whenever he was asked about NAP’s progress, Nisar would shrug his narrow shoulders, and pass the buck on to the provincial governments; he was probably not pressed too hard by his cabinet colleagues. If ever there was a candidate for dismissal, resignation, or, indeed, hara kiri, it was our ex interior minister. I have never met him, but his lack of contact with reality was revealed when, in response to our new foreign minister’s sound advice that we needed to put our own house in order, Nisar replied: “With friends like him, who needs enemies?” So clearly, he remains convinced that he did a great job, and our ambivalent attitude towards jihadists and, more generally, towards extremism, is sound. Dream on, Chaudhry Sahib. |
| Posted by:Fred |