Unhappily, that now seems to have been little more than a familiar last-minute effort to temporarily avoid international scrutiny and censure.
The Jamaat-ud-Dawa
...the front organization of Lashkar-e-Taiba...
and Falah-e-Insaniyat
...the current false nose and mustache of Jamaat ud-Dawa, which was the false nose and mustache of Lashkar e-Taiba...
Foundation, offshoots of and widely perceived to be fronts for the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba
...the Army of the Pure,an Ahl-e-Hadith terror organization founded by Hafiz Saeed. LeT masquerades behind the Jamaat-ud-Dawa facade within Pakistain and periodically blows things up and kills people in India. Despite the fact that it is
banned, always an interesting concept in Pakistain, the organization remains an blatant tool and perhaps an arm of the ISI...
, were outlawed in Pakistain in February via a presidential ordinance amending the Anti Terrorism Act, 1997. Even though the presidential ordinance was suddenly moved ahead of what turned out to be a fateful Financial Action Task Force meeting in Gay Paree, it was a sound decision to ban groups active in Pakistain that have been blacklisted by a UN Security Council committee on sanctions against terrorist groups.
Aligning Pakistain’s domestic policies with its international obligations is a welcome and necessary step.
Yet, presidential ordinances have been constitutionally curtailed, and as soon as the ordinance to amend the ATA was passed, a 120-day expiration countdown began.
In April, it was reported that the federal government was considering placing a bill before parliament to replace the presidential ordinance. But parliament’s term ended in May; a caretaker government was in place till August; and now lawyers for Hafiz Saeed
...founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba and its false-mustache offshoot Jamaat-ud-Dawa. The United Nations declared the JuD a terrorist organization in 2008 and Hafiz Saeed a terrorist as its leader. Hafiz, JuD and LeT are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Pak intel apparatus, so that amounted to squat...
have told the Islamabad High Court where they are challenging the JuD and FiF bans that the presidential ordinance has lapsed.
Staggeringly, this has happened as a FATF team has visited Pakistain as part of a year-long compliance assessment and determined that Pakistain’s overall progress has been unsatisfactory when it comes to removing this country from the FATF grey list.
Nacta, which maintains and regularly updates a list of banned groups in the country, no longer has either the JuD nor the FiF listed as a proscribed group on its website.
While the JuD and FiF, and all groups that face state sanction and closure, are entitled to and must receive due process, the legal process should not be reduced to a farce.
If in February an assessment was made that Pakistain should expand the list of banned groups to include groups that have been banned by the UNSC sanctions committee, what has changed between then and now to justify a reversal of that decision?
The opaque and, at times, irrational decision-making that has characterised Pakistain’s fumbling attempts at rolling back some holy warrior groups and Death Eater networks not only harm the country’s international standing but will make it more difficult to eventually win the fight against all forms of terrorism, militancy and extremism.
Prime Minister Imran Khan
... aka
Taliban Khan, who who convinced himself that playing cricket qualified him to lead a nuclear-armed nation with severe personality problems...
has pledged to reinvigorate and purposefully implement the National Action Plan. The military leadership has consistently maintained that there is no space for terrorism, militancy and extremism of any stripe inside Pakistain.
The national leadership must deliver on its promises.