I am trying to work out which one is the greater challenge.
That there are Taliban in Swat or that the police and judiciary fall short of minimum standards.
To say that a militia of a few thousand fighters at best, is likely to run over a 600,000 strong Pakistan Army stretches creduility. Even the mighty Rustum feared taking on such odds in his own legends. That Taliban can run over Pakistan is similar to chicken little’s hue and cry about the sky losing altitude. However, absence of consequences for criminals CAN plunge the country into lawlessness.
In fact it already has and that is the clear and present danger.
Defense from external threats has always been on top of national agenda without exceptions. However, it appears that defense from internal threats, or law and order has been relegated to use in slang.
The per capita expenditure on law enforcement in District Rawalpindi, one of most well policed district, is Rs350 per person per year, with one police person for every 800 people. I don’t believe a scholarly effort is required to prove that this department of the state is badly dysfunctional.
The Lahore high court has 36 judges that adjudicate the disputes of about 90 million people. That is less than one Judge per 2.5 million people. No wonder LHC and its lower courts have 1.3 million cases pending as of April 2009
Peshawar High court has 13 judges that mind the disputes of 21 million people. That is one judge for every 1.6 million people. PHC and lower courts had 200,000 pending cases as of 1 April 2009
We need to fight the battle in NWFP. However, fighting a battle without a strategy for winning the war is another fanciful enterprise. That containing the Taliban will somehow cause the people of Pakistan to be more satisfied with their grievious lot is silly. To expect that if someone’s daughter is raped and there is no justice in court, they will sit tight and not pick up a gun or an axe and go for walk, is rather optimistic.
One in ten registered FIRs make it to court. That coupled with 1.6 million pending cases in the court system of Pakistan, says we are sitting on dynamite, getting dryer by the day, and starting to crackle.
Taliban is not the core issue. The core issue is effective policing and dispensation of justice.
It is not a tall order to appoint another 1,000 judges countrywide. Such a measure may re-motivate people to respect the law. That is a priceless dividend for a cost which is slender in comparison. Yet, the police is far from effective and the judiciary remains crippled.
Such neglect may be deliberate on the part of the government, but it seems there is a lot more that certain organized segments of the society, particularly the media, and civil society can do to motivate the government to focus on this issue. If a thousand militants, in an ex-tourist resort, armed with guns, can literally grip the attention of the world, what can a million organized voices armed with pens do.
Naivety of the urban educated Pakistanis (in fact globally) is just stinking. It’s not a handful vs 600,000. It’s the mere facts that armies across the world don’t get trained to deal with guerrilla warfare so numbers don’t matter.
It seriously makes me angry and sad that at a moment when we are facing the threat to our existence not as a nation state alone but also as a society, these nerds come up and try to pretend if Taliban threat is overblown or American conspiracy or is not the core issue. No society is perfect, neither is ours but we shouldn’t be bogged down by these sick thoughts who compare Taliban with justice system and judicial reforms.
i disagree that there is a single core issue that is causing the rot in the Pakistani society. We have a whole raft of serious problems which are working in tandem to destroy the very foundations of nationhood. chief among them injustice, unkindness to each other, extremism, sectarianism, provincialism, ethnic hatreds, etc. readily come to mind.
khurram farooqui has made a number of good points in his post. a lot of our ills are fundamental character flaws within our own beings.
what one notices also is that on these boards we all come and harp our tunes and move on. there is no coherent effort from any direction, be it the readership or the site administrators, to abstract worthwhile suggestions and integrate them into an approach that can be used profitablly to change our outlook as a society.
oh well …
@Obaid:
Thanks for the link to Nosheen Ali’s article. It has very clearly and honestly analyzed the root cause of Talibanization. Those who are arguing that police and judiciary reforms are the core issue are deluding themselves. Police and judicial failures are not unique to Pakistan. Yet we don’t see the world overrun by relgious fanatics everywhere. The problem lies with the supermacist indoctrination of Pakistani society that has been taught to treat anything non-Islamic with contempt. This has strenghtened the mullah mentality in common Pakistani.
All countries have law enforcement issues. Some more some less. 100% perfect police is near impossible.
Let us not be in denial about Taliban get diverted with police and justice mal-practices. It’s not perfect but it works.
However we have get Taliban out of pakistan to go forward.
Gilani wants the Army to “finish” the Taliban off. Good grief! No modern Army has had to take on an insurgency as fierce as this one. The US Army - with all it’s money and professionalism - took years before they got a handle on the garden-variety insurgency in Iraq. The Pakistan Army, long trained to fight India, is ill-equipped militarily, strategically, and ideologically to even dent this enemy. They’re going to make a complete mess, cause massive collateral damage, and set the Taliban up for a famous victory. Balkanization is now squarely on the horizon.
The other day my cab driver from Burma told me that how “shocked” he was when he went back to his country after six years.
Everything was changed for better.
After 15 years I went back to a place in Swat called Bahrain.
I was “shocked” to see nothing was changed. Everything was exactly the way I left it. The only thing changed was me.
I dont know why,
May be if tomorrow Alexander decides to come back to check up on his sins I mean offsprings (Talibans), he would not have any trouble to find his whereabouts.
whether or not the taliban are the core issue, police reforms in Pakistan are certianly vital. I have even argued that the U.S. should earmark a specific portion of its aid to Pakistan for enchancing the police capabilities. http://thetrajectory.com/blogs/?p=514
Hassan Abbas in Police and Law Enforcement Reforms in Pakistan has stressed on the value of employing the police as an instrument in counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism. His views can be accessed at http://www.ispu.org/files/PDFs/ISPU%20-%20Police%2 0Reforms%20in%20Pakistan%20Report.pdf
Pakistan’s problem is its constitution says Ali Eteraz
[quote]
A recent sharia-for-peace deal between militant groups and the civilian government in Pakistan’s quasi-autonomous Swat region has ignited interest in the status of Islamic law in Pakistan. The U.S. State Department, concerned about terrorist safe-havens, called the deal a “negative development.” Meanwhile, Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek, trying to look at the bright side of things, argued that the deal might drive a wedge between “violent” radicals and those that are “merely extreme.”
Both of these views, rooted in the “war on terror” frame of thinking, diagnose Pakistan’s relationship with Islam incorrectly. The real issue in Pakistan is not that from time to time a group of militants, while demanding the implementation of sharia, begins attacking civilians. This, while deplorable and painful, is a consequence of Pakistan’s constitution. The essential problem in Pakistan is its flawed constitutional framework, which forces every citizen to refer to their idiosyncratic and personal views on life through the lens of “Islam.” Such a state of affairs has the effect of concealing every political, material and economic demand behind theological verbiage, and that situation ultimately favors religious hard-liners and militants who are willing to use violence.
Pakistan will not be rid of such religion-based conflict until it addresses the problem of its 1973 Constitution. That document’s constitutional Islamization engenders a cultural competition over who controls Islam—a conflict which, thanks to the Soviet war in Afghanistan and then 9/11, has become politicized, militarized, and weaponized.
[/quote]
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=235