On January 27, 2016, the National Assembly Standing Committee on Interior bemoaned that a counter-terrorism narrative has yet to be developed to aid the implementation of the National Action Plan (NAP) against terrorism. It also expressed skepticism at the quality of implementation of the plan and urgently sought a detailed briefing over the issue from Interior Minister Nisar Ali who, in keeping with his tradition of operational invisibility, was not part of the meeting.

Parliamentary committees are bipartisan groups of legislators charged with tracking progress on assigned subjects and generating inputs for formal debates on them on the floor of the house to hold the government accountable against its commitments.

The observations of the latest meeting of the Interior Affairs Committee make some things clear: (i) the Parliament considers NAP to be the lynchpin of the state’s prevalent counterterrorism operations, (ii) the Parliament considers a broader counter-terrorism narrative necessary to not just underpin NAP but imperative for its success, and (iii) the Parliament has just indicted the government of having failed to draft a counter-terrorism narrative even a year after a 20-point NAP was developed as a response to the school attack in Peshawar that killed 150 students and teachers.

In a nutshell, the bipartisan Parliamentary Committee on Interior Affairs overseeing, among other things, the performance of the government on delivering on the commitments on counter-terrorism as an outcome of the national consensus against terrorism, seems to indicate that the state is not fully in control of its own plan against terrorism, and may yet falter completely. It also implies that there is not just no counter-terrorism narrative, there is no counter-terrorism policy, only an action plan.

What does all this mean? One way to a better understanding of this is to analyse if the state actually has a counter-terrorism narrative in the first place, which in turn, can’t exist without a formal counter-terrorism policy. And if there is one, what’s the problem with it? Who has decided what should constitute counter-terrorism? And who should actually be deciding it? Before we answer these specific questions, it will be instructive to start by asking whether the state of Pakistan has actually changed its policy related to counter-terrorism, or not?

A plan without a policy

The 20-point NAP, drafted a year ago, is the closest that Pakistan has come in its past 15-year terrorism-afflicted period to hammering out an overarching action plan that outlines specific actions in response to a national consensus against terrorism.

What’s significant about NAP is that it is a result of equal inputs from the military, parties in the Parliament and parties outside the Parliament, as well as those from both religious and non-religious groups, and from both the centre and the provinces. For added measure, the NAP was adopted by the elected government and endorsed by the Parliament. For Pakistan’s fractious and raucous polity, this was a remarkable achievement in itself. The ownership of this consensus was -- as far as legitimate political pluralisms go -- pretty universal in Pakistan.

So far so good! Where things started going wrong, and continue going down that path, is that while the policy of zero-tolerance of terrorism through a specific action plan was drafted, no formal articulation was made of the counter-terrorism policy or a counter-terrorism narrative that drives it. It is important to make a distinction between a policy and an action plan. While the policy -- the consensus on NAP -- constituted a commitment against terrorism, the NAP merely outlines a list of outputs.

The NAP is not underpinned by a formal parent policy document that articulates a mission statement which explicitly expresses the irreversibility of the commitment and a long-term guarantee to reverse the causes and reasons that engender violence based on religion. There is neither a state counter-terrorism narrative that would permeate the articulate NAP or reporting on it.

Related article: Strategy to counter terrorism

The absence of such a "National Policy (Document) on Counter-Terrorism" renders the NAP as merely a set of immediate outputs rather than long-term goals with intended impact that can be translated through the counter-terrorism narrative. For example, Action #2 of NAP -- "Special courts, headed by the officers of the armed forces, will be established for the speedy trial of terrorists. These courts will be established for a term of two years" -- which is the only of 20 points that suggests any periodicity or timeframe -- seems to suggest that the implied counter-terrorism policy is for two years only. The text or content of none of the other 19 points of NAP suggests that the state will take measures other than those outlined to remove the causes or policies that have brought Pakistan to this pass.

And that’s where the core problem lies with this unarticulated anti-terrorism policy. The NAP promises to stop media (Point #5) and cyberspace (Point #14) from spreading hate speech but fails to promise a purge of hate-filled text books taught to Pakistan’s tens of million children in schools and beyond that help them adopt hate as response to what they perceive are conspiracies against them and their country and (majority) religion. Similarly, NAP promises to amend the constitution but only for improving access to intelligence agencies to terrorists (Point #20) and to hang them through military courts (Point #2) but not to contrarian clauses of the constitution that militate against citizens on the basis of their faith and, as history has shown, allows violence as a tool to settle scores or to use religion to pursue political goals.

A policy without a narrative

So, there we have it. An Action Plan without a policy or an attendant narrative. The all-parties conference attended by politicos, representatives of religious thought (although only Islam, not any other faiths) and sectarian groups and the military brass produced the National Action Plan but not a National Counter-Terrorism Policy. No counter-terrorism narrative was discussed or approved either. The consensus was very much there against terrorism but not the articulation of a mission statement that could translate itself into changes in the constitution and the fabric of the body-politic to emerge as one of the touchstones of the state’s counter-terrorism mission.

And this is a shame because the NAP, handed to the PML-N government in general and Chaudhry Nisar in particular, for implementation, will always be seen as one of many things the Pakistani state tried over the past few decades to shake off the murderous monkey of terrorism off its back.

By not making the historic consensus against terrorism part of the constitution, it will be merely regarded as a consensus championed by PML-N rather than the entire spectrum of political pluralism in the country. What a criminally wasted opportunity!

Even the ownership that otherwise PML-N can proudly proclaim credit for will, eventually, be diluted because short-term electoral compulsions will trump long-term national imperatives. There is only so much road PML-N will travel down without running into its key constituencies of religious and merchant classes that form the core of its base who see violence in the name of God as one of many ways to beat off conspiracies imagined and real.

The natural and permanent home of a national counter-terrorism policy is the Parliament through constitutional guarantees. Without this, the murderous policies of governments led by General Ziaul Haq and General Pervez Musharraf will never be brought to full account and, thus, will also not stop the military in the present or future from ceding ownership of security policies to people’s representatives.

The country and its people are exhausted by policies that serve only institutional interests and as a price of this allow room for imposition of discriminatory, non-representative, and self-defeating doctrines that spill blood. An action plan against terrorism with an expiry date is far from enough. A formal anti-terrorism policy with a narrative that articulates its own irreversibility should be both the beginning and the end.