National Security Strategy – Part – II
Today’s Pakistan is not the nation the Quaid-e-Azam created it to be. We have been laid low by the bankruptcy of the policies we follow, under pressure internationally from forces with vested interests and under attack domestically by the forces of evil – which includes both religious bigotry and deviancy.
While we are still far from being a failed state, the criminal mode of governance of the last five years has put us in a near critical condition. The appetite of those indulging in loot and plunder has not yet satiated, and any security policy must have accountability as one of its primary pillars.
There are two effective methods to avert national threats – political policies and military strategy. It is naive (and dangerous) for any state to consider that maintaining friendly political ties with another state can alone guarantee its security. Today’s friends can be tomorrow’s enemy, and vice versa. The security policy must be based upon ‘caution and realism’ and not ‘sentimentality and hope’. A country’s military force remains a sure guarantee to securing the national sovereignty and security of a nation state.
National security involves protecting the nation’s infrastructure, the potency of its foreign policy and economy, the civil rights of its citizens, trade and work availability and the essentials of national sovereignty. National security envisages the inter-relationship of these facts with terrorism, globalisation, poverty and human trafficking and/or illegal immigration. Three factors in the 21st century dominate national security – the economy, the demographic movement of people and threats and attacks by extremists. We have already seen states more powerful than Pakistan crumble under the weight of declining economics, alienation of the people and soaring military expenditure.
There is need to achieve real consensus on the appropriate grand strategy for Pakistan. Our grand strategy must allocate resources to create various instruments of power for defence. It should also focus on strategic planning, which is the base from which the security strategy formulation must be built. The participation of elected representatives provides moral authority. Long-range planning and strategy formulation will always give way to the pressing combination of crisis management and near-term policy planning and implementation. At present, the executive branch plans for particular events.
Strategy reports must be a focused, comprehensive effort involving political leadership and permanent bureaucracies in the development of a common vision and purpose for the near future. Another major contributor to failure is the complexity of recent arrangements for making economic policy. Strategies for such transnational issues as environmental security, terrorism, and the nexus it has with money-laundering, narcotics and human trafficking must focus at the sub-regional level for implementation. Instead of concentrating exclusively on institutions and processes for the development of a national security strategy we must concentrate on people, who really define the character of the institutions and who make the processes what they are. People of intelligence and goodwill respond to the need to place national interests above those of organisation or person.
National security enhancement must bring together elements of national power. The policy options can be to institutionalise national security decision-making by the creation of a permanent National Security Council; restructure intelligence agencies into two main agencies – the National Intelligence Agency dealing with economic, political and geopolitical matters and the Defence Intelligence Agency dealing with military intelligence matters thus eradicating the duplication of intelligence. By the fusion of intelligence, a small National Intelligence Council can combine the work of these two agencies coordinating intelligence estimates from various sources to present a consolidated summary to both the PM and the president.
Citizens want speedy and equitable justice within their means. The only way this can be done is through very strict accountability to include (a) the superior judiciary; (b) law enforcement agencies and the military; and (c) separate speedy trial courts, which must deal with those who violate the very laws they are sworn to uphold. The system will be compromised the way it is now if there is no credible deterrent in it. Another policy option is also to organise all border paramilitary forces/coast guards and immigration under one Homeland Command.
Amazing though it may be, the fact is that there is no institutionalised decision-making process in Pakistan. At the tactical level the decisions we take are not in strategic harmony and instead in a very slip-shod, fickle and disorganised manner. We do take cursory input of various public institutions but never turn to the private sector for input on a whole range of issues. We have been at the mercy of individual whims. The PM must have a permanent mechanism that can draw upon all federal and provincial resources for information gathering, collation of recommendations and preparation of option papers, a permanent National Security Council Secretariat staffed by the finest brainpower that is available in the country.
Unfortunately, the role of the NSC in supporting good governance by institutionalising the decision-making process is controversial because public perception envisages the armed forces’ control and/or interference in civilian government. This misinformation needs to be corrected. The 18th Amendment mandates all executive authority in the hands of the PM; he must chair the NSC. Politicians have been enhancing the political role of the NSC because of their own insecurity, due to which there is ambiguity about its tasks.
There is a difference between the NSC headed by the PM and the NSC Secretariat (NSCS) with the national security adviser as it’s head. The NSCS is simply a mechanism available to the PM. In the political sense, the NSC – which has officials of cabinet rank and the four armed forces chiefs of staff – is a buffer that protects the country from arbitrary decision-making by creating a check and balance between the elected executive, bureaucracy and the people.
The NSCS must prepare a comprehensive ‘National Security Strategy’. A planning committee headed by the NSA will prepare policy briefs, position papers and policy guidelines on different aspects of national security for consideration and approval by the NSC. Approved policy papers should be presented to parliament and/or published for debate by the public and the media. This NSC should meet as frequently as is needed, involving intense and candid discussions, rather than adopting a traditional bureaucratic approach.
Given the number of crises, partly geo-political and partly political but mostly economic, we do not have the luxury to take time out to ponder what exactly went wrong and why it is still going wrong. The problems are complex and taking corrective measures now without further delay is critical to our continued survival as a nation.
(Based on excerpts from lectures delivered at the NDU, Islamabad, PAF Air War College, Karachi and the PN Naval War College, Lahore over the years)
Concluded
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