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DAWN EDITORIAL: 16 February 2025
THERE are good reasons to be wary. With a new US administration under Donald Trump consolidating its grip on that nation’s foreign policy, there is uncertainty about the short- to medium-term future of Pakistan-US ties.
Recent developments give cause for concern. The Foreign Office has been compelled to publicly express its concerns regarding the outcomes of a recent meeting between President Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Specifically, Islamabad is worried about Mr Trump’s offer to sell advanced military technologies, such as F-35 jets, to India, which has implications for Pakistan’s national defence.
It is also indignant that the joint communiqué issued after the meeting has called for Pakistan to “expeditiously bring to justice” those responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks and the Pathankot incident and called for Pakistani territory to not be used for cross-border terrorism. Such references are “one-sided” and “misleading”, the FO has said.
Meanwhile, the US has nominated S. Paul Kapur, a scholar of Indian origin known for his hawkish views on Pakistan, to be its representative for South and Central Asia. Mr Kapur would be the latest addition to a bevy of strong critics of Pakistan in the new administration. His nomination is already being seen in some circles as a sign of Washington’s souring view of Islamabad’s policies.
Then there are vocal groups of Pakistani expatriates in the US who rallied behind Mr Trump during his campaign and have been pushing for the new administration to take a harder line on Islamabad’s internal policies. All of these factors seem to give the impression that the regime in Islamabad is in the unenvious position of being forced to once again ‘prove’ its utility for US policymakers.
There is no question that Pakistan’s concerns regarding India are valid. New Delhi seems to once again be leveraging economic heft to avoid accountability for its own involvement in running global assassination and terrorism networks, while at the same time using its engagements with foreign partners to shift blame publicly onto Pakistan.
Islamabad should not stand by idly as India plays this game; it must take a more proactive approach to establishing Pakistan’s bona fides. It is regrettable that despite Pakistan’s long engagement in the global war against terrorism and its continuing counterterrorism cooperation with the US, the steep price its people have paid in social and economic terms is still not recognised or appreciated.
Clearly, we need to rethink our foreign and security policies to bring them closer to the expectations of foreign allies while keeping national interests supreme.
Published in Dawn, February 16th, 2025
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Abbas Nasir // DAWN: 16 February 2025
DESPITE signs of defiance from the Arab states, most significantly Saudi Arabia, to US President Donald Trump’s Gaza ethnic cleansing plan, which visualises forced displacement of some two million Palestinians, a “clean out … to build Middle East’s Riviera”, the coming week will make clear if the Arab leaders’ words were just words or will translate into something more concrete.
This coming Thursday, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE and hosts Saudi Arabia will discuss the ‘Arab plan’ reportedly being prepared by Egypt ahead of the Feb 27 Arab summit in Cairo as a counter-proposal aimed at peace and reconstruction in Gaza without displacing the Palestinians.
UAE ambassador to the US Yousef al Otaiba said in Dubai last Wednesday he saw “no alternative” to the Trump plan, fuelling scepticism about the stance of the Arab world. These doubts are magnified by the fact that the UAE is one of the main OIC Arab members to be Israel’s partner in the Abraham Accords; it is also a destination where IDF soldiers go for R&R without fearing the law.
Those who continue to harbour doubts about the real position of the Arab and the wider Muslim world point to a number of factors regarding their fears. The first is that despite strong statements against Israel’s mass murder in Gaza, it has remained business as usual for many of these states.
What is not unpredictable is the Palestinians’ will to fight for the liberation of their land.
Whilst Israel imposed a brutal Gaza lockdown and allowed in only a trickle of supplies to the besieged Palestinians, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, according to Israeli claims denied by Jordan, left the land supply route unimpeded from the Gulf ports through their territories to Israel.
Turkey, too, has lashed out at Israel’s Gaza campaign in tough words but the oil supply from Azerbaijan via Georgia and the Turkish port Ceyhan via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline continued to the apartheid state. It supplies nearly 30 per cent of Israel’s oil needs. This was critical during its military campaign.
The Erdogan government also facilitated the rise of its proxy HTS administration in Syria, which enabled Israel to swallow additional chunks of the Golan Heights including the strategically important Mt Hermon from where Israel can monitor both South Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, a Hezbollah stronghold, as well as Damascus to its northeast.
Notwithstanding these examples, it is also true that Saudi Arabia (which like almost all Arab and Gulf states views Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas as a threat to the status quo and its rule) has consistently called for a two-state solution as part of the ‘normalisation’ of relations with Israel before it enters into the Abraham Accords.
Also, the Gaza war saw Turkey’s annual $7 billion trade with Israel reduce to less than half. Turkish trade and industry sources say the remaining volume is not due to state deals, which have been banned but because of agreements between foreign-owned companies in Turkey and the apartheid state.
These facts need to be factored in but for a balanced analysis it is also important to look at the compelling factors for Arab states to oppose displacement.
Egypt has vehemently opposed displacement from Gaza to its territory for two reasons. The first, of course, is it might prove a shot in the arm for the Islamists that this government and its predecessors have fought against. Combined with the Hamas presence among displaced Palestinians, the Muslim Brotherhood may regain its power that President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has brutally suppressed.
No less important is Egypt’s fear that any future action in the occupied territories by Palestinian fighters may bring Israel’s retaliation to its soil and suck it into a new, vicious conflict, which might shred the Camp David peace accords it concluded with Israel under American auspices in 1978.
Jordan’s position is even more precarious with some 35pc of its population of 11m already comprising Palestinians, many of whom are angry at the Gaza genocide, the West Bank settlements expansions, and Israel’s riding roughshod over many areas under the Palestinian Authority. Another influx of Palestinians may well ignite the tinder box that is very unstable as it is.
An encouraging sign comes from what the Saudi government, media, public figures, and academics have been saying within the country and also while talking to foreign media. They have the same message: a two-state solution is a prerequisite to any normalisation. Saudi academic Mutlaq al-Mutairi of King Saud University has been reported as saying that Saudi Arabia will support the Arab plan even if it means compensating Egypt and Jordan for the aid that Trump has threatened to cut off.
The US president is known for taking obnoxious, absolutist positions in order to kick-start negotiations and make deals. He also remains extremely unpredictable. But what is not is the Palestinians’ will to fight for freedom and the liberation of their land as we heard from those sitting on the rubble of their homes under which lie the remains of their loved ones. They said they weren’t going anywhere.
Egyptian real estate tycoon Hisham Talaat Moustafa, quoted by Egypt’s Daily News, has proposed a $27bn reconstruction plan for Gaza as an alternative to Trump’s which he termed an “illogical and unfeasible” proposal. His plan visualises no displacement from Gaza.
Speaking on MBC TV, Mr Moustafa outlined his vision for creating 200,000 housing units in Gaza within three years. He proposed utili-sing the resources of 40 to 50 construction companies and allocating $20bn to construct enough units to accommodate 1.3m residents. A further $4bn would be invested in infrastructure, and $3bn in educational, healthcare, and commercial services.
Is Mr Moustafa’s plan part of the well-advanced Egyptian plan that unnamed officials have been referring to? And will Arab leaders prove wrong Saad Zaghloul, the leader of Egypt’s nationalist movement in 1919, who had scoffed at the idea of Arab unity by asking “zero plus zero equals what?”
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
abbas.nasir@hotmail.com
Published in Dawn, February 16th, 2025
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Muhammad Amir Rana
THE government has announced another policy related to countering extremism; it contains the same flowery words, borrowed jargon, hollow phrases, and unfeasible implementation plans as several policies before it. One can only hope that the National Prevention of Violent Extremism Policy (NPVE), announced by the National Counter Terrorism Authority (Nacta), will not meet the fate of these previous policies, which are gathering dust in bureaucratic corridors.
The new policy, designed to meet the obligations of the revised National Action Plan (2021), is filled with ambitious goals centred on the five Rs: ‘revisit’, ‘reach out’, ‘reduce risk’, ‘reinforce’, and ‘reintegrate’. Like previous policies, the new policy also divides its implementation plan into three phases: short term, medium term, and long term — from six months to five years.
It is intriguing how most security-related policy documents contain similar types of phrases, and bureaucrats think such terms make policy documents more attractive. However, in essence, the policy contains nothing that hasn’t been touched upon by previous policy documents, including the National Security Policy, the National Internal Security Policies, the Counter Violent Extremism Policy, and the National Narrative. There was no real need for any new policy document; instead, implementing previous policies was more important.
Although the NPVE encompasses numerous elements that state institutions must address urgently, security institutions have their own priorities and set the targets accordingly. They typically select components that align with ongoing practices from policy documents. For example, state institutions have done much to repatriate Afghan refugees and regulate media and social media spaces. They have evolved certain mechanisms for countering terrorism financing under the FATF obligations. Sadly, more critical issues have been included as mere fillers since the first internal security policy was conceived. These include the Balochistan reconciliation process, reforms in the criminal justice system, CT-related prosecution, and capacity building of security institutions. One critical point of effective collaboration between the intelligence agencies and law enforcement, for which Nacta was established, has been gradually eliminated from policy documentation. The Joint Intelligence Directorate may have become active, but its effectiveness is not visible as incidents of terrorism are on the rise and the reach of militant groups is expanding.
Let us review the newly introduced policy available on the Nacta website. The entire document reflects a policing approach to social and ideological issues, which are traditionally outside the jurisdiction of the police. The components that catch the eye of the intelligentsia and international donors investing in counterterrorism and counter-extremism initiatives in Pakistan include the National Narrative by Nacta. The federal education ministry will introduce curriculum reforms, which will see messages of peace, tolerance, and diversity included in the syllabi. The religious affairs ministry aims to create social harmony. To achieve these objectives, implementing partners will be the National Curriculum Council, the Higher Education Commission, the Directorate General of Religious Education, and the Ittehad Tanzimat-i-Madaris.
One wonders whether all these implementing partners have the will to implement these policies and introduce peace, tolerance, and diversity-based changes in the syllabi of learning institutions, especially in madressahs, which are sectarian by nature and have their own interpretation of peace and harmony. Their political economy will suffer significantly if they agree to such reforms.
In addition, the policy discusses trust-building measures that will involve working closely with religious scholars. It will be interesting to observe how state institutions implement this component while working on a similar initiative under Paigham-i-Pakistan. There is no harm in launching a new initiative, but security institutions are currently implementing policies under Paigham-i-Pakistan, much like they did for the jihad policy for decades. Reaching out to religious institutions and introducing a “consensus religious accord against terrorism and extremism” cannot bring about change unless the religious community owns it and develops a consensus among themselves that society truly needs peace and harmony.
So far, the religious clergy listens to what the state institutions teach them under Paigham-i-Pakistan but often ignore this when delivering religious sermons, spreading, instead, the same religious, sectarian, majoritarian, and ideologically supremacist rhetoric.
Another interesting component of the NPVE is the establishment of dedicated centres for everything — from research on countering violent extremism to media monitoring and spreading the National Narrative. This approach of creating new institutions while not reforming existing ones is flawed. Many institutions in the country are already working on religious reforms and constructing national narratives. These include the Islamic Research Institute, the Idara Saqafat-i-Islamia, and several universities with dedicated departments. Recently, a National Rahmatul-lil-Alameen Wa Khatamun Nabiyyin Authority was established despite the presence of these institutions. This has only added to the burden on the national exchequer.
There is a need to reform the existing institutions and provide them the freedom essential for academic discourse. One critical component involves campus surveillance to monitor any suspicious behaviour related to violent extremism, drug use, or crime. These incidents would need to be reported by the administration to the police. However, whether madressahs and private institutions will allow such surveillance is uncertain. Public sector institutions, already under intense scrutiny by agencies, would likely comply with the policy and could become the usual suspects and victims.
Under the policy guidelines, Nacta will also work to sensitise media houses and journalists on extremism and anti-state propaganda issues. Mainstream media is already very conscious of these issues and regularly receives instructions from security institutions, and Nacta’s involvement may further restrict media freedom, as state institutions often define extremism and terrorism according to their political objectives.
One laughable component of the policy is that it advises parliament to constitute a national commission for reconciling warring communities. Parliament is already a constitutional reconciliatory institution, and it raises questions about existing institutions when bureaucrats start advising parliament.
The writer is a security analyst.
Published in Dawn, February 16th, 2025
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DAWN EDITORIAL: 16 February 2025
BEING a child in this society should not be so hard. But recurrent reports of child abuse — from burying girl children alive to torturing a 12-year-old domestic worker to death for consuming her employers’ chocolate — point to a pervasive malaise. The Senate Functional Committee on Human Rights has, yet again, expressed concern over the escalation in cases of child abduction, murder, rape and trafficking across the country. In 2024, according to the Sindh police chief, some 289 kidnapping cases were registered, with 266 incidents of runaway children; 37 children in Karachi were killed, and there were 209 complaints of child abuse, involving 117 boys and 96 girls. The child kidnapping statistics from Punjab are even more unsettling: the crime rose from 2,339 cases in 2022 to 2,448 in 2023. If such dire circumstances do not evoke greater action from the state and the citizenry, what will?
The government knows what to do: campaigning for better parenting, ending patterns of family violence, creating safe school and madressah conditions, and establishing a trained front-line force tasked with rescuing children in high-risk settings. But it seems hesitant to accept that the sickness requires active treatment. As a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Pakistan should not show such prolonged lethargy. Lawmakers need to spring into action to ensure that our children do not suffer in silence, that they have agency, respect and safety. Child rights are mandatory for a humane society; childhood trauma results in lifelong susceptibility to mental illness, drug use, stress, poor focus and violence, making individuals inept at adapting their emotional reactions to people and situations. Sadly, progress has been negligible because no government has kept pace with the scale of the problem. As Nelson Mandela said: “Safety and security don’t just happen; they are the result of collective consensus and investment.”
Published in Dawn, February 16th, 2025
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