PAKISTAN’S placement on the Financial Action Task Force’s ‘grey list’ is, if nothing else, a huge national embarrassment. The question is whether this embarrassment could have been avoided by timely action on our part. As per the last mutual evaluation report (issued in 2009) on our anti-money-laundering/terrorist-financing regime, FATF had called for, inter alia, preparation of an AML/TF risk analysis, adoption of a national AML/TF strategy, and consolidation of the institutional framework responsible for implementing that strategy.

Nine years down the road, we have not had much movement in this direction. While dealing with money laundering falls primarily within the purview of the Ministry of Finance and the State Bank, terrorist financing lies within the domain of internal security. Even today, we don’t have any risk analysis of TF, no strategy on dealing with it, and the main civilian institution mandated to perform this role — the National Counter Terrorism Authority (Nacta) — is only just managing to scrape by.

Nacta was formed in January 2009 under an executive order of the prime minister, and a law to govern it was enacted in February 2013. Unfortunately, years after its formation, it has yet to be made fully functional. The price our society is paying for Nacta’s ineffectiveness is something that has been rarely discussed.

The price our society is paying for Nacta’s ineffectiveness is rarely discussed.

As per the National Counter Terrorism Authority Act, 2013, Nacta’s mandate includes two main areas: formulating a national counterterrorism strategy and monitoring its implementation, and analysing intelligence gathered by different agencies and producing national threat assessment reports for the government.

Thus, Nacta was conceived to be a strategic-level body with no operational role, focusing itself on planning and monitoring the national counterterrorism effort.

To enable it to carry out its mandate effectively, Nacta has to have a stature to be taken seriously by the counterterrorism community in Pakistan, whether civilian or military. Else, neither would they be honest in sharing their intelligence inputs nor be serious in following the directions issued by it. The Nacta act gives it this stature, by making it directly responsible to the prime minister, like the civilian Intelligence Bureau and the military Inter-Services Intelligence.

However, the essential starting point to making Nacta functional as per its law is to have a meeting of its board of governors, which is headed by the prime minister. The board is supposed to provide strategic vision and oversee its activities, and approve its budget as well as its policies and manuals. In light of this, the simple conclusion is that, without a meeting of its board, Nacta cannot become fully functional.

The fact that not a single meeting of the board of governors was held in the last nine years speaks of the low priority given by our political leadership to claiming ownership of the national counterterrorism effort. What, then, are we losing by not making Nacta effective?

Generally speaking, the basic mandate of Nacta is to formulate and monitor national counterterrorism strategy. An ineffective Nacta has resulted in a counterterrorism effort that has no civilian, professional guiding mechanism at the federal level. It needs to be emphasised that Nacta is the manifestation of the fundamental principle of civilian supremacy in policymaking, enshrined in our Constitution. In the absence of an effective civilian authority, the vacuum is filled by the military taking over the driver’s seat.

While this may have achieved excellent results in the short run, it has many negative implications for our internal security in the long run. One, due to the specialised training of the military, any counterterrorism effort led by them is likely to be lopsided, being predominantly kinetic. The non-kinetic aspects of counterterrorism — like addressing the factors that breed militancy, which do not fall within the ambit of the military — tend to get ignored.

This is why many believe that the current lull in the terrorist activities due to the military-led effort is temporary and not sustainable. An effective Nacta can better ensure a balance between the kinetic and non-kinetic aspects of counterterrorism, with an inclusive approach towards all civilian stakeholders. It can indeed be argued that strengthening Nacta is absolutely essential for a long-term solution to the terrorist threat confronting Pakistan.

Another downside of the military driving the national counterterrorism effort is that the capacity building of civilian institutions suffers. For instance, one of the most important points of the National Action Plan (ie capacity building of the criminal justice system) was put on the backburner — more due to the weakness of the political leadership in dividing the available meagre funds judiciously between the civil and paramilitary institutions than anything else.

The second main mandate of Nacta is to collate all the intelligence agencies’ findings and prepare objective threat assessment reports. The basic concept is that no intelligence agency, no matter how omniscient it claims to be, can possibly have complete information on every terrorist activity. Unfortunately, due to Nacta’s ineffectiveness, there is no national-level civilian institution that performs this function. Intelligence agencies, working in silos, submit their reports to the government with the picture they have in view. The debilitating effect this has had, and continues to have, on the internal security of Pakistan can be well imagined.

This is not to suggest that Nacta can be a panacea for all terrorism-related problems. But it can certainly be asserted that the authority is an essential step forward in getting our act together in the field of counterterrorism. Can we request the honourable prime minister to spare an hour, and have the mandatory meeting of Nacta’s board of governors? Or are we asking for too much?

The writer is a former police officer who conceived the idea of Nacta and was its first national coordinator.

Published in Dawn, March 17th, 2018