Originally posted By FM sahib elsewhere:
insight: Costly peace Ejaz Haider
The prognosis therefore is not easy, given the wickedness of the problem. But it is a foregone conclusion that if the presidential order is not signed, the fighting at some point will restart
President Asif Ali Zardari,
reluctant to sign the Nizam-e Adl Regulation 2009, sent it to parliament for review, which approved it Monday evening. A beleaguered ANP government in the NWFP had threatened to walk out of the coalition at the Centre if the president did not sign the document.
Earlier, on April 9, Sufi Muhammad, chief of the Tehreek-e Nifaz-e Shariat-e Muhammadi (TNSM), left his peace camp in the district of Swat, saying that if anything unpleasant happened in the area, President Zardari would be responsible. However, Sufi was careful in stressing that the peace deal with the provincial government is intact.
Now that the parliament has approved the signing of the regulation, where do we go from here?
Before attempting to answer this question, it is important to clarify two issues about Swat which had become conflated and caused much confusion: the peace deal and the Nizam-e Adl Regulation 2009.
Deliberations on what is now termed the Nazim-e Adl (Shariat) Regulation 2009 had begun as far back as 2007, in fact before the army operation in the valley had started.
To think that that document is the peace deal is therefore incorrect.
When the recent round of troubles began in Swat and the army was deployed to the area after the police, the Frontier Constabulary and even Frontier Corps elements were found inadequate before Fazlullahs men, the operations resulted in much civilian internal displacement and casualties.
The army operation, which began in November 2007, continued until February 2008. It is a measure of the success of the first phase of the operation that elections were peacefully held throughout the valley and people overwhelmingly voted for the ANP and the PPP, the two major partners in the NWFP coalition government.
After the elections, however, the Taliban began striking sporadically again. The second phase of the army operation resulted in more collateral damage. At that point the ANP government began lobbying for a political solution. The policy resulted in a dual-track strategy: make legal arrangements for the implementation of shariat in the area through Sufi Muhammads TNSM and use that to force the Taliban into a peace deal.
The thrust was to blunt the Taliban who were using the absence of shariat in the area to accomplish their agenda. Sufi Muhammad, Fazlullahs father-in-law, with his TNSM was thought to be the best bet to achieve this.
Sufi was released from jail in Dera Ismail Khan and allowed to reclaim his bailiwick. Simultaneously, the government offered a peace deal to the Taliban who were presumed to have come under pressure because of Sufi Muhammads release and his statements that given the governments sincerity in implementing shariat, there was no reason to continue fighting.
The fighting stopped. But the policy had come under tremendous pressure for several reasons. It is a measure of the divide on the issue that President Zardari refused to take a presidential decision on it and thought fit instead to send it to parliament. The video showing a girl being flogged had contributed further to undermining the two-pronged policy.
So, is this the best course of action
in Swat?
Critics say the government has surrendered to the Taliban and conceded territory; they warn that other groups would replicate this; they chide the government for showing up the state to be weak and challengeable; there are already reports that the Swat Taliban have moved in to the adjoining district of Buner in the south and are leapfrogging and extending their reach etcetera.
Supporters point to the ground realities; the fact that fighting has stopped, qazi courts are dispensing justice and even taking the Taliban to task; human lives are not being lost and people have started returning to the area.
This is the point in the debate, what should or must the state do, where we are reminded of what social scientists and policy planners call a wicked problem.
A wicked problem is generally one that is either difficult or almost impossible to solve because of contradictory and changing requirements and where information is incomplete. To add to the degree of difficulty, a wicked problem involves complex interdependencies, such that tackling one aspect of the problem can create other problems.
Essentially, this means that no course of action can be based on a definitive formulation because a wicked problem successfully eludes one; courses of action cannot be correct or incorrect or true or false but only relatively better or worse; every attempt is a one-shot experiment which may or may not work; stakeholders have different frames for understanding and solving the problem; there are multiple value conflicts and so on.
Going by this, Swat is as wicked as a wicked problem can get. Not only that, given the pressures of getting to the end-state, a solution, even as how to get there remains highly disputed, the planner is not cut any slack when he goes wrong!
The liberals say the state must act as the Leviathan. Sure. But can the state do so in relation to one problem when its capacity to act as the Leviathan is undermined because of the fragility of the social contract which is presumed to have brought it into being, and which the liberal enclave never tires of pointing to otherwise?
The question is important because the same set of liberals talks about the necessity for the state to dialogue with Baloch sub-nationalists because the Baloch non-acceptance of the social contract is owed to the states highhandedness and its unacceptability!
In a way they are right because a state can act ruthlessly only when its writ is accepted by the majority of the people. A violent expression of state writ, paradoxically, requires the stamp of legitimacy even more so. But if that legitimacy is absent in relation to one set of dissidents, it is equally absent in relation to all sets of dissidents. Neither liberals nor the state can cherry-pick targets for the exercise of internal sovereignty.
The prognosis therefore is not easy, given the wickedness of the problem. But while the parliaments approval of the draft and the presidents subsequent signing of it might sustain the current peace in Swat, it is a foregone conclusion it will not be able to stop the domino effect that has begun in the area, Buner being an example.
The immediate question then is, and we cant go beyond the immediate: where will the state draw the line; or will it?
Ejaz Haider is Consulting Editor of The Friday Times and Op-Ed Editor of Daily Times. He can be reached at
sapper@dailytimes.com.pk
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