NSP and partisan kerfuffle

In his poem, Introduction to Poetry, Billy Collins writes “I ask them to take a poem/ and hold it up to the light/ like a colour slide…” Instead, “all they want to do/ is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it.”

Something akin to this is happening to Pakistan’s first National Security Policy. Barring some honourable exceptions, analysts are “beating it with a hose/ [either] to find out what it really means,” or to add their own sense of what the NSP should have been. Mostly, a joyless, partisan waste of time.

The obvious starting point in debating the NSP should be to first ask two questions: what should an NSP be about and why it is important. Answer: an NSP is basically a framework that describes how a state identifies threats and opportunities to itself and how it intends to address them for providing security for itself and its citizens. It looks at the present and projects onto the future (usually, NSPs are reviewed every four to five years). As an integrated document, it also signals its priorities to audiences both within (its citizens) and without (the international community).

In states which put out NSPs, the document sits at the apex and provides guidelines for subordinate policies: military policy, economic and trade policies, education and health, internal security et cetera. It does not, in and of itself, detail every policy. An NSP’s job is to identify core interests and the direction the state must take. In a way its primary function is to express the state’s intent in order for different sectors to formulate operational policies on the basis of the guidelines presented by the NSP. It is important to flag this point because there has been much criticism, mostly risible, about why the NSP doesn’t provide details.

This is as far as what an NSP is supposed to do. But why is it important to have such a document. Firstly, as stated above, the NSP is presented as an integrated document. It seeks to address threats in an inclusive, comprehensive framework. In doing so it presents the threat spectrum, both traditional and non-traditional, to improve coordination across different sectors.

In other words, it seeks to optimise the response through a “whole-of-government” approach. Not all states have NSPs and not all states put out the unclassified part(s) of NSP for public information and debate. But where and when they do, as is the case with Pakistan’s NSP, the idea is to get domestic consensus and also signal to external actors the direction the state intends to take. Signalling to audiences outside is important for both enhancing confidence and increasing cooperative strategies as well as showing resolve. Finally, the NSP is supposed to guide the implementation of policy.

Let’s now see what the NSP says and what is it signalling to audiences at home and abroad:

“Pakistan’s approach to national security is broad, proactive, and resolute and aims to ensure the security of our most vulnerable citizens. Rather than being set in an archaic guns versus butter debate, our national security thinking seeks to identify means of expanding economic resources such that Pakistan can simultaneously strengthen its traditional and non-traditional security. The most prudent approach is to keep economic security at the core, and judiciously transfer the dividends of a strong economy to further strengthen our defence and human security. This is the vision that the National Security Policy strives to pursue.” (Italics added)

The NSP sets down its remit as “providing strategic guidance on priority areas for policy action while identifying opportunities for and challenges to our national security in the medium and long term,” and emphasises “a geo-economic paradigm that supplements our geo-strategic approach, laying down a broad roadmap on how to actualise the chosen path.”

What does this mean? If we use the method of retrieving or searching digital documents or archives, what key words would we use — “security”, “citizens”, “economic resources”, “traditional and non-traditional security”, “defence”, “human security”, “strategic guidance”, “geo-economic”, “geo-strategic”.

Pakistan is signalling, first, that we are moving away from a total focus on hard (traditional) security and broadening the definition of security. Second, we believe that citizens provide the ballast to a state and therefore any national security concept must keep citizens as its core element. Third, instead of being caught in the guns versus butter binary, Pakistan must focus on increasing the size of the cake so it can address both traditional and non-traditional security threats. And finally, that there is an interactive dynamic between geoeconomics and geostrategy with geoeconomics supplementing geostrategy.

The last point is important because even before the NSP had become public, some commentators went back to the origins of the term geoeconomics (it was coined by Edward Luttwak in a 1990 article for The National Interest, titled: “From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics: Logic of Conflict, Grammar of Commerce”) to argue that the grammar of commerce has not upstaged the logic of conflict but that, as Luttwakwrote, “This neologism [geoeconomics] is the best term I can think of to describe the admixture of the logic of conflict with the methods of commerce.” In other words, critics argued, the world is not rid of the zero-sum logic of conflict and Pakistan needs to rethink its focus on geoeconomics. The NSP has put this to rest by clearly identifying the role geoeconomics must play to secure and project Pakistan’s geostrategic interests.

Unfortunately, the debate so far — if it can be called that — has wittingly or unwittingly involved comments that are external to the value of the NSP. Not only is the NSP the first-ever such document in 75 years but, more importantly, it broadens the definition of security and appreciates that security is an evolving concept and Pakistan must continue, regularly, to revisit its priorities. The argument that everyone knows how important economy is deliberately avoids the fact that this is the first time the state is not only acknowledging that point, but seeking to implement policies to actualise it and pass on its dividends to the citizens. If that is not a major change from a focus on hard security, then I don’t know what is.

Some analysts have also raised questions regarding the implementation of the NSP. Those questions are important but, strictly speaking, cannot determine the value of the policy itself or what it proposes. Important as those debates are, they cannot be used to undermine the policy itself and must be undertaken separately — i.e., one can ask the question about how the (present) government intends to actualise a policy that says all the right things and stresses the imperative of an integrated approach to understanding and implementing national security.

For instance, how would a government that has made a habit of destroying any space for political consensus ensure an across-the-board consensus on certain fundamentals in order to ensure policy consistency? It’s a crucial question. But it should be obvious that this question is about political process, not about the policy. Take another query: given that Pakistan is a federation and some federating units might be ruled by parties that are in opposition at the Centre, what mechanisms would the Federal Government use to ensure that the federating units do not drive in a different lane? Once again, this is about consensus reached through political and constitutional processes and lies outside the NSP’s domain.

Ministries and their bureaucracies are hard-wired to act in silos and guard their turfs. How would the government ensure that they can be made to understand the dividends of a cooperative rather than conflictual approach? A number of national security concerns fall within the remit of the military and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Both are closed clubs. How and who will ensure implementation and monitoring? Again, this is an issue of concern but cannot decide what merit lies in the policy itself.

Obvious also is the fact that the manner in which the National Security Division is currently constituted, it cannot monitor the policy’s implementation. Going forward, there is an obvious need to restructure the NSA’s office so whoever occupies that office has the authority to monitor implementation of the policy.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the problems in implementing the NSP. The point, again, is that to debate the issue of implementation, vital though it is, separate from the merits of the policy itself. As noted earlier, so far the kerfuffle has proved only one thing: political polarisation has reached a point where we have become incapable of informed discourse. That should give us some idea of how difficult it would be to get a consensus on even fundamentals.