Broader Issues

The Federal Law and Order Commission of 1993^{Footnote 9} (FLO-Com.) set about its task by attempting to educate Pakistan’s leadership about the nature of governance in South Asia and the historical relationship between state and society.^{Footnote 10} In this respect, the Federal Law and Order Commission asserted that the former had long been arbitrary and that the latter was adversarial and predatory. This meant that the order of strong rulers, in the sense of the personal writ of the ruler, was imposed through servile instruments. Under weak and incapable rulers, which constituted the overwhelming majority of South Asian potentates, states fragmented, authority dissipated, and chaos reigned, while society reacted through insularity, apathy, flight, concealment, and subservience to the temporarily powerful.^{Footnote 11} The lesson that Pakistan’s leaders needed to learn was that, in their part of the world, order was rarely achieved, while the historical conditioning of society was to survive in anarchic conditions. As such, in the absence of an effective regime, the anarchic, atomized, and insular propensities of a caste-based society were rapidly unleashed. South Asian society was resilient in the sense that it could muddle along amid chaotic conditions on account of its insularity and apathy, but these qualities also ensured that effective large-scale responses to challenges, which could only be mounted by the state, failed to materialize. Since 1947, Pakistan’s state had become increasingly arbitrary and predatory, the quality of its leadership had plummeted, and society was becoming more violent and ungovernable.

It was time that Pakistan’s leaders understood that the “basic duty of the state is to maintain order in society,” which “can only be discharged by the efficient exercise of power,” and that “this power is exercised by the head of the Government through an elaborate and hierarchical State apparatus.”^{Footnote 12} In Pakistan’s constitutional and administrative context, the detection and suppression of criminal activity is the responsibility of the district administration, law and order is a provincial subject, but the maintenance of “ORDER in society is the foremost duty and prerogative of the Central State.”^{Footnote 13} Tragically, while Pakistan’s founder and Quaid-i-Azam (supreme leader), Muhammad Ali Jinnah, realized the central importance of order and the role of the civil administration therein,^{Footnote 14} his successors treated law and order as a “colonial” legacy unworthy of serious attention.^{Footnote 15} For this cognitive failure, politicians, civil servants, and the military all shared responsibility as each in their own way contributed to the breakdown of order.^{Footnote 16} Before Pakistan’s leaders could attempt to retrieve the situation and alter trajectory, they needed to accept that meaningful reforms would take five to ten years to start showing positive results on a macro scale. To further emphasize this point, the 1993 commission observed that “the last time this part of the Subcontinent sank into anarchy was after the death of Maharaja Ranjeet Singh in 1839 till the advent of the British in 1848. Nine years anarchy, needed the efforts of a large number of outstanding men who were facing a population” less than 10 percent of Pakistan’s in 1993.^{Footnote 17} While the problems faced in the mid-1800s were far simpler than those Pakistan confronted in 1993, it was humbling to consider that the British “took at least ten years to restore order but that order lasted a hundred years.”^{Footnote 18} In contrast, in the aftermath of the Mughal collapse that started in 1707, it took 120 years for the Sikhs to establish a new order. The Sikh order, however, barely lasted a dozen years before Ranjit Singh’s death plunged the area into chaos yet again. The reason for the success of the British pacification and even the semblance of its continuity after 1947 was that their imperial order replaced the law of the ruler with the rule of law and created an ecosystem of autonomous institutions inclusive of local and provincial governments, the judiciary, the all-India Services, the provincial civil services, and an Indian military subordinate to civilian authority.^{Footnote 19} Since 1947, the challenges to order in Pakistan had grown while the state response had foundered to the point where administrative exhaustion and rampant criminalization was fast becoming the new normal of governance.

The 1993 Commission’s Overview of Order in Pakistan

Supreme Court Justice (retired) Zafar Hussain Mirza, then chairman of the Federal Public Service Commission (FPSC), submitted his views to the Federal Law and Order Commission and so impressed the members with his assessment of the crisis faced by Pakistan that his testimony was incorporated verbatim in the main text of the report. Zafar Mirza observed that the mass migration of 1947, carried out amid great violence and insecurity, represented the first major disruption of the social fabric in Pakistan.^{Footnote 20} The traumas endured by many of the migrants left them with a powerful “sense of injustice,” a feeling of moral superiority over those who had not suffered as they had, and, from there, a sense of entitlement to compensation.^{Footnote 21} The locals, who had also suffered from Partition, developed their own sense of grievance against the migrants.^{Footnote 22} This fueled the scramble for evacuee property, while the population shift and sudden increase in pressure on the urban areas led to acute economic problems from which escape was only possible through acquisition of evacuee wealth or a government job or both.^{Footnote 23} In Sindh, this divide soon acquired an intractable color owing to the considerable cultural and linguistic differences between the migrants and the locals.^{Footnote 24} The emergence of “rivalry verging on antagonism” between groups was further intensified by the disruption of the constitutional and democratic processes and attempts by autocratic regimes to impose simple and unrepresentative solutions to a complex problem.^{Footnote 25} Deprived of a voice within the system, entire segments of the population became alienated from “the mainstream of national life.”^{Footnote 26} This alienation was mishandled by successive governments so much so that the “gathering momentum of these centrifugal forces gave birth to antagonistic subcultures which swelled the felling of injustice in the two groups to a level of frustration and apathy against the state authority never before witnessed.”^{Footnote 27} Added to this combustible mix, from the early 1980s, were millions of Afghan refugees, international jihadis, sectarian militants, and criminal syndicates engaged in the trafficking of drugs and arms.

An increasingly disorganized state was now confronted by organized crime, armed, equipped, and financed better than the civilian law-and-order machinery. These mafias interfaced with political parties and, flushed with “easy money and gun power,” developed political clout.^{Footnote 28} Money, guns, and political pull translated into penetration of the administration, which was corrupted, enfeebled, and intimidated into collaboration and inconsequence.^{Footnote 29} Once the “inadequacy of the law enforcing agencies and the diminishing capacity for detection of crime” was demonstrated, the calculus of reward and punishment broke down and criminality became profitable for all enterprising individuals.^{Footnote 30} With the social contract in tatters, Pakistani society became characterized by a free-for-all in which criminal behavior brought negligible consequences as long as the perpetrator was moderately determined and resourceful. The technical deficiencies in the organization and equipment of the police and the poor quality of the prosecution were brutally exposed, which further strengthened the downward spiral.^{Footnote 31} As confidence in the law-and-order machinery dwindled, the public became apathetic and unconcerned “with the successful culmination of trial and punishment of the accused.”^{Footnote 32}

The Federal Law and Order Commission endorsed Zafar Mirza’s synopsis of Pakistan’s crisis of order and contended that in light of the upsurge in criminal activity and the power and confidence of mafias, the police needed considerable material investment in forensics, databases, photography, and other crime-fighting technology. In a frank admission, the members stated that “our Police departments are woefully lacking in funding and know-how” and can no longer do their jobs in existing conditions.^{Footnote 33} The integration of the prosecution function with the police department, combined with the poor quality of public prosecutors because of nonserious training, low pay, and lower morale, was another impediment to bringing criminals to justice.^{Footnote 34} Other than separating the prosecution from the police, prosecutors needed to paid and trained well enough to do their jobs. This was imperative because a judge, however brilliant and just, could only make decisions based on the evidence and logic presented by the prosecutors and the police investigators.^{Footnote 35} The quality of judicial decision making in criminal cases depended on the authenticity of the police work and prosecution carried out by the executive. Given the particularly precarious condition of law and order in major cities, the Federal Law and Order Commission devoted much time and effort to advocating the introduction of a metropolitan police system for Pakistan’s urban areas.

Metropolitan Police: Pakistan’s Refusal to Reform

Pakistan’s experience of rapid urbanization, inclusive of the growth of villages into towns, leading to law-and-order challenges, is by no means unique. Industrialized and developing countries alike have had to cope with the challenges of urban overpopulation, inner-city decay, middle-class flight to the suburbs, the spread of organized crime, gang warfare, and the threat of rebellion and terrorist attacks. What sets Pakistan apart was its stubborn refusal to accord metropolitan policing a proper role even when compared to neighboring India. The result was that all material deficiencies and challenges aside, Pakistan’s police administration remained that of a country devoid of large cities. Organizationally, Pakistan’s police continued to be a paramilitary force designed for deployment in early-1900s conditions, while psychologically it reverted to the pre-British pattern of arbitrariness. At the organizational level the conservative configuration of police administration was partly the result of the 1857–58 rebellion against the British, which had the effect of limiting the 1856 local government legislation (Act XIII of 1856) to Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. Under the 1856 law, the three imperial metropolises were placed under a police commissioner, who was assisted by justices of the peace.^{Footnote 36} The police commissioner had limited magisterial powers to handle threats to public order and a range of executive powers to manage city traffic, licensing, public gatherings, and minor tumults. The control of the District Collector and Magistrate (or Deputy Commissioner as more commonly known) over the police, as well as the executive magistracy, was thus phased out in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. After the rebellion, the 1861 act was imposed over the whole of British India minus the three cities.^{Footnote 37} The 1861 legislation placed the police under the general control and direction of the deputy commissioner and conceded the executive magistracy a position of centrality in the colonial district administration.

Between 1947 and 1993, India extended metropolitan policing as articulated by the 1856 legislation to some two dozen cities with the expectation that further expansion of the system would occur in urban centers based upon local demand and objective changes in their demography. In stark contrast, “In Pakistan, since Independence in 1947 to date, the metropolitan policing system as envisaged in Act XIII of 1856, has not been introduced in any of its cities or towns.”^{Footnote 38} Pakistan’s reluctance to move forward with a plainly beneficial and needed change to its police organization needed some explanation given the number of times that metropolitan policing had been advocated within the higher bureaucracy and by foreign experts. The first instance of official advice in favor of metropolitan police was in 1951, when Oliver Gilbert Grace, then Inspector General of Police (IGP) for the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), urged the government to introduce the Police Commissioner system in the port city that then also served as Pakistan’s federal capital.^{Footnote 39} In 1962, the Pay and Services Commission chaired by Supreme Court Justice A. R. Cornelius, also made the case for metropolitan policing in Karachi and Lahore.^{Footnote 40} The Pakistan Police Commission of 1969–70 advocated the application of the basic principle of the 1856 legislation, which is the end of the executive magistracy and the complete autonomy of the police from civil service control, to the entire country, not just the major urban centers.^{Footnote 41} In 1976, a delegation of Romanian police experts noted that “urban police has special requirements,” while Pakistan had not organized its law-and-order machinery in a manner conducive to functional specialization.^{Footnote 42} In 1984, the report of A. J. Giles observed that nearly forty years since independence, the Pakistan police were still a “paramilitary” entity that sought to maintain order through “force of arms and weight of numbers.”^{Footnote 43} In 1985, the Police Committee chaired by Aslam Hayat urged the government to introduce metropolitan policing in urban areas.^{Footnote 44} Following up on the 1985 Police Committee’s recommendations, a two-member delegation comprising Aftab Ahmed Khan (Secretary Establishment) and Diljan Khan (Additional Secretary, Interior Division) visited India from January 27 to February 2 and Bangladesh from February 9 to February 13, 1987.^{Footnote 45} The delegation visited Bombay, New Delhi, Dhaka, and Chittagong, and reported to the Government of Pakistan on March 30 that “we recommend the introduction of Commissionerate of Police System on the pattern, as it exists in Delhi, as a Pilot Project in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad.”^{Footnote 46} Under the reform, all administrative and financial powers with regard to the metropolitan police would be vested in the police commissioner, who would function under the general administrative and financial control of the provincial IGP or the central government, depending on the city in question.^{Footnote 47} This proposal ran into opposition from the provincial governments, which disagreed with the need to go ahead with the trial introduction of metropolitan policing even as the center ruled in its favor.^{Footnote 48} Before any real headway could be made, the Zia-ul Haq military regime’s fortunes took a turn for the worse because of the growing popularity of the Pakistan Peoples’ Party under the recently returned Benazir Bhutto. Zia’s death in an as-yet-unexplained plane crash led to fresh elections being held in which the pro-military Islamic Democratic Alliance (Islami Jamhoori Ittehad or IJI), led by Nawaz Sharif (leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz or PML-N), won power in the Punjab, while the PPP cobbled together a fragile coalition in the center. To the credit of the new government in Islamabad, the prime minister, through directive No.FD_S (Imp)/PMDIR/114/89 of May 4, 1989, ordered the introduction of metropolitan policing as recommended in 1985 and endorsed in 1987.^{Footnote 49} A few months earlier, to streamline the introduction of police reforms, an Implementation Committee was formed (February 1989) to follow up on the directive of May 1989 authorizing metropolitan policing.^{Footnote 50} A three-member police delegation from Britain, headed by Richard Barret, chief inspector of the constabulary for England and Wales, visited Pakistan in January 1990 and expressed views in favor of the long-overdue introduction of metropolitan policing.^{Footnote 51} On March 1, 1990, the Implementation Committee reported, “As desired in the directives of the Prime Minister, we have done all the ground work in the provinces of Sindh, Punjab, NWFP, and the Federal Capital.”^{Footnote 52} By this time, however, the political situation was fraying as confrontation escalated between the army-backed president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, plus the army-backed IJI on one side and the PPP government at the center. With the dismissal of the PPP government in August 1990, all bets were off and the next government, led by Nawaz Sharif, did not make police reforms a priority. Years later, in 1995, when the 1993 Federal Law and Order Commission submitted its report, it observed that “the implementation status of the recommendation under reference remains, at best, indeterminate.”^{Footnote 53}

While political turbulence did impede the ability of the state to function and take corrective measures, there were also plenty of conservative civil servants who did not share with their reform-minded colleagues a sense of urgency when it came to reform of the law-and-order machinery. The Federal Law and Order Commission of 1993 attempted to address the concerns and arguments of those opposed to reform. To begin with, the opposition-in-residence argued that the 1861 legislation was more in line with the needs of South Asian society, which remained predominantly rural and suburban rather than metropolitan in the Western sense of the term.^{Footnote 54} The opponents of metropolitan policing also felt that doing away with the executive magistracy in the urban areas and removing the police from the superintendence of the district magistrate would lead to more frequent abuse of police power.^{Footnote 55} The increase in incidences of abuse would, it was felt, exceed any possible efficiency gains in the South Asian context, while the desire of the Police Service of Pakistan (PSP) for reform was denounced by those opposed as more a matter of interservice rivalry and the desire to be liberated from the supervision of the District Management Group (DMG, successor to the Civil Service of Pakistan or CSP) than one of wanting to serve the public. The rejoinder to these criticisms was that foreign experts and civil servants had consistently advocated metropolitan policing in Pakistan since 1950 and the service affiliation of its advocates was diverse and included several prominent Civil Service of Pakistan officers. Furthermore, unlike the 1861 framework, metropolitan policing inspired by the 1856 framework would go a long way toward addressing the reality of the rural-urban divide.^{Footnote 56} Metropolitan policing would also have the positive effect of separating the executive from the judicial functions of the government in the more developed parts of the country, which was a step long overdue.^{Footnote 57} If implemented, the reform would make the police directly accountable to the judiciary and clarify lines of responsibility.^{Footnote 58} As far as South Asian conditions were concerned, India’s extension of the metropolitan policing system since 1947 indicated that the reform was neither ill-suited to local conditions nor antipeople in any way.^{Footnote 59} At a structural level, while South Asia remained predominantly rural, the importance of cities had grown exponentially since 1947 and the region was home to some of the largest, most rapidly growing, strategically located, and demographically complex urban concentrations in the world. This change was empirically undeniable and needed to be reflected in police organization.

The Federal Law and Order Commission of 1993 strongly recommended the introduction of metropolitan police in Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta, and Islamabad, in effect from January 1, 1996, subject to review and possible extension to Hyderabad (Sindh), Sukkur, Multan, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, and Rawalpindi, along the lines of a draft legislation contained in Annex XVI of its report.^{Footnote 60} In making its recommendation, the commission observed:

That said, the presence or absence of metropolitan policing was not something that could all by itself have much effect on the quality of police work unless further reforms were enacted to roll back the politicization of the law-and-order function. Arbitrary interference in police affairs was the bane of policing in Pakistan and checking it was essential to the rehabilitation of the writ of the state. It is to this aspect of reform that the Federal Law and Order Commission turned to next.

Containing Arbitrariness

Between 1985 and 1994, the number of murders committed every year in Karachi had quadrupled, armed robbery had sextupled, robbery and car jacking had tripled, car thefts had doubled, and motorcycle thefts had quintupled.^{Footnote 62} Detection rates for murder were only 39 percent in Sindh and 28 percent in the NWFP, though Balochistan and the Punjab fared better at 67 percent and 74 percent, respectively.^{Footnote 63} For attempted murder, the detection rates were 40 percent in Sindh, 22 percent in NWFP, 55 percent in Balochistan, and 81 percent in the Punjab.^{Footnote 64} In cases of theft, detection rates were 17 percent in Sindh, 56 percent in NWFP, 67 percent in Balochistan, and 38 percent in the Punjab.^{Footnote 65} For motor-vehicle theft, the detection rates were 14 percent in Sindh, 19 percent in NWFP, 20 percent in Balochistan, and 47 percent in the Punjab.^{Footnote 66} While facts and statistics are not necessarily the same thing, the “poor detection rates expose the inadequacy of the Police to keep pace with the criminal who is better organized, better equipped, better armed, and surer of himself than the law enforcer.”^{Footnote 67} The official crime statistics were probably understating the actual situation on account of the public’s reluctance to report crimes for fear that they would end up being victimized by the police in addition to having already suffered at the hands of criminals. In 1986, the Committee for the Study of Corruption had found on the basis of extensive sampling that 51 percent of people thought that to approach the police in case of being the victim of a crime was futile, while 40 percent said that they would look the other way even if they saw antistate activities.^{Footnote 68} The morale of the police force was also very low with much of its constabulary afraid of criminal elements that often enjoyed access to political clout and more firepower.^{Footnote 69} Above all, it was the arbitrary transfer regime that operated at all levels, and corrupt recruitment practices at support and constable levels, that were identified as the greatest challenges that stymied the effective working of the law-and-order machinery.

Political interference and the resultant arbitrary transfer regime had “emerged as a major debilitating factor during the last twenty years or so. Neither the Pakistan Police Commission (1960–61) Report nor the Pakistan Police Commission (1969–70) Report, mentions interference in police working as an un-manageable factor.”^{Footnote 70} Here one can clarify that the 1953 East Bengal Police Committee had warned of the long-term dangers of political interference and the risk posed by the recruitment of too many unqualified constables.^{Footnote 71} At the time, the East Bengal Police Committee was confident that police officers were “able to withstand the influence” and while “we have not come across instances of interference from superior officers; but if interference from Ministers and MLAs, goes unchecked, the possibility of this virus infecting the officers cannot reasonably be excluded.”^{Footnote 72} The realization of this possibility occurred during the first PPP government (1971–77), and since then political interference in the routine working of the police became a fact of life in Pakistan.^{Footnote 73} This change is corroborated by the internal record of the PPP government of that time, such as the Police Station Enquiry Committee of 1976, chaired by M. A. K. Chaudhry, which reported that arbitrariness in the transfers and discipline of Officers in charge of Police Stations (popularly known as SHOs) was pervasive and that honest and competent officials “came to grief sooner or later.”^{Footnote 74} Those with political connections had reason to “rejoice” as the police bent over backwards to accommodate them while their victims bided their time for an opportunity to wreak vengeance.^{Footnote 75} After the first PPP government, the arbitrary transfer regime continued under General Zia, for it suited him and his political supporters and ensured police compliance with the regime’s agenda. In 1985, Aslam Hayat advocated that the government constitute a Public Safety Commission in order to hear pleas by police officials being pressured to abuse their powers.^{Footnote 76} Not only did the government ignore this advice, but, between 1985 and 1992, it also recruited 836 Assistant Sub-inspectors (ASIs) in violation of the rules—some were ten to fifteen years overage, some did not meet the minimum height requirement by more than three inches, and many had criminal records.^{Footnote 77} During the same seven-year period, 230 lower subordinates and 297 upper subordinates were recruited to the Special Branch “in flagrant violation of the rules and Police Department opposition.”^{Footnote 78} Officers were transferred when constables under their command handed out tickets for traffic violations to politically powerful people, while MNAs and MPAs were even willing to lay siege to police stations and infrastructure to secure desired personnel appointments and transfers.^{Footnote 79} Police investigations against the wealthy and powerful regularly resulted in the suspension and/or transfer of the concerned officials.^{Footnote 80} In theory, Pakistan’s colonial-era laws and administrative heritage authorized “neither the Government nor the District Magistrate to interfere with the internal working and day to day management of the Police in matters such as recruitment, training, postings, transfers, promotions, discipline, investigations, etc. etc.”^{Footnote 81} In practice, the reassertion of indigenous arbitrariness had left the law “nullified,” and when it came to the police the Pakistani State was confronted with the “virtual breakdown of the force as a disciplined, efficient, and effective unit.”^{Footnote 82} The solution lay in building upon the idea floated by Aslam Hayat in 1985 and establish neutral autonomous statutory bodies to insulate the police from political interference in recruitment, discipline, promotion, and transfers.^{Footnote 83}

Such a reform was, again, not totally alien to South Asia as Sri Lanka had a functioning National Police Commission,^{Footnote 84} plus provincial police commissions that, between them, had resulted in “removing almost in toto” decisions related to the police “from the purview of the Cabinet of Ministers.”^{Footnote 85} Pakistan could benefit from this and other examples and establish federal and provincial security commissions to oversee establishment functions related to the police as well as supervise research, manage public prosecutors, inspect equipment and facilities, and act as permanent think tanks on police matters.^{Footnote 86} The composition of the proposed security commissions was that each should have five members drawn from the ranks of the judiciary, civil service, police, women’s representatives, and eminent citizens, somewhat like the Federal Public Service Commission, whose members served fixed terms.^{Footnote 87} The president would constitute the federal commission while provincial governors in consultation with the government would appoint the members of the commissions in the provinces.^{Footnote 88} Once the security commissions had become operational, “All police related-matters currently being dealt with in the Establishment Division and the Ministry of Interior at the federal level and by the Home Department and the Services and General Administration Department in the Provinces, will be transferred to the respective commissions.”^{Footnote 89} While Pakistan’s police needed to make an investment in equipment ranging from an aviation wing to state-of-the-art computer and laboratory facilities, spending more money would not help very much unless the security commissions were in place to protect policemen from political interference.^{Footnote 90}

The Anatomy of Pakistan’s Crisis of Order

The Federal Law and Order Commission of 1993 in its report furnished an anatomy of Pakistan’s crisis of order. This crisis had deep roots in South Asian history and was greatly exacerbated by unwise decisions made by the political leadership whether civilian or military. Since the 1970s, the quality of decision-making had become more heedless than ever before, while Pakistan’s socioeconomic problems and demographic conditions made it harder for the state to maintain order.^{Footnote 91} What had happened in Pakistan was that as society had become increasingly ungovernable, leading to a relative decline in the ability of the state to maintain order, the law and order machinery had been subjected to “horrendous” political interference and starved of proper and timely investments in material and human resources, leading to an absolute decline in the capacity of the state to enforce its writ.

With regard to Pakistan becoming more ungovernable, the contributing factors were diverse. To begin with, the violent and chaotic manner in which Partition was handled, with planning failures at the top disastrously complemented by implementation failures down the line, created for Pakistan a massive evacuee and refugee crisis. Although the state succeeded in restoring order in the administrative sense within a few years against terrible odds, the derailing of the political process and the abortive exercise in constitution making meant that profound and mutually incompatible hatreds and senses of victimhood came to characterize Pakistani politics.^{Footnote 92} Military regimes, such as Ayub Khan’s, attempted to institutionalize the atomization of the political landscape, while popularly elected governments, such as the first PPP government, used their time in office to attack their perceived enemies and thus contributed to the destabilization of politics even in the presence of a majority government. The ultimate push into the abyss came during the military regime of Zia ul Haq. One might expect that the Pakistan army would jealously guard its monopoly on the means of organized violence, as evidenced by the dissolution of the Federal Security Force (FSF), created by the first PPP government to serve as a paramilitary and intelligence organization loyal only to the prime minister. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979–89), however, the Pakistani military, generously assisted by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and other allies, invested billions of dollars in creating and operating religious seminaries that churned out cannon fodder for the jihad against the Soviets. Accompanying this foray into the Afghan vortex was the inevitable refugee crisis as millions of Afghans fled the Soviet invasion and counterinsurgency operations and found themselves in Pakistan. The proliferation of small arms, the easy availability of drugs, especially heroin, and access to large amounts of hard currency enabled a nexus to start emerging between militancy, criminal syndicates, and political organizations and parties. When the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan ended, Pakistan faced a difficult strategic choice: it could either set about dismantling the networks nurtured during the 1980s or it could try and use them on other fronts. With Pakistan-U.S. relations taking a nosedive due to the nuclear issue from 1989 onward and the situation in Indian-held Kashmir deteriorating on account of New Delhi’s ineptitude, Pakistan’s weak and unstable democratic governments were no match for the organizational coherence and discipline of the military as it opted to continue using Islamic crusaders for the prosecution of strategic objectives. One can only speculate on the level of heedlessness and short-term thinking that prevailed at the highest level in the Zia regime and its immediate successors that they would voluntarily relinquish the state’s monopoly on the means of organized violence and outsource strategic policy execution to hardy, motivated, and ruthless religious fundamentalists who regarded Pakistan’s Westernized elite as meriting a fate worse than that reserved for infidels.^{Footnote 93}

While demographic change,^{Footnote 94} regional upheavals, political instability, constitutional disarray, and strategic delusions all combined to make Pakistan more difficult to govern, the combination of political malevolence and fiscal apathy with which the law-and-order machinery was treated greatly reduced the state’s administrative capacity to respond to the fallout. The more important part of this equation was political interference and the resulting chaos in the police administration. Arbitrary transfers meant that police officers were lucky to spend more than six months in any given post, while even more frequent transfers among officials in charge of police stations and subinspectors, made it difficult for the police to handle routine complaints. It had also led to people seeking redress through informal means out of fear that police incompetence and corruption would do them more harm than the criminals. The recruitment of constables on the basis of political loyalty in all but one of Pakistan’s provinces had also undermined the discipline of the force. In a hierarchical organization like the police, the ability of politically connected subordinates to get their officers in trouble, or even transferred, had disrupted the chain of command. The equivalent would be if Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) or enlisted men in the army could, by putting in a phone call, get their Commanding Officer (CO) transferred to another regiment. The frequency of these transfers in the police meant that there was very little that good officers could do to discipline their subordinates under the police laws and procedures. Even if cases were initiated, the officer who took the initiative was likely to be posted elsewhere before the case matured. Pakistan’s tragedy was that even a military regime like Zia’s was unsympathetic to the problem posed by arbitrary transfers and interference in the police. One might expect a professional military officer to regard the insulation of an organization like the police from interference as a self-evident truth in no need of advocacy. Instead, the Zia regime ignored the high-quality advice it received from the civilian bureaucratic elite and allowed its political allies to use and abuse the police for their purposes. This neglect had the effect of further aggravating the imbalance between Pakistan’s military and its civilian institutions in favor of the former, which meant that when democracy was restored in 1988, the civilian bureaucracy at the disposal of the elected government was weaker and more demoralized than ever before. Political turbulence, in the form of four dismissals of elected governments and continuous instability and coup rumors (1988–99), meant that the political leadership was unable to devote attention to reform of the state even though focusing on improving the quality of the civilian apparatus would have done far more to secure the longevity of democratic rule than attempting to reverse the provisions of the Eighth Amendment (58-2-b), which empowered the president to dismiss elected governments.^{Footnote 95}

The Federal Law and Order Commission of 1993 felt that the basic reform needed was protecting the police from arbitrary political interference. If this basic reform was enacted, the police could constructively use desperately needed material investment. In terms of material inputs, police stations were starved of money for stationery and fuel, lacked modern communications, and had inadequate housing and transport facilities.^{Footnote 96} The police did not have an aviation wing, which was essential for effective urban policing, nor did it have modern forensics labs and capable prosecutors. Salaries of the police, as elsewhere in the public sector, had collapsed in terms of purchasing power, leading to the spread of bribery, extortion, and racketeering into the officer ranks. Constables, poorly paid, were not trained, lacked basic equipment and logistical support, and, taking their cue from the spread of corruption and indiscipline among their officers, had gone from being a minor nuisance to constituting a major public menace. In terms of intelligence and research, police facilities were primitive compared to the needs of society and the state and in poor condition.