pakistan’s

While Pakistani elites have time and time again continued down a path of state building
that gives rise to these violent fissures, Pakistan’s institutions have not evolved to manage these
enduring threats effectively. Even though the country’s military, paramilitary, and intelligence
agencies have enabled, if not outright created, these same threats, they—not the local police—
nonetheless take the lead in fighting internal security threats. This situation gives rise to a curious
paradox: Pakistan handles domestic asymmetric threats with conventional military means while
managing conventional security challenges with India and Afghanistan through asymmetric tools
such as state proxies. The record of the armed forces in these conflicts is mixed. In some cases—for
example, various periods in Baluchistan, Karachi in the 1990s, and Swat in 2009—the army has
used excessive force to diminish the rebels’ ability to operate. However, it has done so at a high cost
in terms of civilian casualties and human rights abuses. 6
At the same time, institutions responsible for enforcing the rule of law have long been enervated
and incapable of managing the myriad threats to the state. Part of Pakistan’s inability to manage
these challenges is due to a distinct lack of will: some of the Islamist terrorist groups savaging the
nation have overlapping membership with other Islamist militant groups that carry out the army’s
preferred policies in Afghanistan and India. Thus, there is an inescapable link between Pakistan’s
external security environment and the tools the state has developed to manage it—namely,
militant proxies managed by the army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)—and the country’s
own internal security environment. While this chronic failure to provide security stems, at least
in some measure, from a lack of capability, the central and provincial governments have demurred
from undertaking the necessary reforms throughout the civil service and police organizations to
fortify these critical institutions. A detailed explanation for this is beyond the scope of this essay,
but this issue has much to do with the path dependency of patronage politics in Pakistan. 7
In this essay, I first provide a historical overview of political violence in Pakistan’s recent past.
Second, I provide a thumbnail sketch of the key organizations providing this violence. The third
section then exposits how Pakistan’s internal and external security environments are intrinsically
interlinked. Here, I detail what is known (or suspected in most cases) about the linkages between
these groups and Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies (and even political parties as
appropriate). I contend that these linkages between external security policy and domestic security
management will continue to pose enduring problems for Pakistan unless the state fundamentally
changes the ways in which it manages its external security environment and even the ideology
of the state. The fourth section provides an overview of security governance in Pakistan and
the key roadblocks that prevent the country from better managing its internal security (e.g., the
commitment to jihad under its nuclear umbrella as a tool of foreign policy). I conclude with a
discussion of implications.
36
NBR
6 “Pakistan: Abuses, Impunity Erode Rights,” Human Rights Watch, February 1, 2013, http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/02/01/pakistan-abusesimpunity-erode-rights;
Human Rights Watch, “We Can Torture, Kill, or Keep You for Years”: Enforced Disappearances by Pakistan Security
Forces in Balochistan (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2011), http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/pakistan0711WebInside.
pdf; and “Pakistan: Extrajudicial Executions by Army in Swat,” Human Rights Watch, July 16, 2010, http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/07/16/
pakistan-extrajudicial-executions-army-swat.
7 See, inter alia, International Crisis Group, “Reforming Pakistan’s Criminal Justice System,” Asia Report, no. 196, December 2010,
http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-asia/pakistan/196%20Reforming%20Pakistans%20Criminal%20Justice%20System.
pdf; International Crisis Group, “Reforming Pakistan’s Civil Service,” Asia Report, no. 185, February 2010, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/
media/Files/asia/south-asia/pakistan/185%20Reforming%20Pakistans%20Civil%20Service.pdf; International Crisis Group, “Reforming
Pakistan’s Police,” Asia Report, no. 157, July 2008, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-asia/pakistan/157_reforming_
pakistan_s_police.pdf; and International Crisis Group, “Reforming the Judiciary in Pakistan,” Asia Report, no. 160, http://www.crisisgroup.
org/~/media/Files/asia/south-asia/pakistan/160_reforming_the_judiciary_in_pakistan.pdf.
SPECIAL REPORT u FEBRUARY 2016