DCC meeting fails to provide solid policy

Ahmad Noorani
ISLAMABAD: As expected the seventh meeting of the Defence Committee of the Cabinet (DCC) proved to be its 7th photo-session with two press releases issued by the Prime Minister Secretariat late Wednesday night.

The press releases showed that the civilian and military leadership had once again failed to devise a strategy against terrorism. The single meaningful line in the press release reads: “Security, defence and law enforcement agencies will be authorised to use all means necessary to eliminate terrorists and militants.” This seems ridiculous — as if security and law enforcement agencies didn’t have the authorisation to use all means to eliminate terrorists and militants before this meeting!

The announcement didn’t include any schedule for a next DCC meeting to comprehensively devise a national strategy to counter the growing threat of terrorism that is engulfing the country. The News has already reported that all six previous meetings of DCC were called in response to some major terrorist incidents and not a single meeting was ever called to exclusively discuss and devise a comprehensive strategy to sort out major solutions for bringing peace to the country and an end to terrorism.

The very first meeting of the DCC was held on December 08, 2008 but was called after about nine months of the formation of the government in March 2008, and within 12 days of the deadly Mumbai attacks (November 26, 2008), at a time when national security was at stake in the wake of large-scale Indian propaganda.

Another meeting of the DCC was held in March 2009 with the same agenda — to devise a strategy to take action against those involved in Mumbai attacks. Following these initial meetings held only in response to crucial issues, an independent and exclusive meeting to discuss overall national strategy to save the country from the grave threat of terrorism or to renegotiate the country’s defence relations with the United States is yet to be held.

The last DCC meeting was held on May 12 (13 days ago) which was called to discuss the shameful Abbotabad incident but did not show any concrete results.