Securing Pakistan: Making Sense of the Fundamentals of Counter- Terrorism and Counter-Violent Extremism

Book Review

Abstract

Securing Pakistan; Making Sense of the Fundamentals of Counter-Terrorism and Counter-Violent Extremism by Muhammad Makki and Tughral Yamin is a careful illustration of the transformation that has occurred in the global security measures in response to the 9/11 attack on the United States. Both the domestic and transnational threats of terrorism gave rise to certain regulatory responses that varied from country to country and were highly heterogeneous. In particular, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the policy initiatives taken by Pakistan to counter terrorism. The authors divide these measures into the hard and the soft categories, and provide an extensive overview of the transition from intervention to prevention mechanisms in a diverse society like Pakistan. The first ever policy initiative in the counter-terrorism strategy was the National Internal Security Policy 2014-2018 that recognized the traditional as well as the non-traditional threats; however, in the aftermath of the 2014 APS attack, the National Action Plan (NAP) was devised as the new counter-terrorism strategy. NAP viewed terrorism as multifaceted and metamorphic in nature, thus requiring a more dynamic approach, which is why it identified and established the “National Counter-Terrorism Authority” (NACTA) as a major counter-terrorism institution. This was followed by the National Internal Security Policy (2018-2023) that focused on constructing an ideological response to violent extremism in the form of a national narrative.