Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [61]
The unfortunate inspector had to promise an inquiry, the dacoit’s immediate release and the immediate transfer of the offending police officer to another province. And this chief minister, by the way, has a personal reputation for efficiency, hard work and relative honesty. A senior officer in Punjab told me that around half of the 648 station house officers (chiefs of local police stations) in the province are chosen by local politicians through influence on the Punjab government, to serve their local interests.
Furthermore, the state judicial system is not merely politically reactive, but is also regularly used as an active weapon. A great many artificial cases are brought deliberately by politicians to attack rivals, and by governments against their opponents. The manipulation of such cases and their outcomes is also a key tactic of the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) in managing elections by forcing particular candidates to withdraw or to change sides.
A situation of nearly universal mendacity and political pressure concerning their work would place an intolerable burden on even the best-equipped, best-trained, best-paid and best-motivated police force in the world – and the Pakistani police (like the Indian) are very, very far from being any of these things.
The miserable conditions in which ordinary policemen work was brought home to me by a visit to a station house in the suburbs of Peshawar in August 2008 (responsible for an area where there had been eighteen murders so far in 2008). I spoke with the sub-inspector in charge of the investigation unit in the room where he and the other officers sleep and eat during the day and night that they spend at a time on duty. It was a slum, with bare concrete walls, stained with damp from the leaking roof. My visit was during a power cut – the ordinary police of course have no generators – and in the monsoon the whole station was a hot fug of rot and sweat. The officers’ clothes hung on pegs, and there was a mirror for shaving. That, with their charpoys (string beds) and a couple of chairs, was all the furniture.
The sub-inspector is a big, very tough-looking middle-aged man with enormous fists – not a good person to be interrogated by. I asked him what the police in the NWFP need most. He gave a harsh laugh.
Where to begin? First, we need better pay and incentives. Look at the motorway police. Everyone says how honest and hard-working they are – well, that’s easy, they are paid twice what we get. We need better accommodation – look at this place. We need better vehicles, better radios, better arms, bullet-proof vests. Tell me, could any police force in the world work well given what we have to rely on? Would you risk your life fighting the Taleban for the pay we get?
He told me that at that time there was one fingerprinting machine for the whole of the NWFP; and, as his seniors candidly admitted, it was almost completely useless, both because of the inadequacy of the archiving system and because the ordinary police have no training in taking fingerprints. This is also true for the greater part of Punjab and the whole of interior Sindh. And indeed, all this is irrelevant, since the police have no training in how not to ruin all evidence by trampling over a crime scene. This is generally the case even of the Interior Ministry’s special service, the Intelligence Bureau. It helps explain the shambolic nature of the investigation into Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, which has generated so many conspiracy theories.
To lack of equipment and lack of training can be added lack of numbers. Visitors to Pakistan who see large numbers of police guarding official buildings or accompanying politicians may think this is a heavily policed society. In the main cities, large numbers of police can indeed be called upon if required; but in the Punjab countryside,