ISLAMABAD: “I’ll keep it short and crisp.” This is how Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar usually starts his speech which gets easily dragged into an hour. In the end, he leaves a long trail of smoke screens and everybody feels more confused than earlier.
On Thursday he broke his own record by stretching his short and crisp speech to 65 minutes. It was littered with mumbo-jumbo, mish-mash hashed into hocus-pocus. After 14 hours on Friday, we still wondered what it was all about. Hacks, their arms paralysed from taking notes, had just one thing to swear about 90 percent of the content—déjà vu. Surely, everybody was angry or confused—mostly both.
In the end, we did not know whether the Taliban were friends or foes, patriots or foreign agents; whether we are fighting them or talking to them or doing something, everything or perhaps nothing.
It is not clear how many negotiating committees exist now; how many members do they have; who will talk to whom, why, how and where; whether military will be a part of this or not; what is their mandate; how long will this go on; are there any red lines; what if more bombings keep happening. Our friends in RAW should be happy that they have been credited with suicide bombers, which until recently was exclusively indigenous. Perhaps time to introduce Mossad and CIA—anybody but the Taliban, even if their subsidiary groups own the bombings.
PPP’s Khursheed Shah was rightly incensed that “how can we call the majority of Taliban as patriots.” How about the thousands of innocent citizens and soldiers who lost their lives? What did they die for?
Khursheed Shah was sceptical about Nisar’s theory that the additional sessions judge in District Courts was killed by his own guard. It’s difficult to imagine somebody firing three pistol shots by mistake.
The Syed from Sukkur believed that Nisar was trying to protect the Taliban by blaming the guard.Another usual pattern with Nisar is that he usually skips away after a provocative speech. Khawaja Saad Rafiq had to come to Nisar’s rescue. Saad is turning out to be one of the rare saner PML-N voices among the gems that Mian Sahb has chosen for his third cabinet. But he seemed illogical in his explanation that the investigation was still on and this was not the final conclusion. Why should the interior minister say it if this was not the final report?
Nisar may have created problems for the government by scoring personal points against the opposition. It’s obvious that it’s becoming difficult for Khursheed Shah to keep supporting the government on the Taliban strategy.
Khursheed was also critical about involving the Army in talks with the Taliban. His argument was that if the talks failed the Army could not afford to take the blame for it. Again, Khawaja Saad clarified that it was just a proposal. And yet again why should the government mention it if this was not approved by the Army or the government.
Nisar definitely got us if the idea is to keep everybody confused. If not, something needs to be done to clear the ever-growing perception that the prime minister either lacks the will or, in the words of Ayaz Amir, the spine. The ambivalence in the government policy is more killing than the killing itself.
The government should simply spell out how long till we have to wait for the dialogue charade to continue. How many more people need to die before the government actually declares battle against the ‘Patriots.’ Everybody can see that this lull before, well, another lull is helping the Taliban. The pressure against them stands already diffused. And if this got stretched to the time when Employment Exchange for our local Taliban gets opened for yet another conquering of Jalabad and Kabul, God save us. It will be our turn to become, ironically, the strategic depth for Afghan Taliban.
What saves the PML-N is that the mess in other parties is no less. While the PTI accepted the PPP-PML-N nominee for the Election Commissioner, Justice (R) Bhagwandas, Shireen Mazari broke party ranks to oppose it. (The real issue, it seems, is over the Punjab member of the EC). The inside picture in the PTI seems murkier after the published reports about the alleged award of health projects in the KP being given to the NGO linked with the party’s Airline Carrier.
Another story doing the rounds is about real estate projects being run by a PTI heavyweight who, people say, joined the party for this very purpose. Whither goes the honesty bravado of our Aam Aadmi Party?
If this was not enough, the reports from the third biggest party are equally disturbing. The father, the kid and the holy orphans in the Parliament are running the PPP policy in their own separate ways.
The Parliamentary PPP, so far, supports the PML-N on talks with the Taliban, while Billy the kid thinks that politics is all about revolutionary tweets and showbiz. Will Aunt Sherry please educate him about the real world? Will uncle Wajid return from London to teach a few lessons in political discourse? And the Papa is conveniently missing after having enjoyed power for five long years.
And here we are, the hapless creatures, stuck with the three choices we have. We know it’s relative world but who can blame the confused masses to rally around Canadian Qadri next time he is given the green signal to regroup.
Tail piece: Foreign Office Spokesperson Tasnim Aslam seems headed for trouble for questioning the intelligence level of our policy makers. Or was it about us the journalists. Either way she should have focused more on her elaboration of the foreign policy instead of picking unnecessary fights. The Senate has already summoned her for an explanation. We hear a similar clamour in the National Assembly after Shazia Mari brought it up in her speech. The lady better show some modesty if she wants to avoid a similar grilling at the National Assembly. Sorry MB.
The News
March 8, 2014