The cries of outrage over the drone strike killing Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief Hakimullah Mehsud on November 1 have been replaced with horror over the choice of Maulana Fazlullah, the new leader for the banned terror outfit who has reportedly ruled out any chance of peace talks with the government.
Last week, after Mehsud’s death Pakistan Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan accused the U.S. of foiling the peace process and called for a review of all aspects of the country’s ties with the U.S. However, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has no intention of doing this and official sources said the matter was not discussed at all. The rhetoric of one minister cannot become a policy statement, the sources said adding it would be business as usual with the U.S.
By making an international issue of drone strikes — supported by parties like Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) — the government has taken away the real issue of terrorism from the public eye. Yet, terrorism has claimed over 40,000 lives already and the government says that Pakistan is its worst victim. When the first ever democratic transition took place, the new government under Mr. Sharif vowed to end terrorism and to this end called an All Parties Conference in September for a consensus on fighting terror. The army chief of staff too was on the same page as the government and keen on a dialogue to end terrorism. Six days after the conference, two senior army officers were killed in Upper Dir, a deed attributed to the Taliban. This was followed by five blasts in Peshawar, three of them in a week, starting with the suicide bombing at All Saints Church which caused a setback to the peace talks. Later, the Law Minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was killed, making him the third member of the provincial assembly to be fatally targeted.
While the Interior Minister says the government worked behind the scenes for seven weeks to reach a stage when Mehsud was going to be handed a formal letter of invitation for talks, politicians and the media are raising questions on whether the government had a plan. For instance Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad of the Awami Muslim League has told the National Assembly that he had spoken to all the interlocutors named by the government and none of them had been engaged in talks with the Taliban. Members of the National Assembly staged walkouts on Friday and insisted the Prime Minister who rarely attends the session, take them into confidence and clarify matters on the peace talks, failing which they too would launch a boycott of the proceedings.
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