These are troubling signs of the government’s capitulation before a public enemy against whom it has failed to protect its citizens. The Taliban and the like need to be weeded out; there cannot be any rules of engagement with such rogue elements. No responsible state can barter away its citizens’ rights to a group of bandits who only believe in violence as their tool of operation. The Taliban can lay no claim to being in the mainstream of politics because it is not the ballot but the bullet on which their power rests. The state is acting against its own citizens by according such elements any recognition by signing the so-called peace deal with them, and that too without passing it through parliament.

The writer is an editor with ‘Dawn’, Karachi

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