Islamabad (August 30, 2017): Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly Khursheed Shah urged the government to call a Joint Session of Parliament over new US policy for Afghanistan and South Asia.
According to the details, Leader of the Opposition in National Assembly, Syed Khurshid Ahmed Shah, on Wednesday, called for a joint session of Parliament to give a strong response to the United States’ new Afghan policy.
Speaking on the floor of the house, opposition leader criticized government for its foreign policy failures.
“Today’s session should have been started with the foreign minister’s speech but unfortunately this didn’t happen,” Shah told lawmakers in the lower house of Parliament as he came down hard on the government for its “foreign policy failure”.
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The leader of the opposition questioned deposed prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s role as the country’s foreign minister for four years. “There are a lot of competent people in Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz but they [government] could not find a foreign minister,” he lamented.
Had Sharif even made Abid Sher Ali, a PML-N lawmaker, the country’s foreign minister, we would have accepted it, Shah continued amid laughter from the opposition benches.
He said that the government did not appoint a full-fledged foreign minister during the last fours years, which led to the current situation.
He said: “We should ponder over why Trump threatens us. We should not hide facts from the nation.”
He added: “this is not the proper time to get emotional rather to ponders over our failure as why we are losing our importance.”
He said that today no one was happy from Pakistan and relations with those sharing borders with us were not cordial.
“Our foreign minister should have started today’s debate in the assembly,” he argued.
Shah also criticised Pakistan’s poor relations with most of its neighbors, saying “our neighbors hurl threats at us”.
The Pakistan Peoples Party’s senior leader came down hard on former ambassador Abdul Basit’s scathing letter to Pakistan’s envoy in US Aizaz Chaudhry.
“This is a failure of governance,” said Shah.
Earlier, Awami Muslim League chief Sheikh Rasheed addressed the assembly. He too criticised Basit’s letter, saying it was embarrassing to see news of it in the media.
He said the government should open backdoor diplomacy with the US.
Meanwhile, PML-N leader and former interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan agreed with the opposition leader’s call for a joint parliamentary session in wake of new American strategy for Afghanistan and South Asia.
“Pakistan is not responsible for the failures of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan,” Nisar said, adding the US did not ask Pakistan before invading the war-torn nation. The minister said a major policy overhaul was needed to deal with the challenging situation. “This issue cannot be resolved by mere resolutions and condemnations but we will have to overhaul the entire narrative towards the US.”
Ridiculing Trump over his statement that the US has given billions of dollars to Pakistan, Nisar said it was ‘peanuts’. The former interior minister said Pakistan had called for an international audit into US claims that it paid billions to Pakistan to fight terror “but the democratic country [US] did not even respond to the proposal.”
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