THERE’S a scene in many Bollywood and Lollywood movies where the comic actor pretends to threaten the muscular villain while whispering to a friend who is holding him not to let go.

I am reminded of this familiar sequence every time Gen Kayani proclaims that the army can sort out the Pakistani Taliban, provided the political leadership gives him the green light. Meanwhile, Nawaz Sharif says he will do whatever the other political parties want him to do.

When the all-party conference (APC) is finally called after months, and there is a consensus on negotiations, the politicians remain frozen in inaction. While the various official actors dither, the Taliban continue merrily on their killing spree, murdering a general here, and scores of Christians there.

To provide them with an excuse is Imran Khan, who blames mysterious forces of wanting to derail talks. To compound the confusion, he also asserts that those behind the Peshawar church bombing could not possibly be human beings.

So he wants the government to talk to animals? The stark reality is that with some Taliban sympathisers in GHQ, Lahore, Islamabad and Peshawar, the fight is as good as lost. No matter how hard the Taliban pound us, we seem destined to crawl before them in a desperate attempt to buy peace at any cost.

But as Babar Sattar reminded us on these pages recently, there is a price the government simply cannot pay. In his brilliant analysis, he enumerated the constitutional hurdles that block Nawaz Sharif as he travels the path to unconditional surrender. For starters, the terror suspects the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) want freed as a pre-condition cannot be let off while they are being tried.

Next, the government cannot abjure its responsibility and leave the people of Fata to the tender mercies of the jihadis in any agreement. In this constitutional sense, the earlier deal with Maulana Fazlullah to hand Swat over to him and his gang was illegal.

As my old friend Babar Ayaz reminds us in his wide-ranging book What’s Wrong With Pakistan? “There is no dearth of apologists for the Taliban/jihadi organisations in Pakistan. These apologists are led by the religious parties and other persons, including more recently the Oxford-educated cricketer Imran Khan, who is proud of his right-wing politics….”

The author could have added Nawaz Sharif as well as large swathes of the media to his list.

In a recent TV chat show, I saw Hamid Gul, the Taliban’s principal cheerleader, advising us not to worry as everything would soon be all right, despite the recent spate of terrorist attacks. He and Javed Hashmi insisted that there was an international conspiracy involving the CIA, RAW and Mossad to sabotage talks.

They were on the same page as Imran Khan whose first response to the Peshawar atrocity was to mutter darkly: “How is it that whenever we are about to begin negotiations, there’s a suicide bombing or a drone attack?”

Actually, terrorism against ordinary Pakistanis has been going on for years, and has nothing to do with any talks. The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) chief has trotted out yet another excuse for the bloody actions of the jihadis. And now he wants the TTP to be allowed to open an office. Here’s an idea: to save on rent, why doesn’t the PTI chief direct the KP government to provide office space to the Taliban?

In an attempt to put off action, Nawaz Sharif has announced that he will seek guidance from Turkey on how to deal with terrorism. Had he ever read recent Turkish history, he would have known that the situation there is very different as the terrorist threat has come from Kurdish separatists of the PKK.

In the 1970s, Turkey fought against left-wing revolutionaries. And the army had the firm backing of the political leadership in both struggles. But time spent reading would take our prime minister away from the dining table.

When Nawaz Sharif (and before him, Asif Zardari) speaks of the need for building a consensus before sending the army into Fata, I wonder why this wasn’t considered necessary in Balochistan. After all, the Frontier Corps has been all over the province like a rash for years, conducting a savage underground war against nationalists. No APC was called to stamp its approval on this military action.

And when this government decided to send in the Rangers against the criminal gangs of Karachi, no lengthy consultations with political parties were necessary. True, Nawaz Sharif heard out the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the PPP and the Awami National Party, but basically, the decision had already been taken.

The TTP and the other jihadi groups are no different from the many mafias operating in Karachi, except for being better armed and far more ruthless. So why do they merit deference and appeasement? Is it because they are ideologically close to the mindset of Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan? Some of them are certainly useful to the security establishment.

How badly our politicians want to curry favour with these groups was brought home by the APC declaration in which these killers were given the grand title of ‘stakeholders’. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before they are elevated to the status of ‘lords and masters’.

The irony is that despite all this self-abasement — or perhaps because of it — these militants have upped the ante by killing a general and a colonel, and then going on to slaughter over 80 Christians in their church. They can see they have the nuclear-armed state of Pakistan on its knees, begging for mercy.

By treating them as equals in negotiations, we have already conceded far too much. The TTP has many disparate groups under its umbrella, and knows it is difficult to negotiate with such an unwieldy bunch, all of whose leaders have large egos and different agendas. Far better to simply continue killing, and let the Pakistani state implode under its own fears and contradictions. irfan.husain@gmail.com