WHY did not those political parties which had called and attended the All-Party Conference for peace talks with the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan call an APC on the Quetta carnage?

Quetta has witnessed deadliest bomb blasts since the start of this year in which more than 100 people died, while over a couple of hundreds of people were injured.

The APC on the peace talks offered by the TTP does not make any sense as the TTP is targeting Pakistan’s armed forces and killing innocent citizens. Moreover its affiliates, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi and Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan, are busy promoting terrorism on a sectarian basis in Quetta and Karachi, respectively.

The families of the people killed in Quetta have been looking over these political parties to call an APC on the Quetta crisis and to find a solution to the killings in Quetta with a political consensus.

But we have seen that the majority of the parties which had attended the All-Party Conference on the peace talks with the TTP has built a political consensus against the governor’s rule imposed on Balochistan after the three days of peaceful sit-in organised all over Pakistan in solidarity with the families of the people killed in blast on Alamdar Road in Quetta.

The JUI-F, the coalition partner of the government in Balochistan, has played a leading role against the governor’s rule in the province because they had lost some ineffective ministries which failed to provide security to the people.

It would have been better if the JUI-F played its part in building a political consensus against the Quetta massacres and against the terrorist organisations promoting terror in the province.

When the security forces started operation in some areas, the ministers who were removed started giving statements against the governor’s rule.

This indicated that they have sympathies with these killers. The Feb 16 blast showed that the province needed a planned operation against terrorists as we had seen in Swat and in some parts of Waziristan to establish the writ of the government in Balochistan.

M. SHUJA Karachi