ISLAMABAD, Nov 4: Still furious over a US drone strike that killed the chief of Pakistani Taliban three days ago, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan sought political support in the National Assembly on Monday to keep afloat what he called a sabotaged peace process with the insurgents, but a fire-eating Imran Khan said his party’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government would in any case retaliate by blocking Nato supplies to Afghanistan after Nov 20.

Chaudhry Nisar, speaking before a planned briefing to a special cabinet meeting, and Imran Khan, chief of the PTI that heads the coalition government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, monopolised a brief sitting of the house on the opening day of its autumn session, which started late by over two hours in an apparent wait for the minister to return after watching an army exercise in Bahawalpur with the prime minister.

On a government initiative, the house suspended its question hour and other business for the day for a debate on the situation arising out of the Friday evening killing of Hakeemullah Mehsud and five of his companions by missiles fired from a US drone at the home in North Waziristan.

The minister called for keeping “in some way, the dialogue process afloat”, which he said on the strength of “my experience” was not difficult, and added: “We want the process to start (again) from where it broke”.

But he acknowledged it would not be a smooth job, saying “the matter will remain as it is” until the Taliban had chosen a new chief, and also referred to what he called “serious tensions” following his news conference on Saturday, where he called for a review of Pakistan’s relations with the United States, and “strong” statements coming from spokesmen for the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) after the strike.

PTI CHIEF: Imran Khan was more bitter in venting his anger after opposition leader Khursheed Ahmed Shah agreed to a PTI request that its leader be the first opposition speaker in the debate -- due to continue on Tuesday -- describing the situation as “Pakistan’s defining moment” and lamenting, to cheers from his party’s lawmakers: “The misfortune of our country is that we have sold our conscience for dollars.”

The PTI chief regretted previous killings of top Taliban commanders in US drone attacks as attempts to sabotage peace moves but, unlike the interior minister, avoided referring to some of the most devastating Taliban operations and killings that could sear people’s memory for a long time.

Chaudhry Nisar had referred to the killing of Maj-Gen Sanaullah Khan, an army divisional commander for Malakand, and deadly attacks on a Peshawar church and in the Qissa Khwani Bazaar and on a bus as some of the factors that caused some initial hurdles in the peace process and said how could there be peace talks in the presence of so many corpses.

The PTI chief called Friday’s attack as an “amn jirga (peace council) being droned” and asked “whether (by doing this) America is our friend or enemy”, drawing only a single shout of “enemy” from an opposition bench.

He called for all parties to leave aside their differences and “come on one page” to stand up to perceived American pressure. For this, he said, he was ready to meet all leaders, including his arch critic and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI-F) chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman.

While calling for a national consensus to tell the Americans to stop drone attacks, he said the PTI government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa would watch the situation until Nov 20 before blocking the Nato supplies, which currently cross into Afghanistan via the Khyber Pass after passing through that province and via Chaman in Balochistan.

ECHO IN SENATE: The drone strike also echoed in the Senate. JUI-F parliamentary leader Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Haideri, speaking on a point of order, proposed that the government call another APC on the issue, take hard decisions for the honour and dignity of Pakistan, take the issue to the United Nations and launch a diplomatic campaign against drone attacks.