According to the news of Pakistani newspaper Dawn, during a discussion in a program, Rashid raised the issue of increasing terrorism in the country. On Friday, the office of the Karachi Police Chief was attacked by the TTP. The terrorists carried out several blasts and kept firing on the security forces from inside the building for about 4 hours. Regarding the Karachi attack, Rasheed said, “It is the job of the army and special forces to deal with terrorism, not the police.” He stressed that the country does not have any ‘clear policy’ regarding this.
‘Wrong force fighting terrorism’
Pakistani journalist said, ‘We are using the wrong force to fight terrorism. We don’t know what our policy is, are we talking to the Taliban or attacking and bombing them?’ He blamed former army chief and former President of Pakistan General Pervez Musharraf for the present crisis. Rasheed said that we do not have any anti-terrorist policy. We are not ready to mobilize people in support of any policy because there is no policy.
‘Will have to go a long way to defeat TTP’
He said that Pakistan has to go a long way to gain an edge in the fight against terrorism. Referring to the suicide blast in a mosque in Peshawar, Rasheed raised the question, ‘What happened to the hundreds of policemen killed in the Peshawar attack? They got lost somewhere in the pages of newspapers. Pakistani affairs expert Michael Kugelman, involved in the discussion, said that after the Taliban’s capture of Kabul in August 2021, TTP’s activism increased rapidly.
Pakistan’s trouble will start after the IMF deal
‘Pakistan is no longer of any use to America’
Speaking on Pakistan-US relations, Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in the US, said that Pakistan needs to understand that it is not as strategically important to the US as ‘people in Islamabad think’. He said that often Pakistan feels neglected. This is because he is standing with China. America will not say it openly but ‘this is what is going on in Washington at the moment’. Kugelman says Pakistan is not America’s ‘priority’ after exiting Afghanistan.