Parliamentary oversight of talks with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan is, definitely, the right way to proceed if negotiations with them are inevitable, and due credit must be given to Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto for raising this issue, but it still waltzes past the question of why they are necessary in the first place. Far too many Pakistanis have already questioned this exercise for it to go ahead without answering some very important questions first. Indeed, even prominent retired military officers have implied that the only negotiations that should be allowed with these enemies of the state and the people are terms of surrender. This matter is made all the more important by the fact that neither the Pakistani government nor the military was interested in negotiating anything with these insurgents. Rather the Afghan Taliban promised when Pakistan helped the US reach an understanding with them to end the long war, to sort TTP out once they took Kabul. Yet, when they were back in power, they took no action whatsoever, even when TTP was blatantly violating their orders by using Afghan soil to plan attacks on other countries. Instead, they advised Pakistan to talk to the militants. Since then, for some reason, Pakistani authorities have been negotiating a peace settlement with the TTP. They’ve already once unilaterally withdrawn from the talks because we didn’t release the prisoners they wanted as a pre-condition for peace, but now, we’re back at the table. And while routing the matter through parliament is much better than shrouding it in secrecy, as in the previous PTI administration’s time, it must still be pointed out that a vast majority of the country does not favour this course of action at all. They want to see TTP crushed and made an example of, which means that they want the military to have only the stick as an option when dealing with militants that killed more than 80,000 Pakistanis, not the carrot. *