It’s a little surprising, to say the least, that the parliamentary committee on national security’s briefing by the army high command saw broad consensus in the house, with only MNA Mohsin Dawar, leader of PTM (Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement), voicing dissent. Parliament is supposed to represent the entire 224 million strong population of the country, after all, and there is a wide wave of discontent surrounding these talks that is simply not represented there. So, while ensuring parliamentary oversight of proceedings as important as these is definitely the right way to proceed and appreciated as such, it must nonetheless be noted that these proceedings are progressing without a fair representation of the vast majority of the Pakistani people; especially those that lost near and dear ones, not to mention lives and limbs, to TTP terrorists. It’s also a little strange that press reports about the marathon session say very little about the direction of the talks now that the TTP has ruled out any compromise on the issue of reversing Fata’s merger with KP, imposition of Sharia rule in Waziristan (to start with), and also the release of hardcore terrorists presently held in Pakistani jails. They did say that these were red lines, of course, but we got this far even before this session. Now that the enemy has refused to budge, and there’s no way we are going to accept its core demands, without which it does not even want to talk, then why are we going through all the trouble to conduct these negotiations? There’s no doubt that everybody prefers peace over war, especially innocent people of a country that has lot more than 80,000 people to senseless barbarism. But most people ought to be forgiven for not trusting the TTP when the only result of scores of rounds of negotiations with them has been an eventual, inevitable resurgence in violence with the enemy had got strong enough once again. Why, then, are we choosing to willingly go down the same path one more time? Aren’t such things that the military specifically calls ‘reinforcing failure’? Pakistan must not give the impression that it is desperate for talks with TTP. It must set very straight conditions and demand just yes or no for an answer. *