Domestic security policy in tatters: Babar

ISLAMABAD: PPP Senator Farhatullah Babar has warned that the edifice around which domestic security policy is built is crumbling in the wake of the judicial inquiry commission’s damning report on the Quetta carnage.

“The nation will weep if the interior minister does not step down to restore the people’s trust,” Senator Farhatullah Babar said on Thursday during a discussion in the Senate on Justice Qazi Faez Isa report on the Quetta assault.

He said the interior minister’s “irresponsible response and stubbornness” was more frightening than the report’s impact on internal security preparedness. “The (interior) minister has emerged as the single greatest obstacle in the fight against militancy.”

“If people are still optimistic about winning the fight against militancy, it is not because of the interior minister but in spite of him,” Senator Babar said. The PPP stalwart chided the interior minister for telling the Supreme Court that he was not responsible for the public meetings of proscribed organisations in Islamabad.

“No one can imagine the Nacta chief asserting that he is not responsible if its board of governors did not meet for three consecutive years and the prime minister is responsible for this state of affairs.”

No one, he said, could have imagined that the minister “will have the audacity to assert that he met the leader of a proscribed organization, because he was a delegate of a non-proscribed outfit”.

This is tantamount to the minister saying that proscribed organisations are free to join any political entity under any name. “Can people ever feel safe (in these conditions)?” he asked.

The judicial commission, he said, wondered why the ban on militant organisations has not been enforced, adding the report rightly questioned the interior minister’s pro-militant leanings.

The minister, he said, had wept when Hakimullah Mehsud was assassinated, adding that he claimed that nothing could be done against Maulana Abdul Aziz because there was no case against him. “He defended Jamatud Dawa (JuD), citing a non-existent court order.”

“The report is a stinging indictment of the interior Minister … If he did not voluntarily resign, he must be shown the door,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 23^rd, 2016.