Khurshid Shah calls for joint parliamentary session to respond to Trump’s criticism

Nisar proposes major policy overhaul towards US

Leader of the Opposition in National Assembly, Syed Khurshid Ahmed Shah, on Wednesday, called for a joint session of Parliament to give a strong response to the United States’ new Afghan policy.

“Today’s session should have been started with the foreign minister’s speech but unfortunately this didn’t happen,” Shah told lawmakers in the lower house of Parliament as he came down hard on the government for its “foreign policy failure”.



The leader of the opposition questioned deposed prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s role as the country’s foreign minister for four years. “There are a lot of competent people in Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz but they [government] could not find a foreign minister,” he lamented.

Had Sharif even made Abid Sher Ali, a PML-N lawmaker, the country’s foreign minister, we would have accepted it, Shah continued amid laughter from the opposition benches.

Meanwhile, PML-N leader and former interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan agreed with the opposition leader’s call for a joint parliamentary session in wake of new American strategy for Afghanistan and South Asia.

“Pakistan is not responsible for the failures of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan,” Nisar said, adding the US did not ask Pakistan before invading the war-torn nation. The minister said a major policy overhaul was needed to deal with the challenging situation. “This issue cannot be resolved by mere resolutions and condemnations but we will have to overhaul the entire narrative towards the US.”



Ridiculing Trump over his statement that the US has given billions of dollars to Pakistan, Nisar said it was ‘peanuts’. The former interior minister said Pakistan had called for an international audit into US claims that it paid billions to Pakistan to fight terror “but the democratic country [US] did not even respond to the proposal.”