A cast of clowns, an all parties’ conference. The decision to call one on the current crisis is a bad idea. For much of the country’s history, the idea of an APC, as a concept, has been touted as an elixir for all problems of consensus. There is reason to be wary. Because a parliament is to an executive government what an APC is to a ‘national consensus government.’ One would be hard-pressed to find many democratic voices rooting for such endeavours. Yes, successes the model might have found in the committee for, say, the 18th amendment but that was the discretion of the sitting government. It did not have to and it would be difficult to conjecture a different outcome had it not chosen to adopt that model.
The parliament is an aggregation of our teeming millions. It is the correct forum to evolve a consensus on all issues. To seek recourse elsewhere is a slope slipperier than many would care to see. To segue into the issue at hand: things are heating up with the Americans, yes. And yes, we need to develop a consensus on what appears to be a bit of a rough patch. But what is the point of taking on board those whose who have an interest in moving away from a consensus? The PTI and the Jamaat-e-Islami both see opportunity – and the semblance of relevance – in pursuing an unrealistically, and unsustainably, hawkish stance. Parliaments are unruly enough as it is; trying to evolve a consensus out of an APC would be like trying to herd cats.
With the good comes the bad; the parliamentary approach would have excluded certain parties that actually do believe in mature politics and who are very relevant to the situation at hand, like the Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party. But there had to be at least some consequences of not participating in the 2008 elections and the PkMAP has to live with the decision.
Even though it is not the politicians who have led the country to this pass, it is the political class that have the resilience and ingenuity to steer the country out of the mess that the country is in. If all the opposition parties ease up, perhaps the government itself will turn down the jingoism by several notches and seek reconciliation with the US. To say the Americans are acting brash and bellicose is one thing. But to say that they have no argument at all is quite another.
