Regional isolation?

Published October 5, 2016

REFERENCE your editorial ‘Regional isolation?’ (Oct 2).

I’m afraid Pakistan is already isolated to a large extent. There was a time when the entire Muslim world supported our stance on the Kashmir dispute. Now no Muslim country speaks out in favour of implementing UN resolutions on resolving the issue. Even though there is no proof of our involvement, and it is obvious that India was the only beneficiary of the Uri base attack and, therefore, may have itself engineered the incident to malign us, we are being held responsible for it.

Instead of condemning India for its so-called ‘surgical strike across the LoC’ — which, if it had really happened, could have resulted in war — the entire world is silent. You can be sure if Pakistan had claimed to have crossed the LoC (without actually doing so), there would have been an uproar.

Surely there is something wrong that we are doing. Perhaps if we stopped extremist organisations from openly propagating their poisonous beliefs and brainwashing our youths to turn them into suicide bombers, we may change the perception others have of our country being a supporter of terrorism.

It would also help if we had an able foreign minister in charge instead of our bumbling prime minister who is also the foreign minister and who thinks he is very good at presenting our case before international forums.

Shakir
Karachi

Published in Dawn, October 5th, 2016

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