Guest blog by Dr. Arif Alvi Secretary General Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf
There has been a lot of sadness and condemnation of the Swat flogging incident. The day on which Mr Imran Khan’s statement was issued by me there were many press reports in Frontier newspapers in which some elements of the Taliban had condemned the incident and others said that the incident happened during the time of total lawlessness and before the peace deal. A sign that most of them were on the back foot and embarrassed, though some are not.
We feel such reactions from within the Taliban kind of people need to be recognized because change for the better and saner would happen from within them and not because of outside pressure. Had force been effective huge US and NATO presence and billions of dollars of resources would have brought about a major change in Afghanistan and Iraq.
We must condemn the flogging incident in un-equivocal terms before we even talk of why such incidents happen and how to prevent them. Some people want a simplistic assessment and easy answers.
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