News Desk |
‘The incumbent government’s foreign policy has been utterly failed that put Pakistan to an absolute isolation in the international community’, said PPP’s Vice President Sherry Rahman addressing a press conference in Islamabad. The details read, she termed the Pakistanis Foreign Minister’s Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s visit to New York as unsuccessful.
‘The government’s failure in combating important issues has jeopardized Pakistan internationally’, she claimed. She said that Pakistan has been put at risk in FATF and expressed her fear that China may also not support whereas the Indian Foreign Policy is much effective and successful.
Criticizing the behavior of the ministers and PM of the incumbent government, she said that if Imran Khan wants to run government unhindered then he must behave with the political entity in the parliament.
She was talking to senior journalists from across Pakistan during a special meeting in Senate Committee Room no 3. She was annoyed over the way China’s foreign minister was given reception and said that instead of strengthening foreign relations, the government has lost its friends. ‘When it comes to the bilateral relationship of two countries, China is different from other countries’.
She said that China was the hope for Pakistan in FATF but it is backing out owing to the discourteous behavior of the government. She warned that the CPEC would also be at risk as the government’s contention to review the past agreements had annoyed the stakeholders.
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Criticizing the government of mishandling the foreign affairs, Ms. Rehman said that gravity of the situation could be understood from the fact that despite earnest requests from the government of Pakistan, the Saudi government was not ready to lend oil.
She was annoyed over the way China’s foreign minister was given reception and said that instead of strengthening foreign relations, the government has lost its friends.
Talking about the meetings of the Foreign minister with his counterpart, she that Shah Mahmood Qureshi did not even mention about the blocked Coalition Support Fund (CSF) during his meeting with Mike Pompeo in Pakistan and later in New York. ‘Asking for the CSF is not shameful as we had already spent a lot in that regard’, she remarked.
She supported the decision of government going to IMF as she believed that the world resolved economic issues through the loans. ‘Talking to Americans is different; which the incumbent government has no capacity to understand. The government needs to stay engaged with US on different issues simultaneously as pressing for a single matter may result in refusal’, she suggested.
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Criticizing the behavior of the ministers and PM of the incumbent government, she said that if Imran Khan wants to run government unhindered then he must behave like a political entity in the parliament.
On the occasion, president PAFUJ Rana Muhammad Azeem, Chairman APNEC Ikram Bukhari, Secretary General PFUJ M. Jamal, President Punjab Union of Journalists Naeem Mustafa, President Karachi Union of Journalists Hassan Abbas, Rawalpindi and Islamabad Union of Journalist president Shakeel Ahmed, General Secretary Siddique Anzar, Kaleem Shamim, Raja Javed, Asif Parvez Butt, Muhammad Asif Butt and other journalists asked questions from her to which she answered in detail.
Most of Sherry Rehman’s press conference seemed to be political point scoring and nothing else. The PPP and PML-N have become known to have started blaming the PTI for things that happened during their tenure.
The FATF fiasco occurred during the PML-N’s tenure and already Pakistan suffered a lack of support from China and Saudi Arabia. Pakistan found itself on the watchlist of the global terror financing watchdog in February after a dramatic volte-face by two of its three principal backers.
After the United States negotiated with China, and got Saudi Arabia to lean on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), only Turkey was left standing with Pakistan as the plenary meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) ended in Paris.
Similarly, the attacks of PTI’s foreign policy failing with barely a month passing seems to be politically motivated than rather factually correct. As for Shah Mahmood’s visit, both sides seem to be on the same page of being hopeful for a “reset” in ties. This indicates that the FM’s visit was not as “failed’ as Sherry asserts.
It is apparent that the PPP leader’s rhetoric was an attempt to play on fears of the populace. The PPP and PML-N appear to be undertaking an aggressive policy of attacking the PTI’s solutions for crises that they actually started. Sherry Rehman’s conference appears to be a component of that strategy.