PTI founder asks 'why Afghanistan being made enemy'

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf founding chairman Imran Khan’s sister Aleema Khan on Tuesday said her brother argued that “Afghanistan is not our enemy, why are they trying to make it our enemy?”

“Why are you trying to trigger a war with Muslim brothers,” she quoted Imran as telling her. She was talking to the media outside the Adiala jail after having met Imran. She noted that the PTI founder said his party would go to a National Security Committee meeting only with his permission. Replying to a question, she explained that Imran said look at the graph and see that terrorism had decreased by 2021 and started increasing again in 2022.

She said her brother was not receiving newspapers these days and his TV set was turned off as well. According to her, the founder said he could talk to his children on phone only four times during the last six months.

Separately, PTI Central Information Secretary Sheikh Waqas Akram said peace and progress in the country would remain an unattainable dream unless the state undertook a fundamental and immediate course correction, as the “power grabbers’ self-centered and shortsighted policies” polarized the country and alienated the people. He said this required the state to strictly confine its role within the constitutional limits, accepting constitutional supremacy, upholding the public mandate without compromise, safeguarding people’s rights unconditionally, completely abandoning all coercive practices and, above all, prioritizing national interest over narrow personal and political agendas. He made it clear that Pakistan was facing an existential threat, and God forbid, a ‘volcano’ was ready to erupt in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Balochistan, calling for immediate redressing of their genuine grievances. He lambasted that the stolen mandate holders had unleashed a brigade of cronies to criticize the PTI and its leadership for not taking part in the ‘futile’ meeting of the Parliamentary Committee on National Security instead of seriously considering its rightful proposal to facilitate a meeting with Pakistan’s true leader Imran Khan.