Islamabad: “The identity as well as ideology of the state of Pakistan and its citizens has always been clearly known and cherished by the people of Pakistan and are recorded in the Objectives Resolution and rest of the Constitution of Pakistan”.
This was stated by Muhammad Akram Zaki, former Secretary Foreign Affairs during his concluding address at a roundtable held at the Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad to discuss the national security strategy proposed by a working group of Pakistan Ex-Servicemen Association (PESA).
He said that the idea of Pakistan and its rational basis were clearly spelt out by Allama Muhammad Iqbal in his Allahabad address in 1930 and was further elaborated by Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan and other founding fathers.
Earlier, Air Marshal (R) MasoodAkhtar and former Ambassador Saleem Nawaz Gandapur spelt out the proposals of PESA and iterated that the nation needed to unite on the basis of common identity and values and progress towards known and declared national objectives in order to achieve carefully selected and recorded vital national interests.
The presenters said that they wished to initiate a dialogue on the basis of which a national security strategy may be evolved through input from various sections of society and to be declared and implemented by the government of Pakistan. They stressed that the nation cannot achieve its goals of democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance and social justice of Islam, set out in the Objectives Resolution unless each organ of state and every member of the nation was on the same page with respect to national identity, objectives and destination.
A distinguished panel of experts including lawyers, academics, security analysts, former ambassadors and bureaucrats dilated upon the subject and viewed that the nation cannot proceed towards a consensus unless the state is ready to honor the aspirations of the nation and respect the rights of its members. The initiative was however widely welcomed and it was stressed that the nation would unite only on the basis of common ideology on which they had joined hands at the time of creation of Pakistan.
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