By Asif Akhtar

The past week has been very eventful as far as public statements in Pakistani politics go. Punjab’s Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif has come under heavy fire for a statement in which he reportedly asked the Taliban to stop attacking Punjab because his PML-N party, like the Taliban, is against foreign dictation of Pakistan’s affairs.

The media pounced on this tone of compromise, sparking some full-fledged Sharif-bashing, while Salman Taseer, Governor of Punjab and Sharif's arch-nemesis, wasted no time in condemning the statement as defeatist.

Influential politicians from other provinces, such as MQM’s Altaf Hussain, have pointed out that the comment signifies PML-N’s Punjab-centric attitude, and openly wondered if the Sharif brothers think it’s alright for the Taliban to attack other provinces while sparing Punjab.

Possibly jealous of all the press coverage other politicians are getting, Imran Khan has apparently joined Twitter to try and pass some controversial statements there. Sadly for him, Zee News was the only media outlet to pick up on his social media activities.

Meanwhile Shahbaz Sharif – thank the Lord he’s not on Twitter – is evidently kicking himself in the gonads for ever passing the comment and appears to have retracted it several times, claiming the media misconstrued his comment, took it out of context and manipulated it, though he doesn’t seem to have clarified what exactly he meant either.

The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) seem to have taken note of this plea for a respite, whether Shahbaz meant it or not, as unverifiable reports suggest the TTP have offered the Punjab government a proverbial ‘deal with the devil’, saying they’ll stop attacking targets in Punjab if the government stops taking action against them. This hasn’t really helped Shahbaz’s predicament.

And the fun doesn’t end there. It was recently reported that Pervez Musharraf, who doesn’t like being out of the loop for long, has also been passing comments to the press – this time using a hip new media buzzword, calling Shahbaz’s brother Nawaz Sharif a “closet Taliban”.

Now, I know it’s possible to be a closet homosexual, or a closet alcoholic, but I can only wonder what a Taliban does in the closet. Perhaps Musharraf has been in the closet and knows exactly what goes on there. Though if we look at his record, he did sweep a lot of Taliban organisations under the rug and shove some in the closet during his tenure.

And if the dynamic Sharif brothers are in the line of fire, another (unrelated) Sharif, Justice Khawaja Sharif of the Lahore High Court, has also come under attack for saying that “Hindus might be the financiers of such attacks” by the Taliban. He was apparently rebutting a lawyer who suggested that US security firms were involved in the recent blasts.

What a way to go about an argument, rebutting one loony conspiracy theory with another. I didn’t know they gave that kind of training in law school.

Justice Sharif's remarks have also caused uproar in the Hindu ranks of Pakistan’s parliament, where a band of Hindu MPAs have claimed that such comments hurt the feelings of Pakistani Hindus whose patriotism should not be questioned.

As criticism over his comments started catching heat, the Labor Minister came to the aid of the embattled justice saying: “The judge had seemingly blamed India for financing the Taliban rather than Hindus.”

Oh, okay, so if he was blaming Indian Hindus then it’s perfectly acceptable, because apparently Indian Hindus don’t have feelings like Pakistani Hindus do. Justices should be more careful when passing such sensitive comments – they should use the politically correct term ‘Indian Hindus’ when referring to who was behind the attacks, lest they upset either Indian Muslims or Pakistani Hindus in the process.

Even General Petraeus, that defender of peace and justice in the region, has warned that a Mumbai-style terror attack in India could put the two countries on a war footing as part of a Taliban strategy to take the heat off operations in FATA.

Is it just me, or is diplomacy between the two countries really that idiotic? I mean, if you know someone’s trying to jeopardise the peace talks, would you just sit there and let the peace talks be jeopardised? Even in kindergarten playgrounds, if a third kid is trying to get two kids to fight with each other, they know to band up on that third kid.

But no, the high-ups in Pakistan and India are just too dumb to think that far ahead. Like baboons they’ll go on beating the war drum as soon as there’s even a hint of terror in the region, without stopping to think who exactly ends up gaining from their monkey actions.

And how exactly does blaming India for the attacks in Pakistan help the situation? Does it even matter that the TTP have claimed responsibility for the attacks, and went as far to offer Shahbaz Sharif a deal? No, obviously those Taliban are lying to get credit where it isn’t due. Trying to take the blame away from Indian Hindus – who do these Taliban think they are? Maybe the Indian Hindus are actually in the closet, and maybe, just maybe, Nawaz Sharif might be a Hindu, and Indian, since he’s also in the closet.

I think the government should hire Musharraf as a special envoy to conduct in-the-closet investigations/lecture tours to find out exactly who is in the closet and who’s out of the closet. This could work as a two-pronged approach to also figure out exactly whose side these Indian Hindus are on, and precisely how many Taliban are hiding in the closet.

The danger here is that if we don’t send Musharraf into the closet to tackle this rampant Talibanisation of the closet, then the US Army and the CIA might divinely intervene and destroy the closet in a drone strike. Then we won’t have any closet at all.

What will we do then, with no closet? Where will Nawaz Sharif go on off days? Where will Imran Khan access his Twitter account from? What will we do?

With all this finger pointing over who is a Taliban and who isn’t, this debating whether the Taliban are really that bad, and trying to find alternative paranormal explanations for the frequent blasts, sanity has packed its clothes (from the closet) and taken a good long vacation, leaving our politicians et al to beat their chests in this monkey parliament we have as an excuse for a political institution.