Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has finished a round of talks without the relief it wanted for jailed founder Imran Khan, after the KP governor rule and an emergency were imposed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, The News reported. The paper says the party is believed to have passed up a route that might have kept its own administration in the province. People inside PTI, speaking to The News, said a final bargain was never closed, so the concessions under discussion never took effect.
What negotiators had been discussing
The concessions, as party sources described them to The News, were specific. They included time with Imran Khan, the prompt release of his sisters, meetings with the former prime minister put back on a normal footing, and medical arrangements that could extend to a hospital stay if doctors called for one. Those points were the subject of assurances. They never became a concluded agreement.
A completed agreement might also have cooled the standoff with the federal government and left PTI running the province, the report says. One source told The News that success would have brought "progress on issues directly affecting Imran Khan and his family" and kept the provincial administration in the party's hands. In that source's account, the collapse instead produced the KP governor rule and took away the party's most significant remaining platform of governmental power.
Where the talks snagged
The News says some accounts hold two figures responsible for the present situation: Mahmood Khan Achakzai and Sohail Afridi. Achakzai wanted a meeting with Imran Khan before any decision to call off a planned march, and that demand became a major sticking point. Seeing the founder was already central to PTI's demands, but making the meeting a precondition complicated an immediate settlement.
Afridi's confrontational position added to the widening dispute, according to the paper. His harsh statements, particularly against the counterterrorism policy, came while negotiations still offered a possible way out of the crisis.
Counterterrorism, the effort to combat militancy, remained a major point of contention between the federal and provincial governments. The Centre, including the security institutions, accused the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa administration of failing to cooperate adequately in combating militancy. Afridi resisted the federal position and opposed measures he saw as an infringement on provincial autonomy, the province's authority over its own affairs.
After PTI left provincial office
The News writes that the outcome has raised questions about PTI's negotiating strategy, including whether greater flexibility over the sequence and conditions of the talks could have produced a different result. The loss of the provincial government is only part of what the paper describes. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has been central to the party's political strength and organisational presence since it lost power at the federal level. Leaving provincial office narrows that institutional space while the party's politics remain focused on Imran Khan's imprisonment and on demands for relief.
The failed talks, in The News's account, left PTI with a major political setback and without the concessions that had been under discussion. An agreement that might have offered Imran Khan relief, and kept the KP government in place, ended instead with the loss of the party's principal provincial stronghold. Zaviya has reported separately on the KP governor rule.
