and this horrific incident has taken place in a province by imran kahn's own party. >> how worried areg for a long time about the future of this country. >> well, am i concerned about security in pakistan, of course i am. today we've seen very clearly the massacre that's been caused as a result of terrorists and extremists in pakistan. of course i'm concerned with that. but do i think the best way forward is to have a democratic pakistan where the will of the people of pakistan prevails and they can choose their government? absolutely. and now i think prime minister sharif has to bring all the political parties in together, and from what i know of pakistan, there can be no move towards negotiating with the taliban, the full force of the military and the government has to be used to defeat this evil organization. >> many thanks indeed for joining us. >> you're watching bbc news. our breaking news this hour, that explosions and gunfire are currently being reported at a school in peshawar in northwest pakistan. which was earlier stormed by taliban militants. local officials there say 126

one of pakistan's main political leaders, the cricketer turned politician imran kahn who had given the strike call against the government, he has called off that strike. they are now heading from various market associations, from all walks of society really that pakistan is in all likelihood going to be shut down in mourning tomorrow for a day unlike any that it has seen in the 13 years of this war, starting after 9/11. >> i'm not sure if nawaz sharif has arrived in peshawar yet. that was his intention to go there. he straight away came out and said this is a national tragedy. what will his priority be now? >> not only that he's described it as a national tragedy, i think we've also heard the first unequivocally and the first categorical statement from the pakistani prime ministers, that they're not going to tolerate any shade of militancy in the country. bear in mind, this is a deeply divided society, where the government's policymakers have often argued that one of the major stumbling blocks in forming decisive policy against the various shades of militants present in the country has

one of pakistani most popular politicians, imran khan is now called taliban kahn, because he's workedo try to bring these guys in from the cold, bring them to the negotiating table but their demands are impossible. what they want is a return to the sixth century. you can't, nobody can negotiate that with them. they want no schools, they want girls not to get any opportunities. for education or anything else for that matter. they want a return to this, their idea of eden is this very primitive place where no pakistani wants to go there. when, they are only able to force people to do these things out of fear. >> well it depends on which pakistanis you're talking about, too, right? the culture there as i understand it, bobby -- and a lot of it comes from you -- there was a real bourgeois class that was very westernized, modernized and you have much more rural and set-back ways that are there and one of the fair criticisms is they've given too much to the taliban already, pervez musharraf wouldn't come clean. how do you deal with that in assessing what they care about? >> that's one of th