Comment on 'Discussion on novel attractive force between ions in quantum plasmas-failure of simulations based on a density functional approach'

In a recent paper (Shukla et al 2013 Phys. Scr. 87 018202) the authors criticized our analysis of the screened proton potential in dense hydrogen that was based on ab initio density functional theory (DFT) simulations (Bonitz et al 2013 Phys. Rev. E 87 037102). In particular, they attributed the absence of the Shukla-Eliasson attractive force between protons in the DFT simulations to a failure of DFT. Here we discuss in detail their arguments and show that their conclusions are incorrect.