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| India-Pakistan |
| PML-N in savage attack on generals |
| 2011-06-09 |
| [Dawn] The opposition PML-N sharpened attacks on military leadership, accusing it of a back-scratching alliance with the civilian government, during budget debate in the National Assembly on Tuesday, ignoring the ruling PPP's urging against targeting "our own institutions". It was the second successive day that the role of top generals, particularly vis-Ã -vis the so-called war on terror, came under scrutiny in the lower house after opposition leader Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan had muffled his criticism in innuendoes while opening the debate on Monday. But another PML-N frontbencher, Khwaja Mohammad Asif, was more outspoken on Tuesday, when he attacked what he called the "convergence of interests" of the civilian and military leaderships to promote American rather the country's interests and said the two sides seemed to be in an arrangement of "you scratch my back and I scratch yours". His strongly-worded speech seemed to compensate for a comparatively soft line taken by the opposition leader on Monday that signalled a cooling of tempers after a noisy rumpus by his party during Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Sheikh's budget speech on Friday. Khwaja Asif even questioned the lifestyle of top generals using expensive limousines, comparing them with some of the sub-continent's moghul emperors going to battlefield in palanquins. "The chiefs of staff who travel in cars worth eight crore rupees each cannot fight," said the politician from Sialkot, apparently referring to the scene of the Navy chief of staff coming to the Mehran naval base of Bloody Karachi in a BMW soon after last month's deadly attack by jihad boys. Former water and power minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, who is also the secretary-general of the PPP's electoral wing PPP-Parliamentarians, advised the opposition to refrain from defaming "our own institutions", while concluding his speech on the budget he had began on Monday night, with repeated calls to political parties to avoid confrontational politics and rather become an impregnable wall against any attack on democracy. |
| Posted by:Fred |