Justice For Our Justice

The whole of Pakistan, a nation known for its violent differences, came together to push for a single lesson.

Aitzaz Ahsan

NEWSWEEK
Updated: 11: 08 AM ET Jun 21, 2008

In mid-June, a young Pakistani student was called on to accept an achievement award by Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad. When Samad Khurram strode onto the stage, however, he announced to Pakistan's gathered elite that he could not, in good conscience, accept an award from a government that's remained silent in the face of President Pervez Musharraf's suppression of Pakistan's judiciary. Bowing his head slightly, Khurram then walked off the dais and sat down.

The young man is no radical. Khurram is a polite Harvard undergraduate who looks up to Martin Luther King Jr., not Mullah Omar. He professes a deep fondness for America: not the imperial power that backs Third World dictators, but the nation of laws that he's discovered during his stay in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Khurram's fault, if any, is that he desires the same for Pakistan—a dangerous position to take in his troubled homeland.

Yet his stand is becoming increasingly common. Days before his recent show of bravery, I joined him and a few hundred thousand believers in Pakistan's Constitution outside Parliament in Islamabad. We had gathered for an act of collective and nonviolent defiance perhaps unrivaled in Pakistan's checkered history.

The crowd, which had been invited to assemble by Pakistan's Lawyers' Movement (which I lead), included young girls in jeans and T-shirts, elderly women in veils, students, housewives with their husbands and elderly pensioners with their grandchildren. All had converged on the country's capital to push a seemingly esoteric issue but a critical cause: the restoration of Pakistan's Supreme Court judges.

Those jurists had been ousted by Musharraf on November 3, 2007, after the president, fearing that they'd rule against him on a challenge to his right to run for re-election while in uniform, had declared de facto martial law and thrown the judges out of office.

Pakistan's lawyers quickly took to the streets in protest, but were bludgeoned and bloodied; thousands were detained. I myself was kept first in solitary confinement and then under house arrest for nearly four months. My wife was forced to go into hiding. The chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, and the other independent judges were detained, along with their children.

Thinking he'd strengthened his hand, Musharraf then held general elections—which his party lost. A new coalition government was formed, which promised to swiftly reinstate the judges.

Then the backsliding started. Prodded by America to retain Musharraf, the government complied and did nothing to restore the judiciary. Promises were made, but one deadline after another slipped by.

After two months, we lawyers returned to the streets, calling for a long march toward Parliament. Starting on June 9, marchers from all parts of the country, including Khurram and I, began to converge in Islamabad. Gazing over the sea of humanity in the early-morning hours of Saturday, June 14, I felt that virtually the whole of Pakistan—a nation distinguished more by its violent differences than its commonalities—had come together on a single issue: justice for the chief justice.

This was not a stereotypical mob baying for any brutish form of recourse. It was, instead, a gathering simply demanding fairness under the law. Though few of the non-lawyers in the crowd could have recited the concepts by name, the assembled citizens were taking a stand for basic principles like habeas corpus, the ideas of the Magna Carta (which proclaims the supremacy of law) and the spirit of the U.S. Bill of Rights—all of which have been squashed by Musharraf. Above all, however, they were there to support the kind of judges, like Chaudhry, who treat these concepts not as mere words but as a solemn compact between the state and its citizens.

As the first rays of the Saturday sun streaked over Parliament, I delivered the concluding speech, and this remarkable crowd, the biggest in Pakistan's recent history, dispersed peacefully for the trip home. Not a shot was fired or a pane of glass broken. Yet more than 200,000 Pakistanis had managed to make their point: they wanted their judges back.

Yet as I walked off stage I found myself wondering if the governing coalition, the general or his backers in America had been listening. Unfortunately, the signs aren't promising. A few days later at the award ceremony for Khurram, the U.S. ambassador blithely ignored his brave call for justice. Khurram himself is now in the protective custody of his terrified parents. They fear that Pakistan's notorious intelligence agencies, known for their propensity for making inconvenient people disappear, could move against him.

This very tendency was one more thing that had landed Pakistan's chief justice in trouble—he had repeatedly demanded due process and habeas corpus for all prisoners, even those picked up by the military.

For Khurram's sake, and that of every other Pakistani, we need our chief justice back now.


URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/142567

Why the world needs democracy in Pakistan: Dictatorship fuels extremism, which reaches far beyond Pakistan

Christian Science Monitor -

By Benazir Bhutto:

December 9, 2007




ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: The world has rightly welcomed President Pervez Musharraf's retirement as Army head and announcement that emergency rule will end on Dec. 16. However, a crucial question remains. Is Pakistan heading toward a democratic future? Parliamentary elections are currently scheduled for Jan. 8. Among many worrying signs of corruption, the election commission is biased and not acting on complaints of fraud.



Yet if credible elections are not held, it will have dangerous consequences for Pakistan and the rest of the world community: Extremism will continue to grow, putting everyone at risk. The world must act to prevent this. It must insist on free and fair elections in Pakistan.



President Musharraf's last term in office demonstrated that dictatorship has fueled extremism. The tribal areas of Pakistan have turned into havens for militants to mount attacks on NATO troops in nearby Afghanistan. Lack of governance has led to the expansion of extremism into settled areas of Pakistan.



Democracy offers the best hope of containing extremism. Yet democracy depends on a fair electoral process and an independent election commission willing and able to implement Pakistan's electoral laws to prevent vote fraud. That is not happening.



"Improvised" voting stations, a pseudonym for ghost polling stations, dot practically every parliamentary constituency. Electoral lists – prepared with financial assistance from USAID – are fatally flawed, with more than 10 million unverified and missing names (clearly enough to "win" or "lose" an election). The sanctity of any future ballot is doubtful against reports that district returning officers have been ordered to disperse 20,000 ballots already marked in favor of pro-government candidates. These bogus votes will be "cast" through the process of double voting in the "improvised" voting stations – in ballot boxes that are translucent rather than transparent.

Mayors continue to control guns and police and government resources and are using them shamelessly to campaign for government candidates. The election commission has asked for "a report" on such malpractices but has taken no concrete efforts to stop them. Politically motivated officials have been placed in charge of the civilian intelligence services and key state posts to manipulate the elections further, although election laws demand that such officials be neutral. An assistant to a former chief minister has been made a returning officer to preside over elections in his area. This complaint is being "looked into" as well, which is simply a fancy way of buying time and doing nothing.



Punjab Province, which elects more than half of Pakistan's parliament, chooses 148 of the members through direct elections, excluding reserved seats for women and minorities. Of these seats, it is believed that 108 have been marked for rigging for government-backed candidates.



By the time all such reports of fraud come in from across the country, the elections will be over.



On top of all this, the media remains gagged, opposition leaders remain imprisoned, voter lists and voting locations have not yet been provided to opposition parties or to the general public in final print or electronic format, and no effort has been made by the pliant electoral commission to regularly consult with political parties on these issues. There is also no plan in place to ensure that votes counted at voting stations will be delivered to local consolidation centers without being manipulated en route. The National Reconciliation Ordinance, which provides for an immediate consolidated count, has been suspended.



Put quite simply, the elections are being stitched up to give the country a continuation of the outgoing government – one that failed to prevent the spread of militancy, extremism, and terrorism. Major terrorist attacks, including the latest plot discovered in Germany this summer, tracked terrorists' footsteps back to Pakistan's northern areas.



Unless there is a change in the status quo, the past will repeat itself. But that change can only come when the world community puts its weight behind fair elections and its faith in the people of Pakistan.



Musharraf sent a delegation to the US last week to talk to the Bush administration and members of Congress about the current situation. This visit was only meantto feign progress and deflect criticism.



Musharraf wants the world to believe that the coming election, though not perfect, will be "good enough for Pakistan" given the country's difficult circumstances. But the current circumstances are of the regime's making. Those in charge can – and must – do much better on this count.

The international community must send a clear message that it will not be an accessory to this coming crime. It must not wait to see if the elections on Jan. 8 are free and fair. It must insist on a minimum set of benchmarks to be met for the election to be recognized as free and fair. If the benchmarks are ignored, the international community must be prepared to signal its displeasure to the Musharraf regime in specific, tangible ways.



Flawed elections will worsen instability in Pakistan as civil society and political parties protest. Imposing international restrictions after the fact will be fruitless and only deepen anti-American sentiment.



At the very least, America can and should prod Musharraf to give Pakistanis an independent election commission, a neutral caretaker administration, and an end to blatant vote manipulation.



America is the world's most powerful democracy. By standing up for democracy at this critical time, Washington can give this nuclear-armed nation an opportunity to reverse the tide of extremism that today threatens not only Pakistan but the larger world community as well.

http://www.ppp.org.pk/mbb/articles/article120.html

__________________
Regards

Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

November 7, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor

Musharraf’s Martial Plan

By BENAZIR BHUTTO

Islamabad, Pakistan

NOV. 3, 2007, will be remembered as the blackest day in the history of Pakistan. Let us be perfectly clear: Pakistan is a military dictatorship. Last Saturday, Gen. Pervez Musharraf removed all pretense of a transition to democracy by conducting what was in effect yet another extraconstitutional coup.

In doing so he endangered the viability of Pakistan as an independent state. He presented the country’s democratic forces with a tough decision — acquiesce to the brutality of the dictatorship or take over the streets and show the world where the people of Pakistan really stand.

General Musharraf also presented the democratic world — and especially the countries of the West — with a question. Will they back up their democratic rhetoric with concrete action, or will they once again back down in the face of his bluff?

In my view, General Musharraf’s ruling party understood that it would be trounced in any free elections and, together with its allies within the intelligence services, contrived to have the Constitution suspended and elections indefinitely postponed. Very conveniently, the assassination attempt against me last month that resulted in the deaths of at least 140 people is being used as the rationale to stop the democratic process by which my party would most likely have swept parliamentary elections. Maybe this explains why the government refuses to allow the F.B.I. and Scotland Yard to assist in a forensic investigation of the bombings.

As I write, demonstrations are taking place across Pakistan. Opposition party members, lawyers, judges, human rights advocates and journalists have been rounded up by the police without charge. The press has been seriously constrained. The chief justice of the Supreme Court and many other judges are believed to be under house arrest.

The United States, Britain and much of the West have always said the right things about democracy in Pakistan and around the world. I recall the words of President Bush in his second inaugural address when he said: “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.”

The United States alone has given the Musharraf government more than $10 billion in aid since 2001. We do not know exactly where or how this money has been spent, but it is clear that it has not brought about the defeat of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, nor succeeded in capturing Osama bin Laden, nor has it broken the opium trade. It certainly has not succeeded in improving the quality of life of the children and families of Pakistan.

The United States can promote democracy — which is the only way to truly contain extremism and terrorism — by telling General Musharraf that it does not accept martial law, and that it expects him to conduct free, fair, impartial and internationally monitored elections within 60 days under a reconstituted election commission. He should be given that choice: democracy or dictatorship with isolation.

While the world must do its part to confront tyranny, the primary responsibility rests in the hands of the people of Pakistan. It is incumbent on Pakistanis to tell General Musharraf that martial law will not stand. The overwhelming majority of Pakistanis are moderate; it is my hope that they will unite in a coalition of moderation to marginalize both the dictators and the extremists, to restore civilian rule to the presidency and to shut down political madrassas, the Islamic schools that stock weapons and preach violence.

It is dangerous to stand up to a military dictatorship, but more dangerous not to. The moment has come for the Western democracies to show us in their actions, and not just in their rhetoric, which side they are on.

Benazir Bhutto, the prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996, is the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/op...gewanted=print

__________________
Regards

Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Thursday, Jul. 31, 2008

Making Capitalism More Creative

By Bill Gates

Capitalism has improved the lives of billions of people — something that's easy to forget at a time of great economic uncertainty. But it has left out billions more. They have great needs, but they can't express those needs in ways that matter to markets. So they are stuck in poverty, suffer from preventable diseases and never have a chance to make the most of their lives. Governments and nonprofit groups have an irreplaceable role in helping them, but it will take too long if they try to do it alone. It is mainly corporations that have the skills to make technological innovations work for the poor. To make the most of those skills, we need a more creative capitalism: an attempt to stretch the reach of market forces so that more companies can benefit from doing work that makes more people better off. We need new ways to bring far more people into the system — capitalism — that has done so much good in the world.

There's much still to be done, but the good news is that creative capitalism is already with us. Some corporations have identified brand-new markets among the poor for life-changing technologies like cell phones. Others — sometimes with a nudge from activists — have seen how they can do good and do well at the same time. To take a real-world example, a few years ago I was sitting in a bar with Bono, and frankly, I thought he was a little nuts. It was late, we'd had a few drinks, and Bono was all fired up over a scheme to get companies to help tackle global poverty and disease. He kept dialing the private numbers of top executives and thrusting his cell phone at me to hear their sleepy yet enthusiastic replies. As crazy as it seemed that night, Bono's persistence soon gave birth to the (RED) campaign. Today companies like Gap, Hallmark and Dell sell (RED)-branded products and donate a portion of their profits to fight AIDS. (Microsoft recently signed up too.) It's a great thing: the companies make a difference while adding to their bottom line, consumers get to show their support for a good cause, and — most important — lives are saved. In the past year and a half, (RED) has generated $100 million for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, helping put nearly 80,000 people in poor countries on lifesaving drugs and helping more than 1.6 million get tested for HIV. That's creative capitalism at work.

Creative capitalism isn't some big new economic theory. And it isn't a knock on capitalism itself. It is a way to answer a vital question: How can we most effectively spread the benefits of capitalism and the huge improvements in quality of life it can provide to people who have been left out?

The World Is Getting Better
It might seem strange to talk about creative capitalism when we're paying more than $4 for a gallon of gas and people are having trouble paying their mortgages. There's no doubt that today's economic troubles are real; people feel them deeply, and they deserve immediate attention. Creative capitalism isn't an answer to the relatively short-term ups and downs of the economic cycle. It's a response to the longer-term fact that too many people are missing out on a historic, century-long improvement in the quality of life. In many nations, life expectancy has grown dramatically in the past 100 years. More people vote in elections, express their views and enjoy economic freedom than ever before. Even with all the problems we face today, we are at a high point of human well-being. The world is getting a lot better.

The problem is, it's not getting better fast enough, and it's not getting better for everyone. One billion people live on less than a dollar a day. They don't have enough nutritious food, clean water or electricity. The amazing innovations that have made many lives so much better — like vaccines and microchips — have largely passed them by. This is where governments and nonprofits come in. As I see it, there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest and caring for others. Capitalism harnesses self-interest in a helpful and sustainable way but only on behalf of those who can pay. Government aid and philanthropy channel our caring for those who can't pay. And the world will make lasting progress on the big inequities that remain — problems like AIDS, poverty and education — only if governments and nonprofits do their part by giving more aid and more effective aid. But the improvements will happen faster and last longer if we can channel market forces, including innovation that's tailored to the needs of the poorest, to complement what governments and nonprofits do. We need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today.

Naturally, if companies are going to get more involved, they need to earn some kind of return. This is the heart of creative capitalism. It's not just about doing more corporate philanthropy or asking companies to be more virtuous. It's about giving them a real incentive to apply their expertise in new ways, making it possible to earn a return while serving the people who have been left out. This can happen in two ways: companies can find these opportunities on their own, or governments and nonprofits can help create such opportunities where they presently don't exist.

What's Been Missed
As C.K. Prahalad shows in his book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, there are markets all over the world that businesses have missed. One study found that the poorest two-thirds of the world's population has some $5 trillion in purchasing power. A key reason market forces are slow to make an impact in developing countries is that we don't spend enough time studying the needs of those markets. I should know: I saw it happen at Microsoft. For many years, Microsoft has used corporate philanthropy to bring technology to people who can't get it otherwise, donating more than $3 billion in cash and software to try to bridge the digital divide. But our real expertise is in writing software that solves problems, and recently we've realized that we weren't bringing enough of that expertise to problems in the developing world. So now we're looking at inequity as a business problem as well as something to be addressed through philanthropy. We're working on projects like a visual interface that will enable illiterate or semiliterate people to use a PC instantly, with minimal training. Another project of ours lets an entire classroom full of students use a single computer; we've developed software that lets each student use her own mouse to control a specially colored cursor so that as many as 50 kids can use one computer at the same time. This is a big advance for schools where there aren't enough computers to go around, and it serves a market we hadn't examined before.

Cell phones are another example. They're now a booming market in the developing world, but historically, companies vastly underestimated their potential. In 2000, when Vodafone bought a large stake in a Kenyan cell-phone company, it figured that the market in Kenya would max out at 400,000 users. Today that company, Safaricom, has more than 10 million. The company has done it by finding creative ways to serve low-income Kenyans. Its customers are charged by the second rather than by the minute, for example, which keeps down the cost. Safaricom is making a profit, and it's making a difference. Farmers use their cell phones to find the best prices in nearby markets. A number of innovative uses for cell phones are emerging. Already many Kenyans use them to store cash (via a kind of electronic money) and transfer funds. If you have to carry money over long distances — say, from the market back to your home — this kind of innovation makes a huge difference. You're less tempting to rob if you're not holding any cash.

This is how people can benefit when businesses find opportunities that have been missed. But since I started talking about creative capitalism earlier this year, I've heard from some skeptics who doubt that there are any new markets. They say, "If these opportunities really existed, someone would have found them by now." I disagree. Their argument assumes that businesses have already studied every possible market for their products. Their attitude reminds me of the old joke about an economist who's walking down the street with a friend. The economist steps over a $10 bill that's lying on the ground. His friend asks him why he didn't take the money. "It couldn't possibly be there," he explains. "If it were, somebody would've picked it up!" Some companies make the same mistake. They think all the $10 bills have already been picked up. It would be a shame if we missed such opportunities, and it would make a huge difference if, instead, researchers and strategists at corporations met regularly with experts on the needs of the poor and talked about new applications for their best ideas.

Beyond finding new markets and developing new products, companies sometimes can benefit by providing the poor with heavily discounted access to products. Industries like software and pharmaceuticals, for example, have very low production costs, so you can come out ahead by selling your product for a bigger profit in rich markets and for a smaller profit, or at cost, in poor ones. Businesses in other industries can't do this tiered pricing, but they can benefit from the public recognition and enhanced reputation that come from serving those who can't pay. The companies involved in the (RED) campaign draw in new customers who want to be associated with a good cause. That might be the tipping point that leads people to pick one product over another.

There's another crucial benefit that accrues to businesses that do good work. They will find it easier to recruit and retain great employees. Young people today — all over the world — want to work for organizations that they can feel good about. Show them that a company is applying its expertise to help the poorest, and they will repay that commitment with their own dedication.

Creating New Incentives
Even so, no matter how hard businesses look or how creatively they think, there are some problems in the world that aren't amenable to solution by existing market incentives. Malaria is a great example: the people who most need new drugs or a vaccine are the least able to pay, so the drugs and vaccines never get made. In these cases, governments and nonprofits can create the incentives. This is the second way in which creative capitalism can take wing. Incentives can be as straightforward as giving public praise to the companies that are doing work that serves the poor. This summer, a Dutch nonprofit called the Access to Medicine Foundation started publishing a report card that shows which pharmaceutical companies are doing the most to make sure that medicines are made for — and reach — people in developing countries. When I talk to executives from pharmaceutical companies, they tell me that they want to do more for neglected diseases — but they at least need to get credit for it. This report card does exactly that.

Publicity is very valuable, but sometimes it's still not enough to persuade companies to get involved. Even the best p.r. may not pay the bill for 10 years of research into a new drug. That's why it's so important for governments to create more financial incentives. Under a U.S. law enacted last year, for example, any drug company that develops a new treatment for a neglected disease like malaria can get a priority review from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for another product it has made. If you develop a new drug for malaria, your profitable cholesterol drug could go on the market as much as a year earlier. Such a priority review could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a fantastic way for governments to go beyond the aid they already give and channel market forces so they improve even more lives.

Of course, governments in developing countries have to do a lot to foster capitalism themselves. They must pass laws and make regulations that let markets flourish, bringing the benefits of economic growth to more people. In fact, that's another argument I've heard against creative capitalism: "We don't need to make capitalism more creative. We just need governments to stop interfering with it." There is something to this. Many countries could spark more business investment — both within their borders and from the outside — if they did more to guarantee property rights, cut red tape and so on. But these changes come slowly. In the meantime, we can't wait. As a businessman, I've seen that companies can tap new markets right now, even if conditions aren't ideal. And as a philanthropist, I've found that our caring for others compels us to help people right now. The longer we wait, the more people suffer needlessly.

The Next Step
In june, I moved out of my day-to-day role at Microsoft to spend more time on the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I'll be talking with political leaders about how their governments can increase aid for the poor, make it more effective and bring in new partners through creative capitalism. I'll also talk with CEOs about what their companies can do. One idea is to dedicate a percentage of their top innovators' time to issues that affect the people who have been left behind. This kind of contribution takes the brainpower that makes life better for the richest and dedicates some of it to improving the lives of everyone else. Some pharmaceutical companies, like Merck and GlaxoSmithKline, are already doing this. The Japanese company Sumitomo Chemical shared some of its technology with a Tanzanian textile company, helping it produce millions of bed nets, which are crucial tools in the fight to eradicate malaria. Other companies are doing the same in food, cell phones and banking.

In other words, creative capitalism is already under way. But we can do much more. Governments can create more incentives like the FDA voucher. We can expand the report-card idea beyond the pharmaceutical industry and make sure the rankings get publicity so companies get credit for doing good work. Consumers can reward companies that do their part by buying their products. Employees can ask how their employers are contributing. If more companies follow the lead of the most creative organizations in their industry, they will make a huge impact on some of the world's worst problems.

More than 30 years ago, Paul Allen and I started Microsoft because we wanted to be part of a movement to put a computer on every desk and in every home. Ten years ago, Melinda and I started our foundation because we want to be part of a different movement — this time, to help create a world where no one has to live on a dollar a day or die from a disease we know how to prevent. Creative capitalism can help make it happen. I hope more people will join the cause.


Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/business/ar...828069,00.html

__________________
Regards

Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Thursday, September 4, 2008



Pakistan is at a crossroads. The gravity of the situation has led me, at the insistence of my Pakistan People's Party (PPP), to run for president in Saturday's elections. My children and I are still mourning our beloved leader, wife and mother, Benazir Bhutto. We did not make the decision for me to run lightly. But we know what is at stake. Chief among the challenges that all Pakistanis face is the threat of global terrorism, demonstrated again in this week's assassination attempt against Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani.


Returning Pakistan's presidency to democratic governance is a huge step in our country's transition from dictatorship to democracy. I want to help complete this process. I owe it to my party and my country but above all to my wife, who lost her life striving to make Pakistan free, pluralist and democratic.


Pakistani politics has always been a struggle between democratic forces around the country and an elite oligarchy, located exclusively in a region stretching between Lahore and Rawalpindi-Islamabad. The provinces of Sind, the Northwest Frontier (Pashtunkhwa) and Baluchistan, as well as all of rural Punjab, have often been excluded from governance.


The majority of Pakistan's people, across the expanse of our nation, have been ignored and even subjugated by Pakistan's establishment. This concentration of unchecked power has strained our government to the point of fracture. The PPP is the only party with support in all four provinces as well as in Kashmir and the federally administered tribal areas. The PPP's success in democratizing the presidency will strengthen Pakistan's viability as a nation.


Under Pakistan's constitution, the president was to be the head of state but not responsible for day-to-day governance. Two military dictators, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf, reconfigured the constitution to consolidate their power; they broadened the president's responsibilities to include the authority to sack democratically elected governments.


If I am elected president, one of my highest priorities will be to support the prime minister, the National Assembly and the Senate to amend the constitution to bring back into balance the powers of the presidency and thereby reduce its ability to bring down democratic governance.
It is essential that our nation's independent judiciary be reconstituted. Judges who were dismissed arbitrarily by Musharraf in November are being restored to the bench by the government my party leads, and I believe Parliament must enact a system of judicial reform to ensure that future judges are selected based on merit.


The PPP and those aligned with us are unequivocally committed to an independent judiciary guaranteed by Parliament, consistent with the constitution and independent of political pressure.


I am committed to a democratic, moderate and progressive Pakistan. My views on confronting and containing terrorism are well known. I will work to defeat the domestic Taliban insurgency and to ensure that Pakistani territory is not used to launch terrorist attacks on our neighbors or on NATO forces in Afghanistan.


It is important to remember that Pakistan, too, is a victim of terrorism. Our soldiers are dying on the front lines; our children are being blown up by suicide bombers. We stand with the United States, Britain, Spain and others who have been attacked. Fundamentally, however, the war we our fighting is our war. This battle is for Pakistan's soul. My wife's inflexible stance on defeating terrorists cost her her life. My party and I are struggling to save our nation.


I spent nine years in prison as a hostage to my wife's career and to my party's future. I was imprisoned because of unsubstantiated charges -- which it is now acknowledged were politically motivated -- and was never convicted of anything, even under a judicial system controlled by our adversaries. I turned down countless offers of freedom in exchange for betraying my wife, our principles and our party. Those years made me a stronger person and hardened my resolve to fight for democracy. I wish I could do it at my wife's side. Now I must do it in my wife's place.


The dictatorial forces that have dominated Pakistan for so long are seeking partners to destabilize the new democratic government. The establishment and its allies have unleashed a barrage of attacks against me, my wife and even our children. This is consistent with the politics of personal destruction and character assassination that have defined the elites for more than 30 years. The people of Pakistan have always rejected this campaign and supported us in free elections. We continue to stand firm against the forces of dictatorship.


My family has already paid the ultimate price for our commitment to democracy. The Feb. 18 elections were an important step in Pakistan's transition to democracy. I hope that my own democratic election Saturday will seal the victory of democracy over dictatorship and, at long last, allow our country to defeat the terrorist threat and address the people's needs.




The writer is co-chairman of the Pakistan People's Party.




Source : Washington Post

__________________
Regards

Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.