PESHAWAR, Dec 20: Water and Power Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao has advised the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal to end its protest campaign against President Pervez Musharraf or it would have to face the same protest against its government in the NWFP.

Speaking to newsmen here at the People’s House on Saturday, he said the MMA-sponsored protest drive had failed even before its proper take-off.

He said despite MMA’s hard efforts, general public didn’t respond to the protest campaign launched by it against the Legal Framework Order “as it was not a people’s issue”.

Mr Sherpao asked the MMA leadership to respond in a constructive and positive manner to national issues.

He said the democratic process might suffer a setback if the MMA failed to reach a deal with the federal government on certain clauses of the LFO.

The minister said “we are in a position to launch a protest campaign against nepotism, corruption and wrongdoings of the MMA government.”

Mr Sherpao, the chief of his own faction of the PPP, said that the MMA leadership was fully aware that parliament and the assemblies were the product of the LFO, but they had made it (the LFO) a matter of their ego.

The structural reforms introduced by Gen Musharraf, he said, had set the direction of the future development of the country.

Referring to the loadshedding in Peshawar and its adjoining areas, he said he had held a meeting with the Pesco officials and urged them to take effective steps, solve consumers’ problems, control line losses and remove illegal connections.

Replying to a question, he said Pakistan recognised Afghanistan as an independent and sovereign state. “We have been extending all-out support to the Karzai government since its installation in Kabul after the fall of Taliban. President Musharraf had pledged them 100 million dollars for the reconstruction of their roads,” he added.

When pointed out that had any civilian leader taken the stand now taken by the Chief of the Army Staff Gen Pervez Musharraf, he or she would have been dubbed a traitor, he denied that Pakistan had changed its previous principled stand on the issue.

Pakistan had not deviated from its stance, but it wanted to solve the problem through peaceful means of negotiations, he said.

On another question, he said the Pakistan government had time and again asked the Karzai government to release Pakistanis detained in Afghanistan’s prisons and also got some of them released.

Some of the warlords, who had captured Pakistanis in the north of Afghanistan, were not responding positively to their own government, he said.