March 26, 2006	Sunday	Safar 25, 1427

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ISLAMABAD, March 25: Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto has expressed concern over the report that the military has sought greater share for itself in the next national budget.

“It is bad governance,” she said in a statement on Saturday. “On the one hand Islamabad is going with a begging bowl to borrow more money, and increase the debt burden on the common man, and on the other it is extravagantly spending hard earned resources of Pakistan on military expenditure at a time when tension with India has eased”.

She said her Pakistan People’s Party had called upon the regime to defer military expenditures, such as purchase of costly fighter planes and building a second GHQ and use the monies for earthquake rehabilitation instead.

“It is the sound and logical way to protect the interests of the common man as well as to make the country self reliant,” she said.

Ms Bhutto recalled that two years ago the Rs193 billion military budget was explained in half a line — ‘to defray salary and other expenses’ — in the over 4,000-page budget documents.

In the current year’s Rs1,100 billion national budget, the military was allocated Rs223 billion, excluding pensions.

Official figures indicate that the country yearly spends Rs33 billion on pensions of which the military pensions amount to Rs27 billion, she said.

“These amounts do not take into consideration billions more spent on the Rangers, civil armed forces and on cantonments and garrisons educational institutions or of the Atomic Energy Commission,” she noted.

Ms Bhutto asserted that while the nation was proud of its armed forces “it could not be shamed into accepting the high levels of poverty, hunger and backwardness that exist due to the denial of funds to the social and human sector”.

She said the amount for development was nearly Rs100 billion less than for the military.

“In other words, armed forces of some one million men had Rs100 billion extra spent than the remaining 149 million people of Pakistan,” she said, adding that “the armed forces deserved the best but so did the rest of the people of the country”.

She demanded of the government to “present a break down of the military expenses before the Defence Committee of the Parliament identifying amounts for salaries, hardware and living expenses”.