ISLAMABAD, July 14: Balochistan’s Pashtun nationalist leader Mahmood Khan Achakzai says the time has come when the military and intelligence agencies should stop interfering in politics and let the people of Pakistan govern the country.

In a Dawn Dialogue interview in Islamabad the chief of the Pashtunkhawa Milli Awami Party (PKMAP) said the military should not be given any political role as that would be contrary to contemporary trends, and stressed that all national institutions must be subservient to parliament. He predicted South Africa- style trials in Pakistan “in our lifetime” of those who had committed excesses against people.

Mr Achakzai blamed what he called Punjab’s military and civil bureaucracy for most of Pakistan’s ills and said Pashtuns had deliberately been kept divided in four different units — the North-West Frontier Province, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Balochistan and the Pashtun areas merged with Punjab.

But he said the past must be forgotten and the country be run as a democratic federation.

Mr Achakzai also said the region was passing through a most dangerous phase, with the US physically present in the area with all the power.