ISLAMABAD, June 12: The opposition assailed President Pervez Musharraf's economic and political policies on Tuesday as the National Assembly began a general debate on the present government's last budget, which both sides vowed to use against each other to win the next elections.

The rivals engaged in nearly six hours of wordy duels over the budget for fiscal 2007-08 unveiled in the lower house on Saturday as well as over their policies before they ate together at a dinner hosted by opposition leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman that was also attended by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.

The Maulana opened what Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain said would be a 55-hour general debate with a cautious attack on the government's domestic and foreign policies pursued since Gen Musharraf seized power eight years ago, avoiding to make even a mention of what another opposition figure, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, saw as the president's misuse of his position as army chief to obtain an "expression of confidence" in his presidency at a recent army corps commanders' conference.

The opposition leader and almost all of 11 other opposition members of the People's Party Parliamentarians (PPP), the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), and the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) who spoke rejected most of the government's claims about its economic performance in eight years after the Oct 1999 takeover by Gen Musharraf and more than four years of the present administration after the Oct 2002 elections.

But all the three ministers and three other members on the ruling coalition reiterated the routine government position that it had rescued the country from a virtual bankruptcy they blamed on previous two civilian governments and called the present budget as pro-people that would help the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) and its allies to win the next elections at the end of the present government's five-year tenure in November.

Maulana Fazlur Rehman said the eight years of the Musharraf-led government had placed the country on "dangerous crossroads", increased foreign debt from $33 billion in 1999 to $39 billion, bartering away national sovereignty to a US-led Western alliance as a partner in the so-called war on terrorism and following an "imported foreign policy" that has seen even a

traditional and close friend like China conducting joint military exercises with Pakistan's traditional rival India.He said President Musharraf's advent on the political scene had weakened the country's position as he failed to win from India at the Agra summit in 2001 even milder concessions than then prime minister Nawaz Sharif had got in the Lahore Declaration he signed with his Indian counterpart Atal Behari Vajpayee in February 1999.

Criticising the budget, he said he was sure it would become the basis of what he predicted would be a defeat of the present government in the next elections.

But Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, whose other supporters in the debate included Kashmir Affairs Minister Tahir Iqbal and Minister of State for Environment Amin Aslam Khan, said the present government would "God-willing win the next elections and ...defeat them" (opposition) on the basis of the present budget and its economic performance.

He rejected the opposition leader's remarks that the present government had allowed the US-led Nato forces in Afghanistan to cross the Pakistan's border in pursuit of militants and said "we will resist any such move".

The minister also accused India of adopting a negative attitude and said it would have intervened in Balochistan physically if Pakistan had not been a nuclear power.

PML-N's Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan accused the present government of bringing the country on the verge of ruin, and said Gen Musharraf would invite criticism even as army chief like any politician if he involved army into politics.

He said President Musharraf had misused his position as general because the army had not empowered him to "declare a war" against suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry or the media.

PPP's Naveed Qamar described the budget as the last of Gen Musharraf's "black era" and said it would prove to be last nail in the coffin of the present government.