Elect Bob Rae in Toronto Centre!

A few months ago I visited Islamabad and Kabul. My hotel in Pakistan survived a suicide bomb attack in which two people were killed. The next day in Peshawar the local chief of police and about a dozen others were killed while walking in a funeral parade.

Listening to the speakers at a conference on Baluchistan, I began to learn more of Pakistan's internal dynamic. A federation in name, the country is a military dictatorship dominated by an elite drawn largely from the Punjab. The poorer, more rural, more tribal provinces feel left out, on the fringe of both economic development and political participation.

It seems to be an assumption of U.S. and Canadian policy that General Musharaf, the Chief of the military who is also the President, is our best bulwark against terrorism and the extremism that straddles the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Yet there is a contradiction. Our troops are fighting for democracy and pluralism in Afghanistan. Shouldn't our policy be the same in Pakistan? Thousands have been killed and are missing in Baluchistan and Northwest Province - in the complex politics of the country thousands of political prisoners are in jail because they're opposed to a dictatorship.

General Musharaf's attack on the Chief Justice is a reminder of what authoritarian regimes are like: he doesn't like dissent or criticism, and the west runs the risk of encouraging an even more unstable outcome by lining up willy nillly to support him

We need a regional political and diplomatic strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, and need to encourage NATO to embrace an approach that is less exclusively military. We can't wait until 2009 for such a strategy to unfold. We need to be embracing it now.