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Bhutto launches election campaign

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto ventured into Pakistan's conservative Pashtun heartland Saturday to launch her election campaign, urging resistance against militancy in a main base of pro-Taliban insurgents.

Bhutto urged people in Peshawar city, a stronghold of religious parties, to instead rally behind her Pakistan People's Party, which she said would ensure economic development.

"I ask our Pashtun brothers to come forward for peace. They have supported the Pakistan People's Party in the past and once again they must support the Pakistan People's Party," she said.

Bhutto, a two-time prime minister, was targeted in an Oct. 18 suicide attack that killed 145 people during her homecoming procession after years in exile. She is the first major political leader to launch a campaign since President Pervez Musharraf quit his army post and became a civilian leader this past week.

A coalition of other opposition parties are threatening to boycott the Jan. 8 election unless Musharraf reinstates Supreme Court judges he fired after declaring emergency rule Nov. 3.

Musharrafannounced last week that the emergency would end on Dec. 16, as demanded by Washington and the opposition.

Nawaz Sharif says he is a moderate

Soon after he returned from eight years in exile, Nawaz Sharif reminded his followers that he was the prime minister who made Pakistan a nuclear power.

That popular move among Pakistanis, together with Sharif's reputation for fostering close ties with Islamic militants, raised the specter in a jittery West of a nuclear-armed Pakistan with religious ideologues at the helm.

But former U.S. officials who know Sharif and analysts who follow Pakistan's politics portray a savvy politician who is far from the extremist he's sometimes made out to be. And Sharif himself says he shuns extremism.

"Let me be clear I have been condemning all sorts of terrorism, whether in Pakistan or outside Pakistan," Sharif said in an interview with the Associated Press. "We follow moderation and nothing except moderation."

Thomas Simons, who was U.S. ambassador to Pakistan at the time of the 1998 nuclear explosions and the man who offered Sharif a package of U.S. incentives to "just say no" to a nuclear test, tells of a Sharif who was reluctant to carry it out.

"Most Pakistanis at that time thought they had to respond in kind to the Indian (atomic test) explosion," said Simons. "He did not want to explode that bomb. ... Not to have done that would have cost him his job. It wasn't to thumb his nose at the Americans."

Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a vocal secularist and antinuclear campaigner, recalled that Bhutto "... famously challenged him to test Pakistan's bomb by taking off her bangles and throwing them into the assembled crowd - suggesting that he was not man enough for the job."

[Last modified December 2, 2007, 01:34:44]