ISLAMABAD, Aug 4: The government assured the Senate on Monday it was alert to threats to national security, rejecting the opposition’s charges that it had run the county’s affairs non-seriously since its induction.

Leader of the House Raza Rabbani, speaking in a debate at the start of an opposition-called session, also affirmed the PPP-led coalition government’s resolve to complete its five-year term and said it would be impossible for anyone to remove it through extraordinary means.

Opposition leader Kamil Ali Agha accused the government of ignoring national security issues because of what he called a “non-serious” approach as he opened the debate on perceived external threats to Pakistan as part of a four-point session agenda that also included internal security and terrorism, inflation and alleged government moves to weaken the local government system.

But his apparently ill-prepared speech fell far short of an expected strong opposition assault on a government still trying to find its feet and was overshadowed by a strong rebuttal by Mr Rabbani, who took the so-called “establishment” and “those bred by it” to task for posing themselves as sole patriots with the aim to remain in power and wrongly thinking others were not.

Mr Rabbani said an impression was deliberately being created that the coalition government was dithering on issues of national security, and added: “There is no dithering, and we reiterate that the government is here to stay and will, God willing, fulfil its five-year term. It will not be possible to remove it through any extraordinary means.”

He said hostile reports had recently appeared in the western press because “Pakistan is no longer singing the western tune” and the present government’s three-pronged policy on war on terror based on dialogue and winning the hearts and minds of people and a selective use of force was different from the one followed by President Pervez Musharraf, which had destabilised Pakistan.

Mr Rabbani described Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani’s visit to the United States last week as a success and, in reference to reports about the possibility of US military strikes in Pakistani areas, said it had been made clear that “Pakistan will not tolerate any infringement of its territorial sovereignty”.

The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) also figured prominently in the debate with the former head of the country’s premier spy agency, opposition PML member Lt-Gen (retd) Javed Ashraf, being one of its strong defenders, called it a “bulwark” against external threats.

He rejected the impression that the ISI had a political cell created by the executed former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto which is often blamed for interfering in the country’s political affairs.

He said 90 per cent of ISI’s work was related to external intelligence and Mr Bhutto had “only assigned the ISI’s counter-intelligence wing to report to the government daily about internal happenings”. However, he acknowledged that this wing had been misused by successive military and civilian governments.

Mr Ashraf criticised last month’s Cabinet Division notification that placed the ISI under the “administrative and financial control of the interior ministry”, and said the order should be formally withdrawn because he thought the government’s clarification that the agency still remained under the prime minister’s control was “not enough”.

Mr Rabbani said as promised, a detailed clarification about the issue was being worked out by the prime minister’s secretariat and would be issued later.

The debate, to be wound up by Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, would be resumed on Tuesday, when the house will meet at 4pm.

It was agreed in a house business advisory committee meeting that the session requisitioned by the opposition parties would continue till Friday.