Peshawar: Pakistan on Thursday offered millions of dollars in tax breaks, financial aid and relief measures for its war-torn northwest that business leaders rubbished as insufficient.
"The impact of incentives that the government is announcing for North West Frontier Province (NWFP) will be billions of rupees," Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told businessmen in the provincial capital Peshawar.
The Army launched a major offensive in NWFP in April and says more than 2,200 militants were killed in the districts of Swat, Buner and Lower Dir. In July, the military said most of the insurgent bastions had been wiped out.
More than 2,800 people have been killed in a series of suicide attacks and bomb explosions across Pakistan, but concentrated mostly in the northwest since government troops laid siege to a radical mosque in the capital in July 2007.
Pakistan is now pressing an offensive in the northwest tribal belt along the Afghan border, which Washington has called the chief al Qaeda sanctuary and the most dangerous place on Earth.
Gilani said the tribal regions, Swat and Dir were among the worst-hit areas where the government will exempt factories from sales tax.
"We will also give concessions to people and industry of these areas under other heads of taxes," he said.
PTI
