Former foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar has said the military still plays a bloated role in Pakistan’s politics, claiming the prime minister has “much less freedom than he ought to have.”
Despite the first-ever successful transition of power from one civilian government to another after 2013 general elections, the ex-foreign minister believed the powerful military establishment still dominates the office of prime minister.
The first female foreign minister of Pakistan made the remarks on Al Jazeera English’s ‘Head to Head’ segment. Khar also said Pakistan was ‘guilty of being incompetent’ when it came to the presence of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, while denying any role of the PPP-led government in protecting the global terror kingpin.
Dismissing recent claims by former Defence Minister, Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar, that the government knew where Bin Laden was, Khar said Mukhtar “doesn’t know the first thing that he’s talking about”, while suggesting the former defence minister did not have any knowledge about either the defence or foreign policy matters of the country.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 19th, 2015.
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