Al Jazeera English ‘Head to Head’ interview with Hina Rabbani Khar

• The former Foreign Minister admits Pakistan was “guilty of being incompetent” regarding Bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan.
• Describes former Pakistani Defence Minister Ahmad Mukhtar as not knowing “the first thing that he is talking about.”
• On U.S. drone strikes, the former politician says she refuses “to believe” her government was complicit in the programme and that she “was not in the room” when asked about alleged private meetings on the issue.
• Rabbani Khar says she “would be very happy if the Kashmiri people get the choice to choose between India, Pakistan or an independent state”

Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan’s first female Foreign Minister, said she “went still” when she found out about the 2011 Bin Laden raid, but denies the government was protecting Osama Bin Laden.

In a forthcoming interview with Al Jazeera English’s Head to Head, the former Foreign Minister admits Pakistan was “guilty of being incompetent” when it came to Bin Laden’s presence in the country.  

Dismissing recent claims by former Defence Minister, Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar, that the government knew where Bin Laden was, Ms Rabbani Khar says he “doesn’t know the first thing that he’s talking about” and infers that he “knows nothing about the defence, or the foreign policy of Pakistan.”

Following the country’s first successful transfer of power from one civilian government to another in 2013, Rabbani Khar admits the military still plays a bloated role in Pakistani politics and that the Prime Minister has “much less freedom than he ought to have.”  

On the issue of US drone attacks, the former Foreign Minister says she refuses to believe that the Zardari government, in which she served, gave US backing to drone strikes. Adding: “drone strikes are counterproductive, what does counterproductive mean, it means that they are actually fuelling extremism, and assisting people to attract more people towards extremism. […] they were against Pakistan’s territorial integrity.”

When challenged on a US State Department cable revealing that former Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani had given private support for the drone strikes, Rabbani Khar argues that he never said this “when I was in the room” and that she was “pretty much in every important meeting.”

“It is not possible for me to believe that things change so much because of my presence in the room or not (…) some of these things could have been misrepresented or misreported,” Rabbani Khar adds.

When challenged by Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan on Pakistan’s alleged support of militant groups, the former Foreign Minister admits there were “waves of truth” to the claims, which were “relics of the past” and were “super-imposing on what the present was.”

“Pakistan did not have the ability, to be able to take on every terror network within the region all at the same time,” Rabbani Khar argues. “As far as sponsoring and funding them was concerned, clearly I would like to believe that under our watch, that was not the policy direction at all.”

When asked about the Kashmir dispute, Rabbani Khar says she “would be very happy if the Kashmiri people get the choice to choose between India, Pakistan or an independent state” – a third option, not included in the UN Security Council Resolution on the matter.

Hasan is joined by a panel of three experts: Omar Waraich, journalist and commentator, former Pakistan correspondent for Time Magazine; Humeira Iqtidar, author of Secularising Islamists? and senior Lecturer at King’s College London; and Mosharraf Zaidi, Pakistani columnist and commentator and former advisor to Ms Hina Rabbani Khar when she was foreign minister.  

This series of Head to Head also includes interviews with former US Presidential Envoy to Iraq, Paul Bremer, former Russian politician and historian Natalia Narochnitskaya and BJP Secretary Ram Madhav at the Oxford Union. In each episode, Hasan goes head to head with a special guest, asking the probing and hard-hitting questions few dare to ask.

Who rules Pakistan? with Hina Rabbani Khar will be broadcast on Friday 18th December at 20.00 GMT and will be repeated on December 19 at 1200, December 20 at 0100 and December 21 at 0600.

This episode will be available online immediately after it first airs: http://aje.io/3upj

*ENDS*

 Notes for Editors:

 Please credit ‘Head to Head’ and Al Jazeera English if you use any quotes from this release.

All episodes of series one are available online: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/headtohead/

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