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She was speaking on the current situation in Pakistan at The Tricycle Theatre on Tuesday evening while sharing the panel with Dawood Azami, a BBC journalist and a writer who spoke about the two great Pathans — the Faqir of Ipi and the Frontier Gandhi.
The niece of the slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto appeared particularly concerned about the future of the country under its present elected leadership which she said lacked not only the capacity to govern efficiently and cleanly but which was also too corrupt to be trusted with all the billions that the US and the West were providing to Pakistan by way of compensation for fighting their proxy war against the Taliban.
She was highly critical of the infamous National Reconciliation Ordinance as according to her the ordinance had let the most corrupt in the country go scot-free.
'Its authors claim that it was conceived on the lines of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission but ironically they forgot to put the truth part of the TRC in their NRO,' she added sarcastically.
She did not appear to be condoning the Taliban, but she also did not have any supportive words for the army action against them.
She thought the internally displaced persons who have now crossed the 2 million mark would pose a new socio-economic and political threat to the very existence of Pakistan no matter how much aid is spent in the relief and rehabilitation efforts.
She declared Nizam-i-Adl as unconstitutional and lashed out at the government for not subjecting the regulations to a vote in the National Assembly or holding a referendum on it, 'the 1973 Constitution is very clear on Islamic laws as under it all laws repugnant to Islam are to be gradually removed from the books'.
While answering questions, she said made a fine distinction between state and country as she absolved Pakistan and its people from what she said were the misdeeds of the state spread over the last 60 years.
She was asked to explain the charge that it was the Pakistan army and the ISI which created the Taliban. Fatima Bhutto said the US was as much complicit in the matter as, according to her, even Bin Laden had served as their agent once.
