Even as more than 40 lives were lost last week in the latest resurgence of sectarian violence on Pakistan’s northwestern flank bordering Afghanistan, the nation’s media remained focused primarily on a nationwide “do or die” protest focused on the capital, Islamabad, and organised by the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI).
The apparent aim is to liberate PTI chieftain Imran Khan from the Adiala prison in Rawalpindi, adjacent to Islamabad, where he has been incarcerated since August last year on a vast array of charges, many of them undoubtedly politically motivated. The effort to congregate in Islamabad – where the red carpet was being rolled out on Monday for Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko, a past master in authoritarian repression and electoral manipulation – had been thwarted until the time of writing through road blockades, volleys of tear-gas, suspension of public transport and mobile internet blackouts.
Its potential fallout cannot therefore be assessed, but similar efforts in the past have flopped in the face of official intransigence, and by most indications any magnanimity towards former favourite Imran Khan is not on the agenda of the nation’s de facto military rulers.
To briefly recap his career, Imran was an internationally renowned all-rounder on the cricket field who captained his side to its only World Cup triumph in Melbourne in 1992, as well as a bit of a philanderer on other playing fields who frequently featured in British tabloid gossip columns. By the 1990s, he was also dedicated to the project of constructing a cancer hospital named after his mother, who had succumbed to the disease, in his home city, Lahore.
Back then, he routinely dismissed rumours of political ambitions. It’s unclear exactly what changed his mind, but it’s widely known that his mentor during his initial tentative steps into the political arena was the infamous former head of Pakistan’s CIA/MI6 equivalent, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), Hamid Gul.
As a leading organiser of Pakistan’s assistance to the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, he claimed credit as a gravedigger of the Soviet Union long before he turned his Islamist wrath on the US, and in the interim served as a guiding light for terrorist intervention in India. Imran appears to have embraced fundamentalist Islam with the exaggerated passion of a convert, and was occasionally referred to as Taliban Khan long before he became prime minister, following a partially rigged election in 2018 in which the PTI failed to win a majority, but gained power via a military-facilitated coalition.
During his nearly four-year tenure as PM, Imran Khan (IK) regularly boasted about a “hybrid regime” in which he was “on the same page” as the military high command. The latter turned out to be yet another illusion, but military-civilian hybridity had been embedded in the polity pretty much since the “return to democracy” in 1988, after Pakistan’s most toxic military tyrant, General Zia-ul-Haq, perished in a mid-air explosion most probably arranged by the army itself. Imran – like Gul – was a fan of the deceased dictator.
The army was instrumental through the 1990s in toppling governments led by Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of Pakistan’s first elected prime minister who was judicially assassinated under Zia, and Nawaz Sharif, an ISI creation who grew too big for his boots. The corruption and incompetence allegations against them may not have entirely been facetious, but the Pervaiz Musharraf dictatorship that followed Sharif’s second tenure turned out to be pretty disastrous, particularly following its inevitable capitulation to George W. Bush and his “war against terror”. Yet even in his own hybrid set-up, Musharraf had the sense to knock back Imran’s demands for an absurdly disproportionate number of parliamentary seats in a dubious democracy.
In a comment 28 years ago on the latter’s political inclinations, I had warned “the over-enthusiastic faithful” to beware “of pied pipers, particularly when it is not clear who is calling the tune”. By 2018, there was no doubt about who was calling the tune. Military chief Qamar Javed Bajwa, instrumental in Imran’s political demise four years later, was equally key to his ensconcement in 2018. It turned out shortly afterwards that the PM was incorrigibly beholden to the superstitious advice of the much younger (and fully veiled) spiritual adviser he had wed earlier that year.
Notwithstanding all grand claims about a socioeconomic reset, there were no grand plans on which Imran’s partners in hybridity clamped down. They were alarmed not so much about his narcissistic self-belief as about his tendency to irritate or alienate the closest allies Pakistan relies on for economic sustenance, from China to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. His wife’s incendiary claim last week that the Saudis pushed for his dismissal after the PM turned up barefoot in Madina has been dismissed with prejudice by Bajwa, PTI stalwarts and any number of government ministers, but it’s less implausible than the now dropped PTI claim of being targeted by the Biden administration.
PTI’s current discourse mostly revolves around its unfairly imprisoned cult leader. It lacks any vision for Pakistan, and Imran’s self-proclaimed “principles” remain obscure. Even now, his preferred path for a return to office would be a deal with the military high command. His disdain for his political rivals would be easier to appreciate were he prepared to acknowledge the corruption, incompetence and incoherence of his PTI subordinates.
The ruling Pakistan Muslim League (N), which heads the current ruling coalition under the military’s aegis, and the Pakistan People’s Party are effectively family firms equally culpable in Pakistan’s decline. The biggest culprit, however, is the army, whose direct and indirect misrule across decades has stymied Pakistan political, economic and social development, while simultaneously failing to protect Pakistanis from the terrorism that has run rampant since at least the 1990s.
It’s unclear at this stage whether complete state failure can be staved off, but it might help if Imran Khan, instead of relying for rescue on the next Trump administration or his incipient Zionist fan club, were to set aside his oversized ego and negotiate with his political rivals for a possible path away from Pakistan’s debt (and death) trap.
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Mahir Ali
Mahir Ali has worked as a journalist in Pakistan, the UAE and Australia across four decades.
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