What the Imran Khan episode has revealed

In 1971, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto famously took a wrecking ball to the edifice of the state to fulfil his ambition to become prime minister at any cost. In 1999, the incumbent prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, moved to accumulate absolute power by seeking to declare himself “Commander of the Faithful (amirul momineen)” under a sharia-dominated Islamic state.

While Bhutto triumphed, he ended up presiding over a truncated Pakistan that eventually oversaw his execution. And while Sharif’s Islamic fantasy gained some traction, his efforts were thwarted by a military coup and years in political exile.

Whether Khan was inspired by the playbook of his predecessors to attempt his own gamble is hard to say. What is clear is that he expected to succeed where others — more blessed with brains and less sanctimonious — had come a cropper. So, what accounted for his assumption, apart from the well-rehearsed claim that nothing could go wrong for one famously said to be on the “same page” as Pakistan’s all-powerful military?

One explanation clearly lay with Khan greedily imbibing the commentary of lazy observers who had turned to his captaincy of Pakistan’s winning cricket team, which brought home the World Cup in 1992, as sufficient proof of his skills in managing a large and complex country like Pakistan. Extraordinary as it may now seem, many were seduced. Yet within months of taking over as prime minister, Khan was left floundering in the face of economic and foreign policy challenges that far eclipsed any hazard he may have experienced on the cricket pitch.

Khan’s legendary appeal as a glamorous celebrity with a talent for reaching out across a broad spectrum of society in support of his philanthropic causes was another much-touted asset that enabled his projection as a leader with a flair to build political bridges and deliver on an ambitious programme of reform. It, too, proved hollow. Khan’s show of bonhomie, ostentatiously on display among his wealthy benefactors, soon fell away to reveal an ugly habit of verbal abuse aimed at Opposition parties, whom he routinely cast as “thieves” and “looters”.

Faced with daily harangues of corruption and wrongdoing, it is no wonder that Opposition parties chose to withhold co-operation and behave as spectators while Khan’s government sank under the weight of its misgovernance and the constraints of a wafer-thin majority in parliament.

But neither his record of misgovernance nor the vicious treatment meted out to Opposition parties were as fatal to Khan’s political fortunes as his ill-judged moves vis-à-vis Pakistan’s military establishment. Widely seen as the key enabler of Khan’s electoral victory in 2018, the military had grown visibly wary of its protégé.

Although Khan was praised for his policy of “smart lockdowns” to alleviate the economic hardships caused by the Covid pandemic, his failure to contain double-digit inflation or to arrest the critical depletion of Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves fuelled disquiet. No less alarming to Khan’s erstwhile patrons was his erratic handling of Pakistan foreign relations, especially with the country’s traditional allies, notably the United States. These concerns intensified fears that some of the mud thrown at Khan would inevitably come to stick to the military — an ominous development that was already showing signs of spreading in the military’s main recruiting ground in the rich and powerful province of Punjab.

It was time to let go. As if on cue, a very public fallout precipitated by the hubris which now clouded Khan’s every judgement served as the opportunity for the military to re-set its relations with Khan.

In October last year Khan stepped in to resist the transfer of General Faiz Hameed, Director-General of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), a close confidante, who Khan wished to retain in the post in order, it was said, to maximise his chances of being returned to power at the time of the next elections.

The feverish public speculation that followed Khan’s decision to delay the notification of Hameed’s transfer sealed his fate. After being forced to accept Hameed’s transfer, Khan was made to understand that whatever policy differences needed settling between his government and the military, internal military appointments were not subject to negotiation.

Jealously guarded as the military’s prerogative, often in defiance of civilian authority, the matter of military
appointments has long been a sure-fire way of inflicting maximum damage on recalcitrant civilian governments in Pakistan and hastening their demise — as was most dramatically underscored in the failed attempt by Nawaz Sharif in 1999 to replace General Pervez Musharraf as army chief that invited a military coup.

But it would be quite wrong to read Khan’s defiance of the military as an attempt to rejuvenate democracy. On the contrary, Khan and his upwardly mobile middle-class base remain firmly wedded to a brand of authoritarian populism that, much like the military, is openly contemptuous of politics and the language of liberal democracy, which they roundly associated with a “scheming West”.

It is not insignificant that in selecting a target to blame for his removal from office, Khan chose to single out the US rather than the military as the chief culprit. Many have rightly read this choice as a canny move by Khan to revive a narrative of victimhood and conspiracy by external forces against Pakistan that has long been known to play well in the country, and not just among Khan’s constituency.

But it also suggests that Khan regards his problems as stemming not so much from his partnership with the military, but from the “betrayal” by its current high command who he believes reneged on its promise to guarantee a second term for him. Whatever the outcome of the recent regime change in Pakistan, it is unlikely to herald the onset of a fundamental shift in the country’s so-called “civil-military” imbalance.

The writer is Associate Fellow, Asia-Pacific Programme, Chatham House, London