Pakistan in Crisis: Imran Khan vs. the Army Chief

People in Pakistan and around the world have been sitting on the edge of their seats for months,  and especially since May 9, watching intently the cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan’s political contest with the army. There was hardly an eyebrow that didn’t lift on seeing his supporters damage military properties and attempt to forcibly enter the Army’s General Headquarters (GHQ) in protest against their leader’s arrest for an inquiry in a corruption case.

Scenes of people ransacking and torching military buildings or memorabilia are not common in Pakistan, where the armed forces have been the protagonist in power politics for decades. But after all the drama, the Khan saga seems to be moving toward a happy ending for the politically powerful army, popularly referred as the establishment.

The army turned to an old playbook: cut a recalcitrant politician down to size by attacking both the leadership and the party. The May 9 chaos has now turned into a crisis for the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) as leader after leader is either leaving the party or politics altogether. We may soon see a situation where Khan is proverbially alone – a king without a party.

What is happening in Pakistan is partly a replay of the country’s almost 76-year history and partly unprecedented. Since Pakistan’s geographical-strategic consolidation after the 1971 war with India, in which the eastern wing separated and became Bangladesh, the events of May 9 represented the biggest popular outpouring of anger against the Pakistani military. Though Imran Khan now wants to walk away from the May 9 developments and is even suggesting that his party leadership was not involved in creating chaos following his arrest, the scenes of people barging into a lieutenant general’s house in Lahore and the Army’s GHQ, or pulling down old aircraft memorabilia, denoted fury against years of the military’s overt and covert control of state and society.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the founding leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), was a populist like Khan, with a capacity to enthrall and excite people. Yet when Bhutto was imprisoned by a military government and then sentenced to death through a stage-managed court case, his party never attacked symbols of state and military power.

It is admittedly awkward to compare an intellectually smarter and sharper politician like Bhutto with Khan. That said, Khan’s ability to agitate the minds of his supporters to such a degree that they feel ready to attack the most powerful institution of the state is worth attention.

Khan never prided himself on being a politician. In fact, he always differentiated himself from his opponents by claiming that he was not a politician but a nation builder, who built a cancer hospital in Lahore and a university in South Punjab. Khan’s rejection of the “politician” label is due to his definition of the word as indicating immorality and corruption – things he eventually was accused of himself. Yet it is true that Khan cannot be categorized as a politician; he is an agitator-entertainer rather than an effective policymaker. From running the economy and foreign policy to controlling the state – he failed at all counts in his almost four years in government.

His bigger talent is that, even more than Bhutto, Khan has kept people glued to his voice. From lifting the 1992 Cricket World Cup to his current moves shaking up the Pakistani state and society, he seems to have a knack for entertaining crowds and drawing attention to himself. Khan has made an entire generation of Pakistanis, especially in the diaspora, believe that he has the capability to clean up Pakistan’s image, push back the powerful army, and turn the place around.

Not surprisingly, people are tempted to make outlandish comparisons. For instance, Khan’s provocative politics reminded Ali Usman Qasmi, a historian and professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, who during the late 1960s incited the Bengali population in what would become Bangladesh against the military power of the state. The comparison is obvious, as no other leader of a major party in Pakistan  – from Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif – has been so provocative. Unlike other prime ministers in the past, who have suffered abuse by the army, were arrested and sent to jail, or kept under house arrest, the PTI leader not only refuses to submit to any state control but has continued to egg on his supporters to take the battle to the streets against the state.

But any comparison with Bangladesh’s father of the nation is superficial. In fact, Khan’s political protest, which does not qualify as a full-blown movement, cannot be compared even with other popular public revolts against militaries in Asia over the last decade and a half. While in Southeast Asia we have watched people take up arms in Myanmar against the powerful military, Khan’s political pushback is very limited in its design. His political mobilization is not against the army, but rather the army chief, whom he views as the current coalition government’s primary support in delaying elections in Punjab, where he believes he will get an impressive victory.

More than any noticeable ability to change the state or civil-military relations, Khan is a beneficiary of changes caused by developments in global geopolitics and the resultant circumstances in which the coalition government led by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) rose to power in April 2022. The rapid increase in oil prices due to the war in Ukraine, the poor economy, and inconclusive negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) led to increased inflation, a depressed growth rate, and a burgeoning cost of living for ordinary people, who tend to blame such problems on whoever is presently in power.

The PTI’s opponents, on the other hand, argue that Khan has no concrete accomplishments to show for his years in power, from his election in August 2018 to his ouster in a no-confidence vote in April 2022. While Khan’s government handled the COVID-19 crisis quite well, he was certainly not able to show impressive results in eradicating corruption.

Ironically, the PTI leader, who catapulted himself to significance with an anti-corruption mantra, is now being investigated for allegedly taking a bribe from a property tycoon, Malik Riaz, in return for allowing him to use 190 million British pounds that were returned to the government by the British National Crimes Agency. There are also many other inquiries, investigations, and cases registered against Khan, with the government trying hard to ensure that he is disqualified from contesting the next election.

The long list of Khan’s acts of omission, as seen by the government, does not impress his support base. The fact remains that his popularity is only increasing. A survey published at the end of 2022 showed him far ahead other party leaders, including Nawaz Sharif, who is currently in self-imposed exile in London.

Khan’s popularity in itself has turned into a myth that logically can only be challenged through holding elections. But that’s the dilemma. Given the high pitch of the PTI narrative and Khan’s ability to excite his supporters and scare his opponents, the other parties don’t want to take the risk of holding an election he can contest. There is a lot of nervousness surrounding the consequences if election results favor Khan.

The present government is embroiled in a parallel battle with some of the top judges of the Supreme Court, which include Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial, who has ordered the government to hold early elections, especially in Punjab. The provincial governments in Punjab as well as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were voluntarily vacated by the PTI last year as a political tactic. Islamabad refuses to hold elections despite the court’s order that the polls occur by May 14. The court-versus-government battle has strengthened Khan’s narrative that his opponents want to escape his anti-corruption drive once he returns to power, and thus will do whatever they can to avoid an election that may see him rise again.

In the coalition government’s drive against the PTI leader, the army chief has emerged as a consequential stakeholder, who is also not keen to see the cricketer-turned-politician return to power. Not necessarily reputed as a great thinker or a man of vision, General Asim Munir is convinced that Khan is bad news, personally and institutionally.

The army chief was bruised by Khan’s excesses in 2019, when the then-prime minister removed Munir from his position as head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) after a brief tenure of about eight months. Reportedly, this was for the sin of reporting on financial mismanagement by Khan’s wife. It was Munir’s clear distrust of Khan that made him the best choice as army chief for the coalition government that came to power after removing Khan in April 2022.

Increasingly, this interpersonal friction between the two men is getting nastier and deeper. The army chief is not enamored by the way Khan tends to create division within the military fraternity. There are not any surveys available to assess opinion within the armed forces, but the institution appears divided and shaken. The families of some serving officers participated in the recent protest against the military. There are also many retired officers and their families that are counted as part of the armed forces fraternity that support Khan.

Indeed, Khan’s political success was cautiously and gradually built by the army, by successive chiefs starting from General (Retd) Ashfaq Pervez Kiani. In bringing Khan to the fore, Pakistan’s military sought to break the monopoly of Pakistan’s two main parties, the PML-N and the PPP, which benefited from a revolving door approach of replacing each other in power. The problem is that years of propaganda facilitated by both the military’s covert and overt public relations tools popularized Khan to an extent that Munir’s own men almost lost control.

According to military sources that I spoke with, the Lahore Corps Commander, Lt. General Salman Ghani, was recalled to the General Headquarters (GHQ) and removed from his position for allowing PTI protesters to enter the general’s residence and plunder the property. Some of the daughters and sisters of army officers I spoke with were adamant that there would be greater reaction if Khan was arrested again, although this may be more of a wish than reality.

The PTI appeared to depend on a sense of support from within the army and the judiciary. Its social media experts, some of whom are in exile, such as Major (Retd) Adil Raja, talk about a storm within the institution that is aimed at overthrowing the current army chief and replacing him with a general more favorable to Khan. Raja’s claims are based on the stitching together of disconnected facts to achieve a favorable, though arguably fictional, story.

There is no doubt that Khan has support within the junior and even middle ranks of the armed forces. It’s also a fact that there is a divide among the echelons – caused not by Khan’s political narrative but because of the personal objectives of officers. Munir’s successor in the ISI, Lt. General (Retd) Faiz Hameed hoped to become service chief with Khan’s help. However, the current army chief has greater potential to bring his service in line due to his ability and power to discipline a force that has never experienced a successful countercoup. There are indeed a few cases of army chiefs being eased out due to internal machinations, but only if their continuation in the position was seen as detrimental to the service and not because of the personal ambitions of individual officers.

The Pakistan Army is too much a product of British-American security system to disintegrate as easily as Khan’s supporters would have us believe.

The army chief has lot of tricks up his sleeve to discipline his military. A 2017 study by Paul Staniland and Adnan Naseemullah discussed the intricate system of punishment and reward that the Pakistan Army uses to keep the institution together. Munir has been making full use of that system in fighting his Imran Khan problem. During his visits to various army units, Munir has reportedly spoken to younger officers about the reason for removing the Corps Commander Lahore: the commander’s act of blatant political support for the PTI put military security at risk.

During the May 15 Corps Commander’s Conference, the army decided to punish all those found involved in the mayhem on May 9, even trying these people under the Army Act. Such an action would not bode well for democracy in Pakistan and must be resisted by the political forces. But a lot depends on the government’s capacity to convince the army chief, who has a reputation among those who know him as a man who does not forgive or forget.

As for the junior ranks, the general seems to be offering more monetary perks such as an increase in subsidies and hope for financial inducements in the next budget. It’s still not known how a financially hard-pressed civilian government will be able to fulfill the general’s promise to his men.

Other things are comparatively easier to achieve, like building a case of deliberate and criminal vandalism against the state. Khan’s denial that PTI members were involved in attacks against military properties and memorabilia is a misstatement of the facts. A PTI supporter with close links to Khan’s family talked about recognizing many of the faces that had gone to attack the general’s house in Lahore. “The PTI members are angry and are determined to go to any length to protect their leader,” I was told.

However, the government is making an even more serious case, presenting the May 9 events not just as an organic protest but something orchestrated with the help of a rent-a-crowd that included miscreants. The government may be able to make such a case, as violence was used even earlier against the police in Lahore when they initially tried to arrest Khan from his residence.

Clearly, Khan’s ability to excite people is not matched by an equal capability to understand the details of the military as an institution. His understanding, based on years of personal association with various generals or other officers, is that the top echelons can be impressed with street power. Around 2007, after then-President General Pervez Musharraf signed the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) with the PPP, Khan spoke disparagingly about the military brass to a circle of close aides, telling them that a gathering of 20,000 men could bring the generals to their knees.

He seems to have tested the formula without appreciating his own inability to ensure that a Tahrir Square kind of crowd actually turns out to scare the army echelons. His repeated calls for protests in the past have lacked numbers. Indian journalist and keen Pakistan observer Praveen Swami sees this as a peculiar problem of Pakistan’s political culture, where historically protests are not massive. But this is also about Khan’s inability to convince his supporters to take the risk and leave the comfort of their homes for the kind of exposure where they may get violently targeted by the state. The visibility of personal risk has increased as the government is engaged in a spree of arresting PTI leaders and using force against its cadres. An increase in human rights abuses in the coming days is likely. The idea is to exhaust the party into inaction.

When it comes to Khan’s understanding of the military, like other politicians in Pakistan, the major flaw of the PTI supremo’s approach is that it is personalized rather than approaching the military as an institution, which can only be pushed through institutional mechanisms backed with political grandstanding. Khan lacks understanding of the culture of the armed forces. Groomed under the British-American security tradition, the institution will congregate around its chief irrespective of his professional capacity.

Moreover, Khan failed to use his popularity to keep the army separated from his political opponents, which he could have managed by not targeting the army chief personally. Even those in the army critical of the chief’s personal political preferences will find it hard to not support him, especially when the institution is being physically attacked.

Now it’s game over for Khan, as the army is gradually back reorganizing itself after the May 9 crisis. His support base within both the military and judiciary is being torn apart. Other than making good money from YouTube views, Khan’s narrative managers like Major Raja, sitting in exile in London and spreading rumors regarding generals planning a coup against Munir, have failed.

The army chief looks prepared to carry out tactical purges within the armed forces and tactical coercion against the PTI’s civilian supporters to bring the Khan agitation to its knees. Many PTI leaders are now leaving the party or even politics to save themselves from the wrath of the general.

This is a contest that Khan is not likely to win. He will be silenced, either through incarceration in Pakistan or being sent to exile. The exact outcome will depend on the army and how the political forces negotiate with the General Headquarters and the PTI.

Khan has lost this round against his opponents, as the battle shifted away from politics to a severe civil-military contestation. The democratic process in Pakistan has not gained from this scuffle between the PTI chief and the army chief. The armed forces have emerged the victor rather than any particular political side.

But Khan the political problem will remain a bigger issue than Khan the personal problem. The latter may be relatively easier to fix through coercive means and disintegrating the PTI. Khan’s political ghost will not be that easy to get rid of.

The more difficult thing to deal with will be the changed expectations that the society has acquired in the last few years. Khan may not be an exemplary leader; he is beset with contradictions caused by his personality flaws, including a huge ego and thinking himself above any system or institution. But he is the face of society’s expectations, which were given wing by his presence.

Pakistanis, over 64 percent of whom are below the age of 30, want a new kind of politics that is not defined by patronage or dynasty. Older parties, the PPP and the PML-N, continue to have a support base, but they are no longer exciting. Furthermore, there is a new bunch of aspirational elites who want a role in leadership yet find no space in the older parties. All of these elements see Khan as an alternative – albeit one who, as development expert Mosharraf Zaidi argues, also failed to turn his party into a good alternative.

While Zaidi’s argument is correct, it misses the point: Many will continue to identify Khan as the lesser evil, and see him as representing their desires for a new political system. His image will be bolstered further depending on the success or failure of other parties to bring something new to the table. Pakistan’s continued economic crisis, it is important to add, will not make the battle against the PTI any easier, especially if anyone tries to win the war of hearts and minds. Khan’s support base is not ready to buy any of the arguments against the former prime minister.

The one thing that the government and the state have not even begun to think about is the diaspora, which is almost entirely besotted with Khan and his narrative. Even if some of the PTI’s overseas supporters are quitting the party, the overall support base is resentful. In the words of a U.S.-based medical doctor I spoke with, “Pakistanis should not expect any help from us any longer if they are not willing to fight for the right leader.”

The state can punish the recalcitrant politician, put him behind bars, or try him under the Army Act. However, Khan in prison will be as bitter a pill to swallow as he is on the streets.