MJ Akbar
NEW DELHI: Benazir Bhutto’s party won the elections and a nonentity, Yusuf Raza Gilani, was sworn in. Musharraf resigned in August 2008 before he could be impeached. Gilani lasted till disqualified by the Supreme Court in June 2012.
Nawaz Sharif had also tried to return in 2007 but failed. By 2011 he had made a deal with the permanent establishment and was back in Pakistan. He won the elections in 2013 with help from his old friends. Once again, the equation soured over the next thousand days; corruption was added to the usual reasons.
The Generals needed a new face as much as the people, who were weary of shenanigans. Imran Khan, debonair cricket hero and London socialite in his youth, now a convert to ‘Islamic pseudo-socialism’ in his rhetoric, was the only card left in a tired pack.
Imran Khan has had a phenomenal life, but the biggest phenomenon might be his third marriage, to Bushra Bibi, née Bushra Riaz Wattoo, then 47-year-old, on February 18, 2018. Bushra claims to be a mystic who brings good luck. She persuaded Imran Khan that he would never become Prime Minister until he married her. He did, breaking a few Sharia taboos along the way. Six months later he was Prime Minister. He won the August 2018 elections through what his opponents described as a “manufactured verdict”. In Pakistan, security at voting booths is controlled by soldiers, not the police. Among his first appointments was an unknown General Asim Munir, who became head of ISI on October 25, 2018.
Exceptional charisma
Imran Khan has enormous selfbelief layered on exceptional charisma and courage but does not quite possess the acuity of the political class or a deep understanding of Pakistan’s complex power system and the international forces that have helped to keep Pakistan intact. He began to believe that he could govern on his own terms, backed by popular support. There will be another occasion to examine his years in office, if not always in power, but since August 2023 he has been in jail, serving a 14-year sentence for corruption.
Imran Khan ventured into territory that made his survival incompatible with seven decades of Pakistani foreign policy. Carried away by an immature Islamism he sought to dilute his country’s dependent relationship with America. He described the terrorist icon Osama bin Laden as a martyr (shaheed) and blamed America for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
President Donald Trump, then in his first term, lashed out, saying Pakistan had not done “a damn thing” for America. Trump, unable to resist hyperbole, was articulating the growing frustration in the Pentagon and the State Department. In Imran’s calculation, Pakistan had lost 75,000 lives and $123 billion in American causes, although of course he never detailed the arithmetic of either. Imran Khan departed from the Jinnah doctrine when he rashly asserted that Pakistan would no longer act as America’s “hired gun”: Jinnah and his successors had exacted a high price for this hire.
In August 2021, Imran celebrated America’s hurried departure from Afghanistan as liberation from the “shackles of slavery”. The alarm in Washington grew when Imran Khan became the first Pakistan Prime Minister to visit the Kremlin in two decades, on February 23, 2022. The timing could not have been worse. It was at the onset of Russia’s war against Ukraine. On March 7, 2022 Washington conveyed its concerns about Imran Khan’s neutrality on Ukraine.
Foreign conspiracy
On March 8, Shehbaz Sharif, the present Prime Minister, moved a noconfidence resolution in the National Assembly against Imran Khan. On March 27, Imran alleged a foreign conspiracy to remove him, describing the new ally of the Sharifs, Asif Zardari (husband of the late Benazir Bhutto) as a “Mir Jafar”, the Bengali Nawab who supported Robert Clive during the Battle of Plassey in 1757. In April 2022 the Sharifs and Bhuttos were in office. In January 2024 Imran Khan was convicted of betraying secrets, corruption, and unlawful marriage to Bushra.
Moscow is not on Field Marshal Asim Munir’s travel schedule. The Army’s verdict has also come in. On December 5, 2025 their spokesman Lt General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said that Imran Khan was “mentally unstable” and a “narcissist” because he had “spread poison against the Army”. You must be a bit mad in Pakistan not to recognise the place of the Army in the power structure. Imran Khan is probably safer in prison than outside. The street, as his Oxbridge colleague Benazir Bhutto discovered, is crowded with assassins.