Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party.
You have to hand it to Imran Khan. The cricketer-playboy turned Islamo-populist politician has turned his celebrity into a powerful personal political machine. Before his period as Pakistan’s Prime Minister – though hard to describe as anything remotely close to “stability” – the country’s politics had settled into a rhythm in which two civilian political clans, the Sharifs and the Bhuttos battled for power with each other and the army – while somehow containing the blowback from Pakistani intelligence’s support of Islamist radicalism in Afghanistan.
This had some practical justification: Pakistan needs a friendly Afghanistan for what it called “strategic depth” in a prospective war against India, but supporting radical Islamist movements on the other side of the border was bound to import trouble, since Pashtun tribal networks spanned both sides. The Taliban’s return to power in Kabul has stabilised that front. Securing the West’s exit can be considered a major success of Pakistani policy, and it is not a coincidence that it took place when Imran Khan was in office.
Khan draws a considerable portion of his support from the border region now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), an amalgamation of the old North West Frontier Province, and Federally Administered Tribal Areas with a population of 40 million. He’s also strong in Punjab, the country’s biggest province (population: 120 million). His PTT party broke through in national elections in 2018, winning power in PK and Punjab as well as nationally.
But he never had a stable majority and was ousted in a vote of no confidence last October. In response, he took his MPs out of the national assembly, and stood personally in eight simultaneous by-elections, winning in seven (a single candidate standing in multiple seats to make a political point is something of a Pakistani tradition). Then he had his chief ministers in PK and Punjab dissolve the regional assemblies, forcing new elections that he could use to demonstrate his popularity. It is over the timing of these elections that the current power struggle has unfolded.
The national government wants to postpone the provincial elections and hold them at the same time as the national polls – due later in the year. The Supreme Court, however, has ruled that out. Khan was arrested on 9 May on charges of corruption, and subsequently released – also on the orders of the Supreme Court, paying the role of a friendly umpire. Sharif, not incidentally, has also faced corruption charges while in opposition, and was acquitted after becoming Prime Minister.
Such corruption cases are better understood as a normal part of the struggle for power in Pakistan than anything resembling a mechanism of accountability. In this sense, Pakistan’s politics is democracy at its most raw. Like in an Italian renaissance republic, institutions exist to disguise a raw power struggle rather than contain it.
Both Khan’s arrest, and his subsequent release following riots demanding it, reflected this power struggle. The scale of the violence in his defence showed that his influence needed to be reckoned with. Though imprisonment would not suit him, being an enemy of the establishment certainly does.
It ties in nicely with the conspiratorial anti-American tone of his campaigning. In rhetoric at least, a new Khan government would be a difficult partner for the West, and continue to use China, as well as the United States, to balance growing Indian power on the subcontinent. The Army, which has long been dependent on American equipment and training, is used to manoeuvre (it depended on US assistance to fight al-Qaeda and Islamist rebels, while also supporting the Taliban), but is wary of Khan’s foreign policy and domestic anti-establishment tilt.
The most important question is whether the army is able to work with him: its frustration lies behind his ousting last autumn. Then, the flimsiness of Khan’s parliamentary position allowed him to be removed by a parliamentary vote. The army’s inability to force his arrest, though – which would have taken him out of the campaign – suggests that it doesn’t have the power to remove him by legal means. It may of course resort to illegal means, though an assassination would provoke fierce disorder they would struggle to contain.
If Khan survives to compete, and wins decisively, the army will be faced with a dilemma: acomodate his agenda, or consider a more open return to the Pakistani tradition of coups, and appoint a Chief Martial Law Administrator.