For the cricketer-turned-politician, the risks are significant, with the military leadership bristling at the freewheeling political criticism directed at it, since his exit, at protests organised by Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and on social media.
“Army draws its strength from people and any effort to create wedge between army and population won’t be tolerated,” army chief General Qamar Bajwa was quoted as telling his officers in a reference to unnamed “hostile forces”.
According to the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Bajwa also warned that “misinformation and propaganda threaten state integrity” and called for countering “speculations and rumours”.
Khan’s latest political quest, this time to regain power, is also colliding against the reality of power being consolidated by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, whose government now controls parliament.
And amidst fisticuffs in the Punjab Assembly, Pakistan’s most populous province, power was again wrested away from Khan’s PTI.
The new chief minister of Punjab, Hamza Shahbaz, is Sharif’s son – the first such father-son duo in Pakistan’s history. But if Khan becomes more direct in referring to the establishment and the role of the judiciary, it could become a really explosive situation.” Nawaz said the military will “protect itself as a corporate entity” from political attacks that erode its leadership’s standing with the public.
But retired military personnel and their families are rarely vocal in public when political power changes hands in Pakistan and strict rules guide the public conduct of serving personnel.
With Khan’s removal, however, a dam appears to have burst.
“It is surprising, certainly the extent of it is,” Ayaz Amir, retired military officer and now a political analyst, told Al Jazeera. “Why have you done this and for what purpose – not just retired but serving personnel are asking too.” Since Khan’s exit, a torrent of comment and criticism has been unleashed on social media and private messaging groups, running the gamut from dirges to screeds in favour of Khan by retired military officers and apolitical military housewives and young adults.
“These are the pillars of patriotism, the officer corps concentrated in Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi and their families. They weren’t all always supporting Khan, but when they look at the alternative [the new government], they see no option,” Amir said. Ayesha Siddiqa, author of Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy, suggested that the surge in military opinion in Khan’s favour has been a long time in the making.
“The military has created this moment for itself with its anti-corruption narrative since 1985. Traditional politics has been cast as corrupt and non-representative. It has all come to a head now.
“You created a messiah in Imran Khan. Why are you surprised that people want to follow him even now?” Siddiqa asked. On Thursday, military spokesperson Major-General Iftikhar announced that Bajwa will retire in November, forgoing the possibility of a second extension in service that he is eligible for.
Since Khan’s exit, Bajwa has been criticised on social media and in private messaging groups – unthinkable mere weeks ago.
It is a stunning reversal for a military chief who was spoken of in fawning terms until recently. Meanwhile, as Khan hurtles ahead with his campaign to dislodge a government that dislodged him, he appears to have an advantage his opponents did not: the relative lack of enthusiasm and support for the new government.
Wracked by internal contradictions, confronted by grim economic challenges and faced with a general election that must be held by late 2023, the new PML-N-led coalition government has struggled to articulate a governing message and does not have the political capital that comes with winning a general election.
The coalition partners are a disparate bunch that came together to oust Imran Khan but otherwise have competing political agenda and diverse constituencies. Some of them like the PMLN, the JUI and some smaller parties could potentially forge electoral alliances in the future polls. But the PPP and the PMLN are historical adversaries that are unlikely to ever have an electoral adjustment with each other. While the PPP would work with the PMLN to reform the election laws and perhaps to bring to book those who violated the constitution and hounded the opposition in the garb of accountability, it would not want to take blame for any further economic hardship that might come the common man’s way.
It is not a question of if the PPP and some others would jump ship, but when. This effectively makes the coalition setup a closed-ended transaction unless the outside political compulsions force them to stick together. And Imran Khan is making abundantly clear that he could become that compulsion.
I have maintained that Pakistan army is many things, but it certainly is not ill-disciplined. It has, historically, dealt with the handful of coup attempts against the brass swiftly and decisively. In 1951 a group of disgruntled military officers led by the mercurial Major General Akbar Khan had approached the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) with a coup plot that proposed overthrowing both civil and military leaderships of the time.
While the CPP had spurned the offer, its leadership was jailed nonetheless for years on end in what became known as the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. The CPP leadership was honourably exonerated and released eventually but the party had been banned.
General Akbar Khan In another instance in 1983, a group of mid-level officers were arrested, court-martialed, and imprisoned, on the charge that they were plotting a coup against the military dictator General Muhammad Ziaul Haq, at the behest of the PPP leadership. More recently, a group of army officers were tried and sentenced in 2012, for links to Hizb-ut-Tahrir. The only successful coups d’état in Pakistan were launched by the army, not against it.
The army leadership’s kid-glove treatment of General Faiz Hameed, therefore, was quite a curiosity. The brass, on the other hand, had clearly decided to abandon Imran Khan last fall. While the explanations are myriad, it is within the realm of plausibility that the plan was to send the high-profile general out to pasture quietly once his cohort had been canned. The duo, however, may be down but not out. And Imran Khan is certainly not quite.
A day before Imran Khan’s Peshawar rally, the army convened its 79th Formation Commanders’ Conference, with General Bajwa presiding it. According to army’s official communique, ‘the forum took note of the recent propaganda campaign by some quarters to malign Pakistan Army and create division between the institution and society.” That, however, did not deter Imran Khan from upping the ante at his maiden post-ouster rally, and spinning his conspiracy narrative further. After the rally, the Director General Inter-Services Relations (DG ISPR) addressed a press conference denying and debunking most of Imran Khan’s assertions, without naming him.
The DG ISPR did, however, made pronouncements about the army’s commitment to its constitutional and professional role only, even though the presser itself was political to hilt.
He announced that General Bajwa would neither seek not accept another extension, which isn’t breaking news exactly. The Pakistan army’s pledge to stay out of politics is welcome, but even those inclined to trust it, must verify.
But are the Sharifs to be trusted toot hand nail. Sharif’s unsubtle efforts to buy influence inside the army—which included handing out upmarket cars to top Generals—did not go down well with then-army chief, General Asif Nawaz.
“The Army Chief confronted Nawaz, who did not deny the allegation,” former Indian intelligence officer Rana Banerjee has recorded. Instead, “He offered the keys of a new BMW to Asif Nawaz, urging him not to keep driving his old Toyota Corona as it was not ‘befitting’ for the Chief!”
Sharif and General Nawaz clashed over the appointment of Lt Gen Javed Nasir, a member of the proselytising Tablighi Jamaat order, as the ISI director-general—without even consulting the army chief.
And General Nawaz’s efforts to transfer out Islamist-leaning Lt Gen Hamid Gul, who as ISI chief had ensured PM Sharif’s election, also caused friction. The army chief did not trust Gul to hold charge in his absence, and wanted him in a non-command position, where his ambitions would be contained. Eventually, Gul was retired, over Sharif’s strenuous objections.
In 1998, Sharif sacked Karamat, and handpicked Lt Gen Pervez Musharraf to succeed him, superseding Lieutenants-General Ali Kuli Khan and Khalid Nawaz Khan. Following the Kargil War, Sharif moved to sack Musharraf, who had gone to war without informing his prime minister. The General staged a successful coup.
The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government, which ruled from 2008-2013, also pushed back against military influence over strategic decision—seeking United States assistance, by one account, to set in place a new, civilian-led national-security system. The government survived, but its legitimacy was dismantled by the military.
Following the death of Zia in a still-unexplained 1988 air crash—blamed on the KGB, Mossad, CIA, hydraulics failure, nerve gas, and explosives packed inside crates of mangoes—the Generals instituted a system which diplomat Husain Haqqani described as “military rule by other means.” The army chief, scholar Hasan-Askari Rizvi has explained, became the pivot for this political system. He represented the institutional consensus of the army on the governance of the country, derived through discussions between the corps commanders.
President Asif Ali Zardari, elected in 2008, sought a historical transformation with his country’s eastern neighbour, asserting that “India has never been a threat to Pakistan.” At about the same time, it is now known, the Lashkar-e-Taiba was finalising its plans for 26/11. Zardari sought to put the perpetrators on trial, and to assert civilian control over the ISI—but failed.
Ever since 2019 Pulwama crisis, though, General Bajwa has reined in terrorism, leading to a significant decline in terrorism in Kashmir. Emissaries for the Pakistan Army chief and India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval are believed to have held back-channel negotiations to prevent the two countries from lurching into a conflict neither want.
The Pakistan Army’s position as the country’s preeminent institution of power rests on its status as the guardian not just of the country’s borders, but also its ideological frontiers. Ever since the Independence, the army has cast itself as the custodian of Pakistan’s freedom, identity and Islam itself.
