What's Going On in Pakistan?

How to understand the arrest of Imran Khan

Photo by Hamid Roshaan on Unsplash

Pakistan’s cricket star turned ex-prime minister has been arrested, setting off huge protests nationwide. From the BBC:

Pakistan's former prime minister Imran Khan has pleaded not guilty to corruption charges a day after his arrest sparked nationwide protests.

Nearly 1,000 people have been arrested, police say, and eight people have died nationwide in the protests.

There is tight security at the police guesthouse where he is being detained, which is also serving as a courtroom.

The arrest dramatically escalated tensions between Mr Khan and the military at a time of economic crisis.

Conviction would permanently disqualify the former cricket star - prime minister from 2018 to 2022 - from standing for office. Elections are due later this year.

Dramatic footage showed dozens of security officers forcibly removing the 70-year-old from court on Tuesday, then bundling him into a police vehicle.

On Wednesday Mr Khan was indicted on charges that he unlawfully sold state gifts during his premiership, in a case brought by the Election Commission.

He denies the allegations and says he fulfilled all legal requirements.

You may recall that Khan was ousted from office last year through a no confidence vote in Parliament — but in fact, it was Pakistan’s powerful military’s loss of confidence in Khan which lead to his downfall.

Exactly one year ago, I spoke with Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center about Imran Khan’s rise and fall from Pakistani politics. The episode (listen here) and transcript (below) of our conversation will give you context for understanding the political strife in Pakistan today.

Who is Imran Khan?

Michael Kugelman [00:02:25] If you go back to the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Imran Khan was really a household name in the world of cricket. He was not just Pakistan’s, but one of the world’s greatest cricket stars, for sure and his most famous moment was when he rallied an injured hobbled underdog Pakistani national cricket squad to a World Cup championship victory over heavily favored England in the 1992 World Cup. It was huge and, the entire country of Pakistan was literally exuberant for days and days. So that really, I think, was the pinnacle of his fame as a cricket star. But, yeah, he was a really big deal for a long time.

Mark L. Goldberg [00:03:04] And I have to imagine there is potent symbolic weight to the fact that Pakistan defeated its former colonial masters, England, in that World Cup.

Michael Kugelman [00:03:15] Oh, absolutely, you’d better believe it. And not to mention that England simply had a really tremendous, indomitable cricket squad. But indeed, if you look at the history of it, indeed there’s a tremendous amount of pride based on that very fact that I think made Pakistanis even so much happier that they that they defeated the English.

WHY AND HOW DID IMRAN KHAN ENTER INTO PAKISTANI POLITICS?

Mark L. Goldberg [00:03:36] So how did one of the greatest cricket players of all time who led Pakistan in this improbable victory over England in the 1992 Cricket World Cup enter into politics.

Michael Kugelman [00:03:49] Yes. It was actually very soon after Imran Khan retired from cricket, very soon after he decided to launch his political career. So, he launched his political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, which really translates to the Pakistan Justice Party. He launched it in 1996, and he was already thinking about a political career, I think, during the last few years of his cricket career. One thing that he started to do was become a big philanthropist and he really emphasized charitable causes. And he developed this large cancer hospital in Pakistan in honor of his mother. And I think that was his way of projecting himself as so different from so much of the Pakistani political class, which was dynastic, corrupt, very wealthy, not given to huge displays of philanthropy. So that was a really big deal. But then indeed, in ’96, he formed his political party and the big issue that it revolved around, and it continued to be the case up to the present day, was the issue of corruption. Imran Khan, from his very earliest days as a political figure, depicted himself as a champion of anti-corruption, and he also wanted to really present a third way, so to speak, or actually I guess the second way — he wanted to project himself and his party as different from the long standing mainstream political parties in Pakistan, and there were only two of them, that had ruled Pakistan for its entire history when Pakistan was not run by the military. And again, the idea was to project himself as non-dynastic and non-corrupt, and that really helped him generate a lot of mass appeal in the nineties. It took him a while, of course, until he would lead a government. But he used that image, that projection, as a way to build national appeal in the years that followed.

WHAT POLICIES AND IDEAS DID IMRAN KHAN CAMPAIGN ON TO LEAD THE PAKISTANI GOVERNMENT?

Mark L. Goldberg [00:05:39] And I suppose, you know, when you have this independent kind of celebrity and you’re not caught up in the politics of the past, and you are very much an outsider, it’s easy to project oneself as being not tainted by the corruption of the sort of political establishment.

Michael Kugelman [00:05:56] Yeah, that’s correct. I mean, he really projected himself as that type of populist figure, this outsider who was coming in to make big changes and then pass-through major reforms. But of course, at the same time, we have to acknowledge that Imran Khan was someone who had made a lot of money, become very wealthy from his cricket career. He had very deep attachments to the West and in particular Great Britain, where he’d spend a lot of time during his cricket career, and he was a big part of the celebrity culture in the UK for a while. So, it’s not like he was a complete maverick and a complete outsider, but certainly in the context of Pakistani mainstream politics, he was very different. So, he was definitely very different from what had happened from what we’d seen in the decades leading to his emergence in politics.

HOW DID IMRAN KHAN BECOME PAKISTAN’S PRIME MINISTER IN 2018?

Mark L. Goldberg [00:06:40] So I take it his party must have been something of a sort of permanent minority party for a long time because, you know, you said he started his party in 1996. He wasn’t prime minister until 2018. How is it that he emerged after so many years through the political wilderness to become prime minister in 2018?

Michael Kugelman [00:07:03] Yeah, it was definitely a long, hard road. And the PTI, his party, didn’t really even have any type of presence in the parliament, in the national parliament, for quite some time. And keep in mind, the political state of play was very challenging for him to penetrate for quite some time. Just a few years after he formed his political party, the military came back to take power in 1999 and you had military rule until 2008 so that made democracy very difficult. But it is notable that Imran Khan actually joined the very large pro-democracy movement that broke out 2007-2008 against the rule of military dictator Pervez Musharraf. And it’s funny because we hear so often, or we’ve heard in recent years that Imran Khan was the favorite son of the military, and he became prime minister because of the military support. Well, when he was first starting out, he was actually opposed to military rule in a big way but then what he started to do after civilian rule returned in 2008, he began to focus a lot more on trying to develop a larger base. He did several things. First of all, he really leveraged very adeptly, very strategically, this grievance harbored by a pretty significant voting demographic in Pakistan: that being a conservative, young, middle class, urban group of folks that were repulsed by corruption in the political class and he leveraged that. That had been his big calling card for so long: anti-corruption. So that really helped him become a bigger political figure as we got into the late 2000’s.

And then in the 2013 election, he did not win it, but he used the 2013 election to take aim at the government, which he described as incredibly corrupt, and he claimed that it had won the election through fraud. He became a very adept opposition figure by galvanizing large crowds on the streets in major cities, including in Islamabad. That raised his stature even more. Then the final thing that he did, and this is really what allowed him to become prime minister in 2018, is he very slowly cultivated a better relationship with the military. And as you know, in Pakistan, if you’re a civilian politician and you want to attain the highest place in that political class, that of prime minister, you need to be on good terms of the military. So, he improves relations with the military and then you had a situation in the months leading up to the 2018 election where a number of things happened that suggested that the military may have been indirectly helping Imran Khan to win election. For instance, you had a number of arrests of members of the Pakistan Muslim League Party, which is at the time of the ruling party against Imran Khan. You had TV channels that suddenly went off the air, TV channels that were airing coverage of candidates opposed to Imran Khan and things like that. So, Imran Khan won the 2018 election thanks to the mass following that he had but at the same time, many experts, including myself, believe that he was aided by these pre-election engineering efforts by the Pakistani military to put Imran Khan in power. At that time the Pakistani military was very unhappy with the party that had been in power. It had sparred with the military a lot and I think the military saw Imran Khan as that figure that could be a very useful prime minister for the military’s cause, which we can go into.

WHAT DID IMRAN KHAN ACCOMPLISH AS PAKISTAN’S PRIME MINISTER?

Mark L. Goldberg [00:10:39] Yeah. So having become prime minister in 2018 with, as you said, the support of the military and a degree of popular support as well. How did he rule? What were characteristics of his time as prime minister?

Michael Kugelman [00:10:58] So he came in with very lofty goals and very high ambitions. Again, he was projecting himself as this populist maverick outsider that wanted to do big and better things. So, he made all kinds of promises that there was no way he could keep. So, he talked about wanting to create this new Islamic welfare state in Pakistan that would involve huge increases in social welfare spending to help the poor. Pakistan’s economy didn’t allow that quite frankly. He also vowed to get rid of all corruption within the political class within 90 days of taking office. That wasn’t going to happen either, given the structural presence of corruption in the political class. But he tried to follow through on those promises. Initially, it became very clear that it wasn’t going to work out. Another thing that stands out from his years in power is that he never really had any consistent, clear, principled positions. He made a lot of U-turns. He promised to do one thing, and he would have reneged on that promise. But I think what stands out the most, and this is what in the end contributed to his downfall, is that he really acted like an opposition figure even when he was prime minister. He really did not reach out across the aisle to work with the opposition. He harassed them. He called them names. He accused them of being frauds and corrupt. You know, he alienated members of his own party for some of the things he did. So, in the end, he wasn’t willing to make the types of compromises and concessions that are necessary in a parliamentary democracy, and particularly for Imran Khan, who was leading what was a rather fractious coalition. I mean, when his party won the election in 2018, it was by a pretty narrow margin, so he didn’t have much of a margin for error. He really had to make concessions and work with the opposition and be more accommodationist, but he wasn’t. And that’s really what stands out in retrospect about his nearly four years in power.

WHY DID IMRAN KHAN LOSE THE SUPPORT OF PAKISTAN’S MILITARY?

Mark L. Goldberg [00:12:53] And presumably, at some point, he must have fallen out of favor with the military and the security services, right?

Michael Kugelman [00:13:01] Yeah, that’s correct. So indeed, for the first few years that he was in power, he did have quite good relations with the military from the Army chief on down. And, you know, it’s striking many an analyst, including me, soon after he was elected, questioned whether he would be able to maintain good relations with the military because his personality doesn’t lend itself to working well with the military. He’s stubborn, he’s defiant; he’s got strong views. He does not like to defer to the higher authorities and yet the military wants exactly that. It wants civilian prime ministers to be willing to be malleable and to defer to the Army. But I think for the first few years that he was in power, Imran Khan really wanted to become Prime Minister for so long since he formed his party in 1996 so he was willing to defer. But then things finally changed at a key moment in November of last year when Imran Khan disagreed with the decision of the army chief about who the next spy chief would be, the next chief of Pakistan’s preeminent spy service, the ISI, as it’s known.