Pakistan speeds towards a predictable denouement

Khan is reportedly taking stock of developments that have not only put his own life at risk but have raised the stakes in his running battle with the armed forces

Is this the lull before the storm? Or will the gale force unleashed by Pakistan’s maverick former Prime Minister Imran Khan -- seemingly unfazed by the November 3 failed assassination attempt -- and threatening to re-start his Long March, finally blow the once powerful Pakistan Army out of the water?

As the authorities enforce a clampdown, blocking access to the capital Islamabad and the garrison town of Rawalpindi, shutting down all schools and colleges, Khan has retreated to his home in the tony suburb of Zaman Park in Lahore -- where he intends to recuperate for a fortnight before joining the Long March in Rawalpindi -- handing over the responsibility to others in his Tehreek-e-Insaaf party to keep the protest pot boiling.

But will the Long March, which has rattled the political and the military-intelligence establishment, even continue for that long?

Khan, who met with a series of emissaries dispatched by army intermediaries, is reportedly taking stock of developments that have not only put his own life at risk but have raised the stakes in his running battle with the armed forces, who have traditionally pulled the political strings.

One small indication that he could be backtracking came with his announcement on the appointment of a new army chief.

Until now, furious at the manner in which the army, at the behest of Washington, engineered the fall of his government in April through a failed trust vote in Parliament, he has had no qualms over stoking the people’s anger; many say, to dangerous levels.

Convinced that he alone speaks for the people, he has repeatedly cited his success in polls, even when out of power, to drive home the point that it is he and he alone who should pick the next army chief, after fresh elections are held – which he believes he will win.

But in a surprising move late on Wednesday, he said he had no right to choose the next army chief, signalling a possible end of the year-long challenge to the army’s writ that began when he sought to anoint his own man as head of the ISI and promote his favoured incumbent Lt Gen Faiz Hameed to the post of army chief, when the current army chief Gen. Qamar Jawed Bajwa was all set to step down.

His relationship with Gen Bajwa – whose term was extended by a year – quickly unravelled. In part, it was due to unease in the establishment over the growing electoral writ of the cricketing icon-turned-politician.

Not only had he won his home state of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal areas, FATA, on his own terms, but he was eating into the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) constituency in the Punjab heartland, from where the army, too, has traditionally drawn its strength.

When Khan’s popularity began to transcend borders, as he overstepped unspoken boundaries, and he caught the imagination of the ordinary Pakistani with his verbal fusillade against the army, which turned public opinion against his mentors, the army knew that once again, they had backed the wrong horse.

The omnipresent army that has hitherto dominated the nation has never had its back to the wall. At least, not to this extent. Through its many military reverses at the hands of the Indian Army, the embarrassment of losing Kargil and Siachen, through the political challenge to its writ posed by the political tour de force Benazir Bhutto and the Punjab strongman Nawaz Sharif, the Pakistan Army has always managed to keep the upper hand as the chief arbiter of Pakistan’s polity and its domestic and foreign policy.

But with Imran Khan donning the role of not just political challenger to the army but re-inventing himself as the larger-than-life messiah who would deliver the Promised Land – Riyasat al Madina -- in his Naya Pakistan, he was going where no other politician had gone before. Playing the religious card with impunity, with visits to shrines and dargahs par for the course, his main advisers in this adventure have included not just the leading lights of his party, but his third wife Bushra Bibi.

Unlike his previous wives, she favours the veil, is said to exert enormous influence over him, and is alleged to be behind his illegal appropriation and sale of gifts from foreign governments, charges that could now make him ineligible to stand for office.

In an indication of how far he could go to whip up anti-army feelings, a video started doing the rounds on social media within hours of the gun attack on Khan atop the container in Wazirabad. Dozens of tanks can be seen rumbling through the darkened streets of Lahore, while a voice in the background rains invective against the Pakistan Army. “You couldn’t fight India in 1965, you couldn’t stop them in ’71, and you’re trying to stop us now… we’ll fight you…”. Media commentators say it’s the handiwork of Khan’s media groups.

A clip of the Lahore Corps Commander’s residence being stormed at around the same time that night also went viral. A day later came a clip of angry young men breaching the cordon around the Peshawar Corps Commander’s home in the capital of Khan’s home state of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, following Friday prayers. Army sources have quietly let it be known that both were authentic.

In nuclear-armed Pakistan, where the armed forces are in charge of the safety and security of nuclear weapons, the army cannot be seen as vulnerable, either to mob rule or to terrorists and their sympathisers who have radicalised millions of the poor and underprivileged in both Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as well as Punjab.

As reports circulated of a mob laying siege to the official residence of a serving officer from the ISI, Maj Gen Faisal Naseer -- whom Khan publicly named as being behind the Wazirabad attack which left three bullets in his shin -- and to the army chief Gen Bajwa’s official residence in Rawalpindi GHQ (neither report is authentic), the army quickly realised that while they had held back on taking action, unsure whether they could quell a “Pakistan spring”, Khan’s propensity to whip up the masses had to be nipped in the bud before it did any lasting damage.

Sources now reveal that Gen Bajwa quietly and without fanfare convened a late-night Corps Commanders meeting at General Headquarters in Rawalpindi on Tuesday. It went on for nine hours.

By the end of the marathon session, insiders close to the developments said, apart from the case of appropriating gifts from foreign leaders, a whole set of fresh charges were being readied to be filed in the next couple of days that will tie Khan and his cohorts down in one court case after another. The tactic is similar to those used on the Bhutto-Zardaris and the Sharifs when they ran afoul of the military establishment.

Khan, incidentally, has not spent a single day in jail. And although part of the elite, land-owning class that is educated abroad and lives the life luxurious, his appropriation of a more radical line, his populist anti-American, anti-establishment invective and support of the Taliban and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, was not just election sloganeering but part of his self-belief that he is the messiah Pakistan needs. The would-be assassin, incidentally, belongs to an Islamist group, the Tehreek-e-Labbayak, which shares the same ideological roots as the TTP.

The army chief, who has less than 20 days in office -- he retires on November 29 – has decided he has little choice but to find a way to blow a hole in Khan’s larger-than-life dominance of Pakistan, ensure political status quo, and retain the army’s grip over the State.

Bajwa had repeatedly advised Khan, when he was still PM, to focus on job-creation and education, to back trade ties with India to kickstart the flailing economy, and to tone down his support of seminaries and rhetoric on Kashmir even after India’s trifurcation of J&K. Khan, consumed by self-belief, refused to heed the army chief.

Bajwa’s dilemma wasn’t simple. Intent on stepping down from office and against taking an extension, his sole focus had been on finding a successor -- either Lt Gen Asim Munir, whom Khan had sacked for opening the lid on the foreign gifts scandal, or Lt Gen Sahir Shamshad Mirza, the frontrunner -- and ensuring that the military stayed in the right hands. Despite a running battle with the multi-party Pakistan Democratic Movement, he believed that they could be trusted to run the State. But Khan’s explosive street politics threw his plans off gear, forcing him to turn to former bete noire, Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), who had taken refuge in London in 2019 after the military threw him in jail, to take on Khan. Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif was sent to London on Tuesday, to ask his elder brother to return and lead the civilian charge.

Bajwa has taken some comfort in the first sign of cracks within the PTI, with the pro-army Punjab top guns, the Chaudhrys, baulking at issuing an FIR against the ISI’s Maj Gen Faisal Naseer.

What’s more, Pakistan’s top Generals, wary of the growing schism in their own ranks, especially in the lower rungs where Imran Khan is seen as the man who can steer Pakistan in a new direction, have concluded that the only way to stop the Khan juggernaut from rolling into Rawalpindi GHQ and weakening the army further, is for Gen Bajwa to keep his boots on -- at least for another year and through another election.

‘Pindi’, the garrison town where the Generals have sprawling homes, has been under siege before, with former army chief and president Gen Pervez Musharraf surviving two assassination attempts on the well-guarded road that connects the city to the army redoubt.

But even if Gen Bajwa decides to give himself another extension and signal the end of the Imran Khan experiment – and it suits the current crop of politicians, too, to play along -- the military-intelligence establishment will do well to realise that Pakistan’s toxic polity will continue to throw up one new challenger after another to the ‘deep state’.

(The writer is a senior journalist and former Foreign Editor of Gulf News who has reported from various hotspots in South Asia and the Middle East)