Imran’s toughest innings yet
Pakistan, like Frederick the Great’s Prussia, is an army with a state attached. Not just because of its large professional soldiery, the military sway over the political process, their grand segregated compounds, but also because the army comports itself as if it were the better version of the country.
Generals behave as if they are the nation’s schoolmasters trying to bring to order an unruly classroom. This is a country of coups; the army has ruled directly for half of Pakistan’s 71-year existence and pulled strings for much of the rest of the time. It’s a habit that the army cannot break.
For yesterday election, the generals chose a different strategy: making clear their favourite for prime minister – the Oxford-educated cricket star Imran Khan – by making trouble for his rivals, the established ruling dynasties of the Sharifs and the Bhuttos.
The army put 370,000 soldiers on the ground (more than the British and German armed forces put together) to monitor polling. That might have been, as the generals claim, to prevent terror attacks. Or it could have been to remind voters that the army has got Khan’s back.
Either way, it’s a dirty game that involves the muzzling and intimidation of Khan’s critics. When the television commentator Gul Bukhari, a critic of the army’s political clout, was briefly abducted on a Lahore street dotted with military checkpoints, the message was clear: we don’t like criticism.
And when courts suddenly sentenced Khan’s rivals to jail before the election, blame was pinned on the unhealthy relationship between military intelligence and a politicised judiciary.
Anonymous threatening calls, raids on offices and warehouses – all the stops have been pulled out to make the opposition to Khan look corrupt.
He should have had no truck with it. Of course a leader of Pakistan has to rule with the army and not against it. But he should listen more carefully to those who called the Khan campaign ‘‘boot polishia’’, boot-lickers of the army.
The army is hedging: it is counting on Khan emerging as a prime minister supported by an inherently unstable coalition. A fragmented government will ensure that the army’s interest in setting the terms of foreign policy and internal security is not challenged by Khan, who has little experience as a statesman.
If there is to be peace with the Taliban, the army wants it to be on the terms set by the spooks of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). It doesn’t want any talk of peace with India, it wants a good relationship with China, and Khan’s value will be to charm and straight-talk the Trump administration into lifting the suspension of US military aid.
It wants to recover the respect of America as an ally, without changing its spots. That’s an impossible task for Khan.
This is the age of the political soldier. Generals call the shots in Thailand, where a military oligarchy rules on behalf of the monarchy, and in Burma where a timid civilian government struggles to justify or conceal the army’s ethnic cleansing.
In the Middle East, Egypt is led by a former army chief who makes sure his fellow officers cling to their charmed world of subsidised cars and apartments, hotels and clubs.
Pakistan, then, is by no means an exception in its dealing with its army; the officers are treated as a khakistocracy, a uniformed nobility. For ordinary fit and bright Pakistanis it remains one of the surest paths to social mobility and a decent pension.
They are well trained, highly motivated, and more battlehardened than other armies in the region, having fought four wars and three counter-insurgency campaigns since independence.
It invests in its military nuclear programmes, tests submarinelaunched cruise missiles, and it occupies one of the most strategically volatile corners of the world, neighbouring not only its arch-enemy India but also Iran and Afghanistan.
That’s why the army’s steering of Pakistan is so sensitive. And why it is in the long-term interest of the region for a confident democratic leader to set out the limits of the army’s political role.
Khan entered Pakistani politics as a man eager to rejuvenate society, to engage and enthuse. Leadership means recasting the relationship with India, even if that is seen as a betrayal by the Pakistani officer corps.
For too long, the ISI has played the Taliban as a bargaining chip, a way of sapping the Afghan central government so it could not reach out to India. They call this strategic depth, but it is nothing more than toxic, ultimately selfdefeating politics. If Khan is to leave a mark, he will have to take on the ISI and not surrender foreign policy to the army.
The ISI is the biggest reason why the Trump administration considers Pakistan an unreliable ally. When US aid was suspended, Trump was in effect saying: prove your loyalty or we will start leaning more towards India.
The Pakistani response was: who needs the US? We can buy from France and in particular from China, our new big friend.
Khan is shrewd enough to realise he can’t play China off against the US. But, if elected, he needs to start setting a course which frees Pakistan from the fears that are kept alive by an army which, while kitted out for nuclear war, is stuck in an antiquated power-play with its neighbours.
It is time for Imran Khan to act as a captain again. – The Times