Pakistan: Yes we Khan!
Ex-playboy set to become PM
Cricket star-turned-politician Imran Khan, the former playboy who counted Princess Diana as a close friend, is poised to become Pakistan’s next prime minister.
“We’re going to run the country like it’s never been run before,” he declared before Saturday’s early election results.
Khan, 65, played off his status as a legend of Pakistan’s favorite sport: he was the captain of the national cricket team that defeated England in the World Cup final in 1992.
Back then, he was known as a playboy who chased supermodels around London nightclubs. He palled around with Sting, Mick Jagger and Goldie Hawn.
Princess Di paid Khan a visit in Pakistan in 1997 and, before her death in a Paris car crash, even enlisted him in an effort to try to talk on-again, offagain boyfriend Hasnat Ahmad KKhan (no relation to Imran) into marrying her.
By then, Imran Khan was married to British heiress Jemima Goldsmith, a London gossip-column regular. They had two children together before divorcing in 2004.
After a monthslong marriage to glamorous British-Pakistani journalist Reham Nayyar in 2015, he made headlines earlier this year when he wedded his sspiritual adviser, Bushra Wattoo, in a traditional Islamic cceremony.
Khan’s political views mirrored changes in his romantic life over the past two decades.
After 9/11, he seized on Pakistani opposition to the US war on terrorism. Khan defended the Taliban’s justice system and increasingly portrayed himself as a pious Muslim.
Khan’s vision of a “new Pakistan” struck a chord among middle-class voters sick of high inflation and constant threats of violence. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has cut hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid.
Khan’s upstart Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party won 115 of 270 seats in the National Assembly in an election marred by a deadly suicide bombing and accusations of vote-tampering.
The party’s total is 21 short of a majority, but Khan declared victory nonetheless, vowing to team up with regional party representatives to form a governing coalition.
He has pledged to end decades of misrule in Pakistan, where, he said, corrupt politics is “eating away this country like a cancer.”
Opponents claim Khan’s newfound piety is a hypocritical attempt to gain power. His second wife, in a recent memoir, contended that his religiosity is merely “a front.”
Observers suspect his election victory was a soft coup engineered by Pakistan’s powerful military. With Khan as the popular face of the regime, they say, the generals will be able to quietly pull the strings — without taking any responsibility if things go wrong.