By Luke Peterson

Nov/Dec 2023

On August 5, 2023, former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan was sentenced to three years in prison on the back of corruption charges that have hovered over him ever since he was ousted in April 2021. His removal came after a hastily organized vote of no-confidence — many of which were openly bought by the propped up opposition alliance — in the National Assembly, ensuring that Khan, the popular figure who still garners broad nationwide support, will be unable to participate in elections intended to be held before the end of 2023 (now set for 2024; Khan would likely win if he was allowed to run). 

Khan’s ouster has substantially altered nuclear-armed Pakistan’s political landscape for the foreseeable future. But a recent disclosure of diplomatic cables between the U.S. and internal anti-Khan factions reveal that the problems facing him may not have been exclusively homegrown. 

Recently published documents — ironically provided by an unnamed military officer — received by independent journalists at “The Intercept,” an online American nonprofit news organization, indicate that the plan to marginalize and discredit Khan originated in Washington. One particular diplomatic cable known as a “cypher” point to a March 2022 meeting between U.S. State Department officials and Asad Majeed Khan, the then Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., as the moment when Khan’s fate was sealed. In plain view, the ambassador’s secretary was writing all what was being said.

At that meeting, the ambassador was allegedly informed that the prime minister’s position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which started as Khan was about to land in Moscow, was in error. Instead of the balanced approach Khan had been pursuing, U.S. officials warned that Khan needed to be much more aggressive toward Putin’s Russia to remain in the Biden administration’s good graces. The penalty for stepping out of line, Khan’s opponents were told, would be Pakistan’s international isolation and demonization. 

Undeterred by American and international pressure, as well as those U.S. officials who were also threatening a reduced status for Pakistan in European eyes, Khan continued to chart an independent path. He appeared at a rally shortly after the beginning of this latest European conflict in 2022 assuring the crowd that, “We are friends of Russia, and we are also friends of the United States. We are friends of China and Europe. We are not part of any alliance.” 

He loudly championed Pakistani sovereignty and independence to thousands of his enthusiastic supporters by rhetorically asking the international community, “What do you think of us? (March 1, 2021). Pakistan will “absolutely not” allow the CIA to use bases on its soil for cross-border counterterrorism missions after American forces withdraw from Afghanistan, Imran Khan told Axios on HBO” in a wide-ranging interview which aired on June 21, 2021.

Predictably, this bold opposition didn’t sit well in Washington, and U.S. officials were quickly dispatched to Islamabad to explore alternative leadership options that would shift its foreign policy priorities toward a more Amero-centric position. Calling Khan’s policy “aggressively neutral,” Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu assured his Pakistani colleagues (and enemies of their sitting prime minister) that Khan’s middle-of-the-road policy would not be allowed to continue. In the leaked cable in question, Lu even floats the idea of a no-confidence vote in Khan’s administration; Khan’s opponents moved it forward a mere day after the U.S. State Department meeting. 

Officials in the Biden administration from the State Department and elsewhere have continued to deny direct interference in Pakistan’s electoral processes. And yet the close timing and coincidental occasion of a change in Pakistan’s leadership, and the subsequent realignment of its foreign policy to align precisely with U.S. policy preferences, have continued to provoke troubling questions for Biden’s diplomatic team. 

For Khan and his supporters, the diplomatic cypher amounted to what his National Security Council called “blatant interference into the internal affairs of Pakistan … which was unacceptable under any circumstances.” Nor are the consequences of this meddling restricted to the foreign policy outcomes emanating from Islamabad. 

Khan’s ouster and the tarnishing of his personal and political reputation have dramatically emboldened the military who are in league with his political opponents and arguably stand to benefit most from this sudden foreign policy sea change. In the months since the change in government, the military leadership has assumed an unprecedented role in the country’s legislative processes, spearheading the passage of laws that authorize warrantless search and seizure and arbitrarily imprisoning Khan supporters on baseless charges. Worse still, some unknown number of those arrested have been tortured and killed while in military custody. 

Further, new laws implemented this year have criminalized criticism of the military and provided unique veto powers to its leadership. Riots, beatings and mass arrests have ensued, all symptomatic of a chaos fomented by coordinated efforts between Khan’s internal political enemies and U.S. officials insisting upon their own policy priorities in Washington’s continuous drive for global, imperial oversight. Widespread outrage spread in late August over highly inflated electricity bills — a move demanded by the IMF. Ironically, assembly members, senior government military officials and judges are given deep concessionary rates.

Indeed, the insinuation of the military into Pakistan’s civil affairs since Khan’s dismissal and subsequent imprisonment has led to an authoritarian creep within the South Asian nation. However, the Biden administration, which claims to champion global human rights, seems content to ignore this reality. 

On Nov. 3, 2022, Imran Khan survived a shooting at a political rally — the deflected bullets pierced and fractured his leg. To date, and ostensibly under military pressure, no report of the attempted murder has been filed; nor has any investigation been carried out.

Arshad Sharif, a well-known Pakistani journalist who had been close to the Khan administration, was assassinated in Nairobi during October 2022. Sharif had knowledge of the diplomatic cypher and the allegations of American interference, having been briefed on them before Khan’s ouster. To this day, the circumstances surrounding this event remain unclear. In May 2023 the military detained Imran Riaz Khan, another nationally known reporter; he has not been heard from since. Major news outlets within the U.S. like The Washington Post and The New York Times gladly report on the political chaos that has taken hold since Khan’s removal while habitually neglecting to mention the overwhelming evidence of American interference in that country’s internal politics that has catalyzed these conditions.  

On Tuesday, August 29, 2023, a Pakistani appeals court suspended Khan’s three-year prison sentence stemming from alleged corruption charges after his forcible removal from office. But he’s hardly out of the woods — he remains in a state prison awaiting his next trial for divulging state secrets (a law the president has yet to sign), the penalty for which, if he is found guilty, may lead to even more severe punishments in keeping with the military’s expansive new powers justified in the name of that infamous euphemism of “national security.” 

In the meantime, newly installed — and now former — prime minister Shehbaz Sharif claims to have righted the political ship and has assured interested parties that there will be “free and fair” elections to decide Islamabad’s new direction in early 2024. The National Assembly, having completed its five-year term in August, installed an interim prime minister who is basically an army plant and extension of the regime. Sharif has remained conspicuously quiet, though, about the role that the military will have to play in those elections, or indeed, in the coming, turbulent years of Pakistan’s sociopolitical history.

In Washington, business as usual is the order of the day as Biden officials continue to seek the expansion of the war in Ukraine via direct weapons supply and proxy designations. As coincidence would have it, in the absence of the restrictions placed upon it by Imran Khan’s government, the military has proven more than willing to serve as a proxy by sending its own weapons to Ukraine like 10,000 MLRS “Grad” missiles and 122 mm high explosive Yarmuk rockets (images of Pakistani-made ammunition on Russian-Ukrainian battlefields have begun to circulate on social media sites). 

And undoubtedly as a reward for a job well done, in August 2023 the Pakistani military received a massive extension of its contractual cooperation with the U.S. military in a deal promising “joint exercises, operations, training, basing and equipment” sharing until at least the year 2035. The deal, worth untold billions, goes a long way toward demonstrating what a military dictatorship might gain from the U.S. in exchange for a minor coup and just a little bit of authoritarian creep.  

Luke Peterson, Ph.D., Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Cambridge — King’s College, investigates language, media and knowledge surrounding political conflict in the Middle East. He lives in Pittsburgh, where he regularly contributes to local, national and international media outlets.

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