Pakistan: The forever mil-establishment in a country forever at war with itself

Normally, what the Pakistani military wants, it gets. (Source: AP Photo/PTI)

History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

Imran Khan was once the blue-eyed boy for the men in brown khaki uniforms; but today, he finds himself behind bars, out of office, and out of favour.

Pakistan is a land of contradictions for many a reason. Not least, for too long, in Pakistan, even when the Islamic nation has held elections, it was always the army generals who were victorious even when they weren’t on the ballot.  Albeit an election, it often got nomenclatures as the “general selection”. The Prime Minister in a parliamentary form of democracy is said to wield the power, and yet as history has evinced, the Prime Minister of Pakistan at times is as good as the Mayor of Islamabad in the aura of political clout. Imran Khan, in 2018, was the military’s man, today, the praetorian guards of the Pakistani state are no longer his fans.

A History Of Continuous Contradictions

It’s not the first time that some have said that political life for former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has come full circle. During the late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s reign, more than three decades ago, Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) or PML-N in its erstwhile avatars was propped up by the military in its stronghold of Punjab to counter the Bhuttos’ Pakistan’s People Party (PPP). The PPP was then the bete-noire of the military, given the fallout with Pakistan’s military dictator Zia-Ul-Haq who ousted Benazir’s father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in a military coup, followed by a controversial kangaroo court that saw him sent to the gallows.

As I said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but often rhymes, as Nawaz Sharif, now Prime Minister in 1999, faced his own Zia-ul-Haq when the now late General Pervez Musharraf ousted him in a bloodless coup. Sharif returned to Pakistan over a decade later, history repeated itself when he became Prime Minister again in 2013, and it rhymed once again when he was ousted from office, this time on corruption charges, in 2017. A year later, the military backed his long-term rival, Imran Khan.

Come 2024, history repeats and rhymes, as Imran Khan finds himself doing time. Irony again, as Khan whose movement is impaired, isn’t silenced, and while captive, also claims victory as he “declared from behind bars”, that the Pakistani public had voted his PTI party back into power.

As I previously wrote for Moneycontrol, back in the 1990s, Imran Khan who once lamented the lack of democracy in Pakistan, touched on his disdain for military rulers like Pervez Musharraf and didn’t shy away from praising India’s vibrant democratic institutions as a yardstick for democracy in his home country. Imran Khan’s credo, then, was that real power must lie in the masses and not the military, but that went a cinder when the mill-establishment gave their blessings in 2018, propped him into the highest echelons of Pakistan’s political summit.

Contradiction is a continuous chapter in the subcontinent, as cricket aficionados, who adored the charismatic heartthrob in Imran Khan couldn’t fathom how an Oxford-educated, anglophone western Dapper Dan, who branded himself as the charming crusader of the people and said he won hearts and minds playing cricket suddenly morphed into a pious born-again conservative Muslim.

The unrecognisable political avatar of Imran Khan on many an occasion displayed apoplectic rage with harangues directed either at India after Kashmir and Article 370, the United States, as he alleged the State Department of orchestrating a CIA-like conspiracy, or his political rivals at home and showed a fondness for the Taliban.

Elections in Pakistan have an eerie theme. Be it 1977, 1985,1988, 1990, 1993, 2007, 2013, 2018, or 2024, no Prime Minister has finished a full five-year term. Insidiously ironic, it’s only in Pakistan, do Prime Ministers struggle to finish a single term while army chiefs get multiple – three men in uniform have each ruled for more than 8 years. Prime Ministers fall like pawns – usual suspects included - exiled, arrested, or assassinated.

History repeated itself once again in this election, as the mil-establishment’s adversary, Imran Khan, was behind bars before polling, and their preferred candidate – Nawaz Sharif, was back on Pakistani soil. In the pious land, the Fauji plays the praetorian guard. Normally, what the military wants, it gets. Ironically, while Imran may have lost in some ways, the polls indicate he is in the lead. In this rare case, it seems the mil-establishment isn’t the victor, while Imran isn’t as vanquished.

The Mil-Establishment’s Follies

This election reads like an old western, rewritten with poor renditions, the script is stale and predictable. There is the caricature of good guys and bad guys. For most in Pakistan, at least the PTI aficionados, it’s the beloved protagonist, their Citizen Khan, against the corrupt Sheriff, Asim Munir, backing kleptocratic dynasts in the Sharifs.

Democracies, even if they’re faux democracies like Pakistan, are about a collective sense of “We” for the people. In Pakistan, these elections bring a series of “I”s – Imran, inconclusive, internet blackouts, independents, intimidation, inflation, and ignominy – all around.

While PTI supporters sing paeans for Imran Khan, as a Prime Minister he was capricious, volatile, and vindictive. But in the Pakistani imagination, it’s a political quagmire, where a candidate, who is neither military nor a dynast, who has achieved the highest echelons of international sporting pedigree winning Pakistan’s grandest award on the world stage –  the 1992 cricket world cup, a candidate who raised the political bar now fights an election behind bars.

When he won the 2018 elections, he likened it to winning the “World Cup”. He claims to have won the 2024 elections, but I doubt he’d use this analogy, as the “selectors” here accuse him of match-fixing, while having their own rigged series. Imran Khan lauded the idea of neutral umpires in cricket. He’d give a lot right now for an independent judiciary.

Much like its moribund economy, the political maelstrom casts doubt of uncertainty. Grubby coalitions are the norm in parliamentary systems. Which way will the independents go? Will the mil-establishments force them to coalesce with Nawaz Sharif? Will the Bhuttos rise again or will Imran and Munir suddenly have a détente?

In the post-Partition era, throughout the 20th century, India and Pakistan were often compared as children of the Raj with a colonial past who suffered from a Radcliffe-Mountbatten-induced violent partition. Their economies ran parallel for a few years, at times, Pakistan was even ahead in the 1960s and then they fought three wars and became nuclear adversaries.

However, one key difference remained – the civil-military leadership. The legendary Field Marshal, Sam Manekshaw didn’t always see eye to eye with then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Both titans were heralded as heroes for their roles, as head of the military and head of the government when India and Pakistan went to battle in the liberation war of East Pakistan in 1971. Field Marshal Manekshaw said the Indian army is “deeply politically conscious, but consciously not politically committed”.

In Pakistan, the civil-military leadership is a case study in itself. Nawaz Sharif, like Imran Khan, knows the ephemeral transactional nature of this relationship – Fauji friend and Fauji foe.

The mil-establishment lauds its success over battles and wars, at times claiming it has won wars that it never did but forgetting one cruel irony – that their election interference through the years has left Pakistan a state constantly at war with itself.

Akshobh Giridharadas is a Washington DC-based former journalist. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.