[PTI Attack on Lahore Corps Commander’s residence]
The televised attacks by a mob loyal to Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreeq-e-Insaaf (PTI) party, by Imran’s followers who set fire to the residence of Lt. Gen. Salman Fayyaz Ghani, commander of IV Corps (Lahore ), are simply amazing. The General Headquarters (GHQ) Rawalpindi was also attacked, as was the compound of the Peshawar Corps Commander. What is unfolding across the border feels like a popular uprising, even a revolution. Pakistan seems to be in the middle of what Imran wanted: a “jihad for freedom”.
It is the first time in the seven decades of its existence that Pakistan is witnessing the army, the self-proclaimed guardian of Pakistani ideology and the Pakistani state, which has grown fat by feasting on the country’s meager resources, under the direct and immense pressure of the masses, who until yesterday thought that the army could do no harm. The World Bank imposed an austerity regime on an import-dependent Pakistani economy, which has squeezed the common man with an inflation rate of 30% plus and a depleted Pakistani rupee (P300 today buys a dollar from USA). However, the Pakistani military still lives very much on the hog. Fed up with the army’s puppet role in the country’s politics, the Pakistani people have turned to it.
The immediate provocation was the arrest of Imran Khan by paramilitary Rangers operating under the direction of the army’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). They took him out of the premises of the High Court of Justice, threw him into an armored police vehicle and simply made him disappear. Nobody knows where it is. The ex-prime minister is accused of corruption, mainly over double-triple money worth 50 billion rupees (£190 million) diverted from the Treasury through UK banks and returned to Pakistan, a transaction facilitated by the disreputable real estate tycoon, Malik Riaz. Riaz is known to have army generals in his ample pocket, courtesy gifts of houses and plots in colonies he has developed on land that his friends in uniform have helped him secure through fair means, but mostly isolated.
In any case, the 140 official charges against Imran announced by Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah are not important.
What is significant is that the Daring Game in which the Pakistan Army and Imran have been engaged in the last 4-5 months has finally reached its climax. Ironically, it is the army’s pet and political establishment that has turned against the army, confident that now that it has successfully mobilized large sections of the population, especially in Punjab, and freed itself and PTI from control of the army, can ride. people’s support to power and owe nothing to GHQ, Rawalpindi. For this goal to be fulfilled, however, it is necessary for the current government of Shabaz Sharif to announce an election which it will not hold because it will surely lose. The army, of course, can force Shabaz’s hand, which it does not because it shares Shabaz’s ill feelings for Imran and PTI.
After retirement, former army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa was repeatedly egged on by Imran Khan, who publicly blamed him for removing him as prime minister and installing Shabaz Sharif’s regime led from a distance by Mian Nawaz, the elder brother of the current prime minister, based in London. and founder of the ruling party. He highlighted a fact of political life in Pakistan that no one rises to power in Islamabad without the Pakistan Army helping his elevation. So it was mortifying for GHQ, Rawalpindi, to find Imran biting the hand that had fed him.
It didn’t take long for the army to retaliate. ISI leaked personal phone conversations involving Imran’s third wife, Bushra Bibi. One of them had the Bibi loudly scold a servant for his handling of the objects taken from the toshakhana! Upping the ante, Imran responded by orchestrating leaks of Bajwa’s income tax returns that showed a phenomenal rise in the general’s wealth during his six-year tenure, apart from numerous prized plots across the country, their property titles magically materialized in the family names. members, including a suddenly wealthy daughter-in-law. Oh! This hurt because Bajwa was considered a relatively straight arrow, among the cleanup corps commanders, when Nawaz picked him to be COAS! Unrelenting, Imran pushed the army into a corner with friendly journalists encouraged to share confidential conversations Bajwa had with them in early 2022 in which he speaks candidly about the army being in dire straits and, for lack of spare parts and POL (oil, petroleum, lubricants). ) unable to fight a war: the implicit reason for its agreement with New Delhi in 2019 a ceasefire on the Line of Control in J&K.
What the Pakistan Army is not used to is a political leader who supported and then deepened his struggle by getting the people on his side. This is what Imran has done. In fact, the army brass were given fair warning about the violent mass response should the army try to remove him. The Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations, two days ago, reacted by threatening Imran with consequences if he crossed the red line of continuing his public campaign against Bajwa and the army.
This has always been the pattern: the Pakistani military chooses the man/party to be the mukhota for their government and holds elections to give legitimacy to their chosen regime. Invariably, that person/party fails to deliver on promises, or becomes a nuisance or so unpopular due to corruption or unpopular policies that it becomes a political liability. The army then abandoned it so that the sparks of the people’s discontent could be ignited into a wild fire that engulfs them. Then GHQ, Rawalpindi, acts—orchestrating street protests, making life uncomfortable, giving him the excuse to replace the incumbent with someone new or, as in Shabaz’s case, someone familiar and old, using the election to this facility.
With people angry and roused by Imran’s fiery rhetoric, it is a complicated situation for the Pakistan Army. He cannot hold a show trial and throw Imran in jail, much less hang him on false charges like General Zia ul-Haq did to Zulfiqar. Ali Bhutto, or force him into comfortable exile in Britain, ostensibly for health reasons, as Bajwa managed with Nawaz Sharif, but a similar effort was not heeded by Pakistan Peoples Party chief Asif Ali Zardari .
If nothing drastic is possible regarding Imran Niazi and the Pakistan Muslim League-led coalition led by the Nawaz-Shabaz duo cannot be trusted to win the next general election, then what does the army have to do without of General Asim Muneer and his cohort? lose for him the privileged position he has enjoyed since 1958? It was that year when, tired of a new prime minister every two months, Ayub Khan simply kicked out all the politicians and presented the people of Pakistan with the downside of martial law rule.
In much more difficult social, economic and political circumstances, caused by the terrorist actions of Tehreeq-e-Taliban Pakistan, the intention to establish sharia in the province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the Baloch liberation groups, has become practically in governing the country, when talking about governing it. impossible GHQ Rawalpindi may decide to cut their losses, retreat to the cantonments and let the politicians fight in the streets, which will unleash anarchy and who knows what the outcome could be for the army. Alternatively, it can exercise its tried and tested option: impose martial law. Such a move will have the sure support of Shabaz’s government. who viscerally hates Imran and his PTI and most importantly the upper bureaucracy, who have always preferred military rule to the uncertainties of electoral politics and the civilian Raj.
