Imran Khan served as prime minister of Pakistan from 2018 until 2022. Removed in a controversial no confidence vote on April 10th of this year, Khan is now touring Pakistan trying to stir up support for his political career- but the all-powerful military might well have other ideas.
My guest for this conversation is Declan Walsh (@declanwalsh on Twitter), Chief Africa correspondent for the New York Times. Declan used to cover Pakistani politics for the Guardian, but was kicked out of Pakistan in 2013, which he has written about in his 2020 book The Nine Lives of Pakistan.
Imran Khan served as prime minister of Pakistan from 2018 until 2022. Removed in a controversial no confidence vote on April 10th of this year, Khan is now touring Pakistan trying to stir up support for his political career- but the all-powerful military might well have other ideas.
My guest for this conversation is Declan Walsh (@declanwalsh on Twitter), Chief Africa correspondent for the New York Times. Declan used to cover Pakistani politics for the Guardian, but was kicked out of Pakistan in 2013, which he has written about in his 2020 book The Nine Lives of Pakistan.
Hello and welcome back to the hated in the dead with Tom Leeman. This week I cover a politician from another South Asian country, Pakistan. Pakistan is one of my favourite countries to read about. So there were many potential candidates for the subject of this episode. However, given recent events in the country, I have settled on Imran Khan, who was until April the 10th of this year, Pakistan's Prime Minister when he was removed from office after a controversial no confidence vote. Khan's removal has unleashed a tidal wave of polarisation in the physical and virtual world with protests and pro con rallies erupting across Pakistan, and conspiracy theories and partisan reporting littering Twitter. Many around Khan, who had been Prime Minister since 2018, have blamed the Biden administration for instigating a coup against their leader after Khan visited Vladimir Putin only hours after the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. Whether or not this is true, can't short Premiership is a warning against angering the military. Pakistan is to a great extent an army with a country rather than a country with an army in the sense that the military has played a part in determining the government of the country since its founding, and has instigated coos against civilian governments on at least three occasions. Whilst it is often said that Pakistan is currently in a period of civilian rule, there is little doubt that the army played a role in both the rise and fall of Imran Khan. Therefore, direct military rule and indirect military rule might be a better dichotomy to use in the Pakistani case, than military rule and civilian rule. My guest for this conversation is Declan Walsh. Declan is currently the chief Africa correspondent for The New York Times. And he used to cover Pakistani politics for The Guardian. Before he was kicked out of Pakistan in 2013. Declan has documented his experiences in the country in his 2020 book, The Nine Lives of Pakistan, which I highly recommend reading. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to introduce Imran Khan. Good morning, Declan. How are you? Good morning, Tom I spiritual. We're talking about Imran Khan today. Declan man who was until very recently, the Prime Minister of Pakistan. He was removed from office on the 10th of April of this year. He was born in Lahore in 1952. And of course, he's a politician who is many, many ways better known for the career he had before politics. He's considered one of the greatest cricketers of all time. I don't know whether you're a fan of cricket yourself. But can you start by talking about the cultural importance of cricket in Pakistan, and how it helped Imran Khan as a public figure and as a politician? Well, Cricket is one of the few truly unifying forces in Pakistan. You know, it's this country that, in many ways has been characterised by divisions between regions between parties between religious beliefs since its foundation in 1947. And it said, you know, the sort of the hackneyed phrases, you know that the only things that unify Pakistan are supposed to be the army and Islam. It arguably, neither of those contentions are actually true. But the one thing that any all Pakistanis share in common is really this absolute passion for the game of cricket. And Imran Khan is, without a doubt, the most celebrated Pakistani cricketer of many, many decades, arguably of all time, you know, he led the national cricket team to win the World Cup in 1992. He was the captain of that team for about a decade. And, you know, he brought a you know, great skill to the game. He's us, if not the greatest and one of the greatest cricketers himself. But also, you know, he brought this great glamour to the game at a period in the 70s through the 80s and the 90s, when he was at the top of his career, and he sort of seemed to, at least in the public eye, divide his time between cricket for the Pakistani national side, but also spending a lot of time in the UK in particular, where he was part of this sort of, you know, airbrushed, 80s Glamour scene that you know, revolved around the locales of string fellows nightclub. He was in a string of relationships with glamorous society women that were were huge tabloid fodder and sort of crowd all of this by marrying Jemima Khan, who at the time was the daughter of I mean, a socialite and the daughter of one of the richest people in the world at that time, Jimmy, Jimmy Goldsmith, and, you know, brought Imran Khan brought Jemima back to Pakistan with him and they had two sons. So Ken is this absolutely combustible combination of a sports superstar, and a sex symbol. And someone who I think is one person as one guy once said, you know, women want to be with him and men want to be him. He was 40 when Pakistan won the World Cup in 1992. What was his first foray into politics? So he moved towards politics pretty early on, he won the World Cup in 92, founded his own political party called the Pakistan tehreek e Insaf. Or movement for justice in 1986, but it got off to a very slow start his political career. He spent a good 15 years really floundering about in the wilderness. He flirted politically with many different versions of politics. In the beginning, he avoided you know, a strong association with a slum. Later he allied with the military ruler of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf. In 2002, he threw himself behind this very contentious referendum that Musharraf held which was basically a sort of popularity contest that about himself that Musharraf organised it was heavily rigged, influenced by the spy service. And Imran Khan, threw his weight behind that now later, he publicly regretted it. But it was a sign of how, you know, as Imran Khan was trying to convert this huge public popularity he had, you know, by most measures, he was the most popular person in the country. But he really struggled to convert that kind of incandescent celebrity and popularity into votes. He only won his first his party won its first seat in Parliament, I think, in 2002. And that was just one single seat. And I remember I moved to Pakistan as a correspondent in 2004. And I went to see Emraan. In in the parliament lodges where the parliamentarians live are largely beside the parliament and in Islamabad in 2005. And at that time, he cut this kind of slightly lost figure, you know, he, he had a single seat in Parliament. He was at that point had turned his back on Musharraf. He was starting to vote with some of the more extreme fundamentalist parties in Pakistan, but religious parties. He was, you know, his ex wife. But but at this point, he had been divorced and Jemima Khan for a number of years. You know, she was making tabloid headlines at the time for being lost in the Caribbean on holidays with her then boyfriend, Hugh Grant. Imran was, you know, doing cricket commentary for Indian channels to make some extra money. He had a single seat in Parliament. And he was kind of struggling to find takers for his ideas very much this guy in the wilderness. Now, to be fair, he had also, you know, some years earlier, and he set up this hospital called a Chaka Khan on Monday Memorial Hospital in Lahore, which was Pakistan's first major cancer treatment facility. He'd set it up in the memory of his mother who had died from cancer. And, you know, this hospital by all accounts was very well run and was providing a fantastic public service and received through his celebrity a lot of donations and a lot of money. So he had Goodwill's through that, but politically was, as I said, was, was struggling. So it really took him until the elections in 2008, he started to make some progress, but really until the elections in 2013, and in the years preceding that, that he suddenly chanced upon this formula that really chimed with the Pakistani youth in particular, and sharpened from being this kind of No, Hooper, who was kind of, you know, prior to that really marked by a lot of people. I mean, I remember when I got to Pakistan, people would call him Taliban calm because he was seem to be making excuses for the rise of the Pakistani Taliban who of course, were, you know, carrying out a lot of violent attacks in the country at the time. And then he was sort of looked down upon by the elite in Lahore, which is the city that he's from, and indeed, in one of the big English language papers in Lahore, they had a satirical column About him every week, which was supposedly written in his voice. I mean, it was clearly a satire, but it was caught in the dim that you mentioned quite a lot of different strands of Pakistani politics there, Declan. And I want to just sort of go over a couple of things, just just to be clear, during the sort of 90s and 2000s. Pakistan obviously flitted between civilian rule and and rule by the military. First of all, can you explain a little bit about the influence of the army in Pakistani politics a bit more directly? Pakistan has obviously been a country since the late 1940s. But the army has been a sort of constant throughout that. What are the specifics of their influence? The Army has been really the controlling force in Pakistan's governments, both civilian and military, for most of the country's history. You know that the first coup took the first decade of pocket Pakistan's existence from 1947 on was very politically chaotic. There were a lot of governments and leaders that fell in went, the country was really struggling to establish itself as a stable as a stable place. After the bloodshed of partition. There had been disputes over the division of assets between India and Pakistan after the departure of the British. And the sort of at that point, the forces in the country that were seen as the only stabilising solid forces were the colonial the remnants of the colonial bureaucracy, and the and the military. So the first coup took place in 1958. And really, for most of the decades that followed, you had a succession of either have periods of either long, long periods of direct military rule, punctuated by conflicts with India. And then from the, you know, from the late 80s, early 90s, on you had a number of democratic governments, but those democratically elected governments were frequently destabilised by meddling from the military, which was absolutely determined to maintain its grip on really the key policy issues in Pakistan, which are the relationship of foreign policy issues, certainly, which are the relationship with India. Pakistan's dealings with Afghanistan, to some degree the relationship with the United States as well. So there were governments that fell and Rose led by these old dynastic families, the Bhutto family of led by Benazir Bhutto and later by the Sharif family of of Nawaz Sharif. So the military has always been the strongest force in politics, either, either when politicians are in charge, or not. And kind of the story of Pakistan over the last decade in particular, has been how the country has been trying to pull away from that domination by the military to establish, you know, a truly democratic system, where the institutions are able to stand on their own two feet, and, and behave impartially. And arguably, I think they've had very mixed success. But there have been, there certainly has been some success, particularly since the fall of Pervez Musharraf, who was the you know, who was the military leader who came to power in 1999 and ruled until 2008. And really, it's, you know, Musharraf was the last outright military ruler that Pakistan has had. But arguably, the military has still kept a strong hand on the way the country has run since then. You mentioned the Pakistan movement for justice, the party that Imran Khan set up in 1996. It doesn't sound as if, as if Ken has a particularly fixed ideological view of politics either in Pakistan or in the rest of the world. But if we look at the period post 2008, when, as you said, the military leader Musharraf resigned, you've gone from a situation where the Pakistan movement for justice has been a basically a sideshow in politics in 2008, to a situation in 2018, where it's now the largest party in Pakistan. What do you think has changed? Do you think that Khan has just essentially filled a vacuum, a vacuum created by fairly unimpressive corrupt political parties? Or has he actually offered a genuinely popular and different political programme? I think he is He tapped into some very powerful emotions inside the Pakistani electorate. You got to remember that at that period during the Musharraf years, the country had been rocked by, you know, endless explosions and was bomb bombings by the Pakistani Taliban and other extremist groups. There was a war going on across the border in Afghanistan, involving the United States, that was hugely unpopular in Pakistan. And the Americans were carrying out pretty regular drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal belt going after al Qaeda and other terrorist suspects. So Khan tapped into a couple of things at once he tapped into people's frustration with the United States. And he adopted a very strident anti American policy. At one point, I remember when his star was rising, he led this kind of caravan of supporters into the tribal belt. It was this very unusual coalition of Pakistani supporters, and also American pacifist activists, a group called Code Pink, and they led this little caravan into a corner of the tribal belt to protest against these drone strikes. And that was hugely popular. So he tapped into that he also tapped into frustration with the old dynastic politics, the fact that civilian politics, even when they had when it had been dominant, was dominated by these two or three large families, the Bhutto's and the Sharif's namely, and he tapped into frustration with this idea that politics was Riven with corruption. This is an idea, of course, that the military had been very strongly encouraging for years in order to justify their political actions. But nonetheless, corruption is is objectively a huge problem in Pakistan, and can promised through the hospice through his own example of the hospital that he led the cancer hospital, he sort of said, well, I ran this cancer hospital in a very reputable way, I'm going to serve, I'm going to shed the old dynastic politics, and I'm going to bring in a new kind of politics that is effectively corruption free, and I'm not going to be beholden to these Western institutions like the Western dominant institutions like the International Monetary Fund, and I'm going to lead a new type of economic reform in the country. And I would say, lastly, you know, Pakistan is a very young country, two thirds of the country is under the age of 30. And, as we discussed at the beginning, people are crazy about Pakistan, they adore Him, they, you know, they admire him, they fancy him fancied him. And so, you know, in this very stultified political scene can offer this dynamic, exciting, some even said sort of sexy alternative, that young Pakistanis, you know, came behind and there are backed under in their throngs. So all of these factors, you know, came together, really, from 2008, after the fall of Musharraf, but particularly, I would say, from the election and in 2013, where you could see I was in Pakistan at that time, and you could see over the preceding couple of years, year, two years, he just started attracting, he started attracting 10s, sometimes perhaps even over 100,000 people to these ginormous rallies, that were kind of crackling with, you know, excitement and they weren't glamorous he had, he had, you know, music and dancing and get a very, from an early point, he had a very strong social media presence. His supporters were absolutely avid and very kind of aggressive sometimes on social media. But, you know, this was he was he was tapping into something into something new, and that that excited people and I think that's what brought him into power in in the first place from the election in 2018, when he finally became prime minister. Yes, he became prime minister in August of 2018, following the election in July, I can't imagine that he is the first politician in Pakistan to kind of rail against corruption and try and claim for himself a type of economic reform in terms of the economic reform and anti corruption programmes that he was promising. What What were the specifics of those and how successful do you think he has actually been in that? What he promised really was to wash away the old order. So in Pakistani politics, they have a term called electricals, and electrical is a kind of synonym for a powerful person in a local constituency, who's probably the parliament or started the candidate for parliament, and who may have his influence and sway in the community or in that area. Maybe because his family has a lot of land. They're sort of sometimes called feudal landlords or semi quasi feudal landlords, or maybe they have some that come from a family that has a an heritage of being a being in Sufism, so they have a kind of religious authority. You know, the Pakistan is a huge and obviously very rural country. So across the country, you have these local power brokers who have traditionally been the key to these dynastic parties who's coming to power and holding on to power. And Khan came in, and he said, Well, I'm going to get rid of corruption because of course, these local power brokers give their support to political parties at a price. And that price is usually access to money or funds in some shape, or form. And he's like, I'm going to, I'm going to sweep away all of this, I'm going to bring in new dynamic leadership into the country. And that's how we're going to run things. And, and the problem for him really was that he very quickly ran into, you know, the reality that it's very hard to wash away the system in one fell swoop and Pakistan, it's so ingrained and embedded in the in the, in the fabric of society and of politics. And it was almost naive to promise that he would get rid of it so quickly. And indeed, once he got into power, he struggled, he, for one thing, he had to turn to some of these people, these electable of these power brokers to get elected. And once he was in power, he really struggled to implement an anti corruption agenda. He made it he had a couple of initiatives, where he tried to appeal, particularly people in the Pakistani diaspora for funds and so on to help to bolster the country's finances. And he claimed that he was not going to appoint people on you know, on the basis of nepotism and so on. But, you know, he, he, he struggled to implement these reforms. And at the same time, he arguably mismanaged the economy and inflation started to soar the into double digits, the economy was really suffering. And so he's caught in this bind, where he's promising to, you know, a keystone of his platform is that he's going to get rid of corruption. And at the same time, that's not happening. And people's living standards are starting to erode. So he immediately starts coming under, under under under pressure. And in many ways, I think that was the foundation or that was, you know, that was really the start of the problems, I think, among others that led to his being ousted from office last month on it on a no confidence vote. I certainly want to turn to the events of the last few weeks later on, I want to ask you first about the kind of foreign policy side of Con, Pakistan is obviously a very significant country in international affairs. It shares a long border in history with Afghanistan, and for many years, the Pakistani military and intelligence services backed the Taliban, much to the annoyance of the US. It has a long standing rivalry with India. It shares quite a long border with China, leaving Kahn to one side for a second. To what extent do you think can any Pakistani Prime Minister drastically altered the foreign policy of the country is always this in reality, the domain of the military. This is basically the domain of the military and civilian leaders who have tried to forcefully change those policies have often come a cropper and envy and indeed, in the 1990s, when, you know Benazir Bhutto, rose and fall and Nawaz Sharif, rose and fall, it often seemed to be that when they tried to take the initiative, for instance, particularly on the relationship with India, that they started running into real problems with the military that started, you know, manipulating things behind the scenes to ask them from power. And indeed, the government that preceded him run, sorry, the government that ruled until 2000, from 2008, led by Benazir Bhutto's husband as far as our dairy had also, you know, just before it fell, it had started to make, you know, reach out to India or make statements about India that the military didn't like, and I think that was probably a factor in some of the movement against against that government as well. So that, you know, India, Afghanistan, to some degree, the relationship with the United States and the money that the Pakistani military money and military systems the military has received from the US. These have been very difficult a very sensitive issues for civilian leaders because, you know, they they find themselves having to deal with public opinion on the one On side and manage that. On the other side, they have the military, particularly in the form of its intelligence service, the inter services intelligence ISI, which, you know, not only has been very active in promoting Pakistan schools in Indian occupied Kashmir or in Afghanistan for the supported proxy forces, but it's also a very, or has at least traditionally had a very strong role in meddling in the politics of the country. And to get back to our earlier point about electable as these, you know, local powerful figures who kind of hold the key to winning elections in Pakistan. You know, the ISI, has, in many elections, really tried to, you know, bribe course, pressure, influence collectables in various areas, you know, to stand for one party or the other in order to sway the overall result of the election. And bringing Khan into the fold, then, in light of those three countries, I mentioned the US, China and India. How much did Khan want to change foreign relations with them in a fundamental way? I know that, given what you've said, he probably was never in a position to actually do that. But what what do you think his view of foreign policy actually is? Well, you're right to mention China, because China is a huge entrant into Pakistan's Foreign Policy severe over the last decades, I mean, the Chinese and the Pakistanis have always had close relations, the Chinese and the, the, they've cooperated covertly on nuclear nuclear issues, and so on. But really, it's just in the last decade, decade and a half the Chinese have come into Pakistan with these huge packages of financial aid and development, building roads and ports and other things across the country. And so they've become a force. And it's important to mention that, I think, you know, Khan, you know, came to power at a time when, you know, Pakistan's relationship with the US, for one, through the kind of attrition of the War on Terror period, was really very poor. And China was rising, and can't certainly hitched himself to the China waggon, if you like, was a very, you know, strong proponent of good relations with China was notably very reluctant to voice any criticism over Chinese mistreatment of the Uighur minority, in in in Sinkiang in western China, which course is notable because the Uyghurs are a Muslim minority. And Pakistanis are generally, you know, very passionate about the rights of Palestinians, and Muslims in Kashmir who are being discriminated against. But there was a sort of huge blind spot when it came to the weekers. Because of the relationship with Beijing, Khan absolutely refused to criticise China over that. So he certainly allied himself with China. And as I said, you know, from a once his electoral stuff, as his electoral star was rising in the late 2000s, he had made popular he grew popular by engaging in vociferous criticism of the United States and that never really stopped. And then when it comes to India, well, you know, Imran Khan, the cricketer and the erstwhile tabloid celebrity had actually been someone who went to India a lot peep, you know, commentated on cricket for Indian channels, he was sort of seen hanging out with Bollywood, film stars, in his glamour days and so on. But once he came to power us came into politics only came to power, he became this very Hardline, many would say, critic of India, and of Indian nationalism, and in some ways, I think, arguably, particularly in recent years, his party has been more anti India than even parts of the military, which is an astonishing thing saying Pakistan put which has always defined the military has always defined itself against the Indian military. But Pakistan's Imran Khan's party has been absolutely almost rabidly anti Indian at some times. Now, of course, you have to look at that in the context of this is also the time of course when in India, Narendra Modi has come to power and is discriminating blatantly against his Muslim population. Nevermind what's going on in Kashmir. So, there was certainly you know, a fuel to that policy. But you see, in some respects, cans policy on India going even more to the right of the Pakistani military. I want to move to talk about the events of the last few months, Declan. As you've mentioned, Khan was removed from office about four weeks ago. What was the sort of trigger point for this? Can you explain a bit as to what's happened? I think there were two main factors. One is, as I said, the the economy had really suffered under his tenure, you know, Pakistanis had seen their purchasing power go down. The people, people, people's people were really suffering. So that's the most obvious thing. The second thing, I think, is that he lost the support of the military leadership. What I spoke a little a few moments ago about the influence of the ISI on elections. Now, I think, to be fair, it's important to note that the last number of elections, isI interference, or military, direct interference in elections has diminished. But nonetheless, when Khan came to power in 2018, there was a very strong sense that the military leadership supported him that they saw him as in Pakistan, they call it the blue eyed boy, as, as, as someone who was very close to the military, and indeed, you know, for the, for the first years of his tenure, I mean, Khan was absolutely in lockstep with the militaries position on on those major issues that we've just been talking about. And in some, in some respects, went further than the military. So there was absolutely no conflict there. And in fact, it was a notable government in the history in Pakistan's history, and that it was probably the first one where there was no major friction between the civilian and military parts of the state, largely because Khan's government had abdicated control over these major foreign policy issues already to the military. But that started to change. And there was a period about a year ago, where it became clear that the military leadership was actually kind of starting to get tired of Khan, and had sent signals that it was tacitly removing its unconditional support for him and his government. This emboldened the opposition to come forward, eventually leading to this vote of no confidence that they tabled against time. And, you know, led to some very strange contortions were suddenly in recent weeks, as this drama has played out, we've seen you know, Khan go from being the, as I said, what they call the blue eyed boy of the military, to being quite a vociferous critic, certainly, of the military leadership in Pakistan, as this political crisis has has unfolded. Arguably, well, self evident, he's only become a critic, because suddenly he's on the losing side of that equation, though, right. It certainly seems, if not inconceivable, then it is hard to believe that, you know, the opposition would have been able to bring this vote against Khan would have been able to peel away many people from his own party, to the you know, people from his own party, some of these collectibles we've been talking about they, they that, you know, they they dropped their support for con allowing this no confidence vote, to ultimately to go ahead and effectively ensuring that Khan's party would lose that vote in the parliament. And it's hard to imagine that that would have happened if the military had not, at the very least taken the time off the scales, which is what happened. And you know, as just to recap very briefly, when this vote of no confidence came to the Parliament, came before Parliament, Khan's party manoeuvred very aggressively to stop the parliament from holding this vote, the speaker of parliament, which is from his party refused to hold the vote. And it suddenly went from being this political standoff into a constitutional crisis, because the matter had to the opposition parties brought this manoeuvre before the Supreme Court, which, within about a week ruled that indeed, it was unconstitutional for Khan's party for the speaker to refuse to hold this vote. And then in this very dramatic, you know, classic Pakistan moment, Pakistani politics moment. There was a deadline where the court had said this vote has to take place before midnight, I think on a Saturday night I think was April 10. And the it went right up to the wire. You know, I think like two or three minutes before midnight, you know, you had a new speaker installed in Parliament. This vote took place, and Imran Khan was out there But then immediately, once he was out, he started saying that actually this vote had been, or the no confidence motion had been promoted by the United States. And he, he took a diplomatic cable that had been sent by his own ambassador by Pakistan, ambassador to the US recounting a meeting with a Biden administration official, where this, Biden officials said, informally, you know, in a private conversation that the US was not happy with a rapprochement between Khan and, and Russia, because Khan went to visit Vladimir Putin on the first day of the Ukraine war. And suddenly, Khan took this this report of this conversation, put it a version of it in public. And he said, Here's proof that the United States, you know, wanted to bring my government down. And so since, since that happened, he he's been holding these huge rallies across the country, tried to keep himself still, even though he's out of power very much front and centre, the focus of attention, he's trying to force it appears that he's trying to force an early election that he hopes will take place and, you know, on faith on terms that are favourable to him, and at the same time, has found himself in publicly at odds with the military leadership. Because, you know, a couple of weeks ago, we had the military spokesman who came out and said publicly that they had examined this conspiracy theory that Ken had been promoting about us meddling to oust him from power, and had decided that it had no basis so that if ever the, you know, if ever there was a sign that this, you know, close relationship between Imran Khan and the Pakistani military had effectively collapsed. This was it. In terms of him, going around the country and trying to stir up support for his career. What has the response been from the people? I mean, they elected this man, only four years ago. Do you get a sense of what the Pakistani people actually think of this problem, or this crisis that's unfolded? Well, one thing is clear, is that he retains huge popular support. He's held a number of rallies in the big cities with you know, if you just look at the images, you will see 10s of 1000s, maybe even more people who are coming out and are absolutely in passion. So we're seeing large crowds, we're seeing a very polarised atmosphere on social media in particular, really kind of, in some, in some respects, recalled the polarisation in the US that happened after after Donald Trump can't can became a force in politics. You know, Pakistani Politics, Politics everywhere has always had a degree of polarisation. But now it is very strong and very vituperative. And, you know, critics say that Khan is creating a kind of dangerous cult of politics. You know, in which, you know, the truth doesn't matter. He's propagating this, you know, certainly according to even as allies in the military, this discredited idea about, about the about the about the motion that took him from power. He's his supporters are repeatedly referring to the government that's in place. Now, a coalition that's led by the Shahbaz Sharif has as an imported government. So they're not just saying that they're really trying to discredit them, and portray them as foreign puppets, essentially. So he certainly does have popularity. But and it's very clear that his strategy is to keep himself in the spotlight and keep a sense of momentum going until he can have an elect to look can be an election and he can return to power by the ballot box. But Pakistani politics are a very, you know, very mercurial. It's a very mercurial scene, very unpredictable. And, you know, this factor of him being publicly at odds, to some degree with the military leadership is the X factor in all of this. It's not, you know, the military certainly doesn't like Khan going up against them. He's very powerful politician or popular politician, you know, publicly criticising the military. They certainly don't like that. It's unclear how they're going to how they're going to react to that. And then to add one further complicating layer. It has also become clear that even within the military, there are rifts over con, the military leadership certainly doesn't seem to appreciate them. But there are increasingly there's a good number of people in the military rank and file either retired military officers who can be quite influential in Pakistan, or even some serving military officers who've made it clear in their own way that they are But they're behind con that they see him as someone they want to stay in power. So that's another x factor in all of this, how it's going to resolve inside the military, between the between the corps commanders, the the military leadership, and the UN, certainly a proportion of the rank and file that seems to have thrown itself behind behind Khan. On that point, if you think about many, many leaders, Pakistan has had Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto, ziarul Hack, they all met fairly unpleasant ends. So for Carl was hanged by the army, Benazir was shot zero hat was blown up. In a way, if all that happens to Ken is that he's just ejected from office, he's arguably had a fairly lucky escape, really, by the standards of his country. Do you think it could be dangerous for him to come back? Do you think this is a serious personal threat to him in what he's doing now? Personally, politics is a dangerous game for anyone who plays it, the the examples you've given, bear that out. And you've got to remember that in the background of all this politicking, you've got, and this is, I think, from my perspective, certainly one of you one of the more substantial criticisms you could make of Imran Khan's period is that, you know, it's a country that has all these unresolved issues, its relationship with India, but also, it's got a large fraternity, it's got a large number of militant groups that are still at large in the country. You know, it has a tribal area, the tribal belt along the border with Afghanistan that is still largely lawless. It has a huge problem with extremism, with instrumentalisation of the law against blasphemy to buy religious, extremist equip of public public sentiment. And so whatever the sort of, you know, specific threat, there might be against calm, it is a country where, you know, there's a lot of weapons, and there's certainly a lot of unresolved issues, some of them to do with extremism. And that does make it a dangerous place to be a politician. It also means that there's a lot of if you are a force that wants to do harm to your opponent, there's a lot of these groups that can be instrumentalized, sometimes to carry out violent attacks. I mean, you know, even though Benazir Bhutto was killed by the pack by a Pakistani Taliban suicide bomber, there's still a lot of unresolved questions and speculation about in the country about whether elements of the military were behind these Taliban, this Taliban group that carried out the attack that killed her. So I think it is, it certainly is a dangerous game for for Imran Khan. But it's a dangerous, frankly, it's a dangerous, dangerous arena for anyone who plays in it. Just as a final question, I was reading Anatole levens book about on Pakistan recently, I think it's just called Pakistan. And he made a very interesting remark which you've sort of hinted at as well about the army. He said that the reason the army plays such a large role is that it's the only institution in the country that's founded on any sort of meritocracy. Every other state institution is basically just a reflection of tribal interests of kinship interests. It's a state that's based on negotiation rather than rules. If that's true, does it ever make you wonder whether the army whether army rule might actually be a better course for Pakistan than civilian? Well, when you look at the history of the country, the last number of decades, you see that there has effectively been army rule, I mean, directly or indirectly. And it's had some pretty disastrous results. You know, you mentioned zeal hack. During the 80s. Zia empowered the ISI intelligence service, and he also empowered Islamist extremists in order to prosecute a guerrilla war in Afghanistan and to bolster up his own popularity. And in many respects, we're still seeing the blowback from that period. Now, we saw in the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the 2000s. And we're seeing in recent years with this just dreadful instrumentalisation of blasphemy, as something that is used to as a law, that zeal hack introduced, he introduced capital punishment for blasphemy, which has turned it into this very powerful tool for bigots and extremists to discriminate against minorities in the country, and also to sometimes, you know, engage in mainstream politics and hold giant rallies and some in recent years, they have forced government ministers to resign. So I think that, you know, the military certainly is probably the best organised institution in the country, and has benefited from a lot of resources of the state to do it. But at the same time, I think it's arguably, you know, when you look at its record, it's taken some pretty terrible decisions that have created the problems for the country is now I think the bigger question is how do you transition from a state where the military plays such a huge role into one where, you know, democracy can a democratic system can exist, you know, that has the checks and balances and the institutional strength if you like to continue. And that's the that's, that's the experiment we see going on. For the last 1010 or 15 years since the end of Musharraf. And it's been with mixed results, we still see the military playing a strong role. But you know, when we saw this court ruling just a couple of weeks ago, where the Supreme Court stepped in to say that Imran Khan's party's efforts to stop this no confidence vote going through where it was unconstitutional. I mean, that at least was a heartening sign. You know, that here is the Supreme Court that in the past has often basically rubber stamped unconstitutional manoeuvres has rubber stamped military coups, was stepping into establishes its, its independence. So I think that's the, you know, in all of this, in all of this politicking and mess, I feel that that something like that is at least a positive sign. Declan, thank you very much. That was great. If people I Pakistani politics to me is one of the most interesting political systems in the world, I think it's a fascinating country to look at and where can people find your work? If they want to read read up more on Pakistan or anything else that you're doing? Where can they go? But well, you know, that I've written a book, The Nine Lives of Pakistan. So there's, there's quite a bit in that. And, I mean, I wrote I covered Pakistan for 10 years for The Guardian, and then for the New York Times. So most of what I've written is during that period, and I continued to cover the country actually from London as well, when I was after I was kicked out in 2013. So yeah, I have a body of work there. And I'd love to go back if I could ever get a ticket ever get a visa. Thank you, Declan. Okay, great. Great to talk to you. Thanks, Tom. Thank you for listening to the hated in the dead. If you've enjoyed this podcast, follow it on Spotify and Apple podcasts. And for good measure. Leave us a review. You can also follow the hated in the dead on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, so you never miss new content.