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A police officer stands inside a cordoned-off area after a suicide car bombing in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Pakistan vs. (Pakistani) Taliban
Pakistan’s “second war against terror” has effectively begun.
On Friday, a suicide bomber killed himself and killed three other people in Islamabad, the first such attack in Pakistan’s capital in eight years. This is just the latest in a series of offensives launched by the Pakistani Taliban, who unilaterally ended a ceasefire with Pakistan last month after their leader was killed in Afghanistan, where they are provided refuge by their allies, the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistani Taliban blamed the death on Pakistani intel.
Since then, the group has stepped up attacks of all types — cross-border sniping, complex hostage-takings, even targeting medical teams trying to cure polio — across Pakistan, further destabilizing a country in the midst of an economic meltdown and a political crisis. But the Taliban aren’t Islamabad’s only problem: this year has seen an uptick of attacks by the Islamic State as well as Baloch separatists who have targeted personnel from China — Pakistan’s only ally.
Meanwhile, Islamabad’s relations with the Afghan Taliban have also deteriorated.
For much of the two decades of the US-led military occupation of Afghanistan, Pakistan aided and abetted senior Taliban leaders, providing them safe haven at the cost of losing Washington’s trust. But a year and a half after the Taliban takeover, the Islamists are turning out to be more than a mere disappointment for Islamabad.
Taliban border guards killed Pakistani civilians and attacked military posts last week, even as the Taliban leadership has continued to protect and nurture anti-Pakistan insurgents as well as engaged commercially and diplomatically with India, Pakistan’s arch-nemesis.
The Pakistani Taliban's comeback is a big problem for the country's army. And the wrong bet on the Taliban might be yet another strategic miscalculation by an institution which continues to rule Pakistan while undermining civilian rule.Pakistan's new army chief Gen. Asim Munir meets with President Arif Alvi in Islamabad.
Operation Cleanup: Pakistan’s new general has an old assignment
After months of drama and debate, Pakistan finally has a new army chief, ostensibly the most powerful man in the land. While Gen. Asim Munir inherits a country in the midst of political chaos and economic disaster, he is also confronted by a crisis of confidence in Pakistan’s most powerful and organized institution.
Since independence, the Pakistani military has earned many titles: “a state within a state,” a “rogue” organization, or a “praetorian” force, which is an “army with a country” (and not the other way around).
The monikers stem in part from the army’s tainted legacy of political interventionism. Since independence in 1947, the military has ruled Pakistan directly for three decades and pulled the strings from behind the throne by propping up allies, eliminating challengers, dissolving parliaments, forcing elections, and even installing and firing entire administrations for almost half a century.
The army also has an outsize presence in the day-to-day management of Pakistan. The generals manage the cricket team, battle polio, run electricity grids, fight COVID, build roads, organize bicycle races, make cereal, and produce movies.
Abroad, the army practices its version of statecraft by conducting “military diplomacy,” driving the economic agenda, deliberating in think tanks, and carrying out peacekeeping missions. Pakistani soldiers are currently providing security at the FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
The numbers only add to the military’s power. With over 600,000 active-duty troops, Pakistan’s is the world’s sixth-largest fighting force, with an advanced nuclear arsenal that is fast-growing. While the country’s missiles can hit Israel and eastern Europe, its men have even more bandwidth: immersed in the British colonial tradition, Pakistan’s bilingual military officers train at the world’s finest military academies and even head international military coalitions.
The rough neighborhood the country resides in makes the case for a strong army. To the East, a right-wing India is beefing up its own military and constantly threatening to acquire Pakistani territory. To the West, a disintegrating Afghanistan is triggering humanitarian and terrorism concerns. And to the South is an unstable Iran that is both interventionist and sectarian.
Yet, these unfriendly neighbors — compounded by the army’s suppressive policies to deal with domestic political resentment — only add to Pakistan’s own homegrown security threats: separatism, terrorism and sectarianism that are the Frankensteinian blowback of decades spent fomenting international jihadists and guerillas to fight across the world.
Consequently, as Pakistan’s military is its greatest strength, it’s also its most cancerous ailment. Thus, Munir has his work cut out for him when his three-year-term starts Tuesday.
The last four military commanders outstayed their welcome: they ruled for a total of 23 years, hanging on by constitutional “extensions” and extraconstitutional emergencies. They mired Pakistan in international conflict, terrorism, and economic mismanagement. And they interfered, either directly or through the army’s feared intelligence apparatus, with the country’s political machine by installing, removing, exiling, and trying 10 sitting and former prime ministers.
In 75 years of independence, none of Pakistan’s 23 PMs has ever completed his or her term in office, while only one of 16 army chiefs — four of whom ruled by decree — resigned voluntarily. This grim statistic indicates a civil-military schism that seems both irreconcilable and irreparable.
Munir faces a hydra of challenges that spans beyond the conundrum of sharing power with his civilian counterparts. At the top of the list is what to do about Imran Khan, the rambunctious former PM.
Having survived an assassination attempt earlier this month, Khan is scaling new heights of popularity in a protest movement that is openly confronting the political and military establishment. He blames the incumbent ruling coalition, headed by current PM Shehbaz Sharif, as well as the army for engineering his ouster last spring. While he is demanding snap elections, the powers that be haven’t budged.
But on Saturday, just 48 hours after Munir’s appointment, Khan — a former cricket superstar and global jetsetter before he became a born-again Muslim populist — decided his party will quit all federal and provincial assemblies. This is likely to create a legislative vacuum that could become a constitutional crisis if elections aren’t held. Yet, the government is continuing to head down a confrontational path, arresting Khan’s top deputy over the weekend.
The pressure on Munir is as political as it is reputational. As premier, Khan sacked Munir as chief of the feared ISI spy agency. Moreover, his predecessor, the outgoing military commander and Khan’s nemesis, Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, has come under intense scrutiny due to recently disclosed allegations of corruption. Critically, as the top brass scramble to take cover from the constant public onslaught, Khan enjoys great sympathy both on the Pakistani street as well as from within the military rank and file.
The general will have to hit the ground running. He needs to repair the broken civil-military compact immediately. But he also has to clean house and do damage control within the army, which might lead to a purge or even an investigation against his former boss. However, he certainly wants to avoid being further targeted by Khan’s unbridled populist fury, both for himself and his army.
“If Gen. Munir continues on the current path of cracking down against Khan, it will work in favor of Khan,” says Kamran Bokhari, director of the New Lines Institute in Washington, DC. “The more the army reacts with the usual coercive means, the more outrage it will generate.”
On the other hand, Munir can take advantage of the fact that he doesn’t have the baggage of his predecessors.
“His calculus in adopting a more restrained approach towards the criticism coming from Khan could help him manage the Khanists in and around the ranks,” Bokhari explains. But such a stance, he warns, could backfire if it’s not coupled with political compromise — like elections — because it’ll embolden Khan to further bash the military.
If he doesn’t act decisively, Munir might look weak to an army that is used to privilege, power, and total domination, and is unwilling to accept this emerging brave new world of investigations, criticism, and vitriol that Khan’s protest movement has unleashed.
“Civil-military relations will be going through a very messy phase until an equilibrium of sorts is reached, and a new norm of criticizing the holy cows, like the military, is established,” Bokhari adds. “And that will not be anytime soon.”
For now, Pakistan may have a new general, but the assignment is still the old one: clean up the mess and try not to conduct a coup while you’re at it. So far, most of his predecessors have failed. Will Munir, the first army chief with the distinction of having led both of the military’s premier intelligence agencies, succeed?Imran Khan supporters chant slogans as they condemn the assassination attempt on the former PM in Wazirabad, Pakistan.
After Imran Khan attack, Pakistan’s fatal political threesome escalates
Pakistan is still reeling after the assassination attempt on ex-PM Imran Khan, the born-again Muslim populist who has been campaigning for snap elections and a return to power since being ousted from office last April. After he survived gunshot wounds on his legs Thursday, a three-way political battle between Khan, the civilian government, and its military backers is now spilling onto the streets.
The flurry of accusations, questions, and investigations in the wake of the shooting doesn’t bode well for political and social stability in the world’s fifth most populous country and the only nuclear-armed Islamic republic.
Khan to march on. For the 70-year-old Khan, who’s expected to make a full recovery, the struggle continues. Within 24 hours of being shot, the physically fit former West End Lothario-turned-cricket hero-turned-Islamist took to the cameras, rejecting that he was the target of a lone-wolf attack and blaming it on a plot hatched by PM Shehbaz Sharif, the internal security minister, and a senior military intelligence officer.
Without offering any proof, Khan demanded they all resign. He also promised to return to his “Long March” across Pakistan’s political heartland as soon as he was healthy enough and encouraged his supporters to keep protesting — which they continued to do over the weekend.
Yet, Khan runs a one-man show. Although his Long March is expected to resume on Tuesday, the political momentum he has gathered is expected to weaken at least until he hits the streets again.
Meanwhile, Khan’s demand for snap elections — which he would win by most estimates, considering the size of his rallies and his dominance in by-elections — is unlikely to be heeded by the government or military leaders. Both seem dug in and have called out Khan, pushing to investigate him for politicizing the attack — even alleging that the former PM orchestrated the attack himself, “outdoing Bollywood actors.”
Whodunit? The country has lost too many leaders whose killings have never been properly investigated. But the latest attack is particularly fraught because of what’s at stake.
While the suspected gunman, who was challenged and overpowered by a courageous bystander, confessed that he acted alone in two leaked videos, his story has changed. In the first clip, he said he wanted to kill Khan because the former cricket hero was “misleading” Pakistanis. By his second video, he had shifted to a convenient trope used to justify so many murders across the country: “blasphemy.”
While ballistics and forensics teams have yet to weigh in to confirm or reject the lone wolf theory, Khan continues to claim he was fired upon from two different sides and by multiple attackers. Doctors and eyewitnesses are adding to the confusion and coming up with different versions of how many times he was shot.
The real and conspiracy theories are leading to political chaos. A senior military intelligence official was fingered by Khan as a co-conspirator, triggering the army to pull out its knives. In Pakistan, where spooks enjoy anonymity and immunity, it is rare for a top spy to be investigated for anything, which is exactly what Khan is demanding.
But the praetorian military isn’t budging, and a formal investigation is not yet underway. The lack of cooperation and legal follow-ups is triggering confrontation, further polarizing Pakistan’s partisan politics, where perceptions weigh more than the truth.
The more Khan keeps blaming top government and military officials for the attack and continues to reject the lone wolf theory, the more supporters (and sympathy votes, whenever they’re allowed to roll in) he’ll gain.
Expect the polarization and acrimony to escalate (further) between Pakistan’s political establishment — which includes the older, family-run parties and the powerful military — and Khan’s populist insurgency.
Threatened by divisions, the establishment seems to be digging in for now. Yes, Khan’s accusations have been rejected by the higher echelons of government and the top brass, which seem more united than ever against him. But second-tier officials are now beginning to show their concerns about the pushback Khan’s party is facing. Several mid-level military officials have confirmed their sympathies for Khan’s cause to GZERO.
“[Khan] is keeping up the pressure on the military leadership, which has been divided and thus on the defensive,” says Kamran Bokhari, from the New Lines Institute for Strategy & Policy in Washington, DC. “He will use the attack on him to continue to exacerbate rifts within the military in order to try and subordinate the institution to his goal of creating a single-party state.”
In the melee, the army is confronted by perhaps the biggest challenge to its decades-long domination of the state. Indeed, it’s “facing increasing criticism from the country’s heartland of Punjab, which for decades had been the bastion of its support,” Bokhari adds.
But the world’s sixth-largest fighting force is unlikely to yield to Khan’s pressure.
“The men and the machine are inseparable,” Bokhari explains, “in that the military-intelligence complex is so intertwined with the functioning of the state that any change to its role will be a very messy affair — leading to greater destabilization.”
But remember, this is a three-way battle. Despite being way more seasoned than their nemesis, it’s Khan’s political opponents who constitute the current coalition government — the right-leaning Sharifs, the left-leaning Bhutto-Zardaris, and the religious parties — who are struggling for relevance.
“Their objective is to see the military and Khan weaken each other and emerge as beneficiaries of this feud,” assesses Bokhari. “The problem with this strategy is that Khan’s PTI [party] is way more popular. There is also the unmistakable reality that the anti-Khan camp lacks a vision that can counter the PTI narrative.”
The old adage about politics in Pakistan is that there are only three types of people who live there: the rich, the poor, and the soldiers. At this rate, Khan seems to have captured the imagination of many of the first two, while forcing a split in the third.
Sure, there is strength in numbers. But there is also a certain madness in multiples. For regional competitors like India — and stakeholders in Washington and Beijing — this does not spell an E pluribus unum moment for Pakistan.Ousted Pakistani PM Imran Khan gestures as he addresses supporters during a rally in Lahore.
Pakistan's former PM injured in assassination attempt
On Thursday, former PM Imran Khan was shot and injured in the leg during a rally in Wazirabad, a city in eastern Punjab province. The shooter, identified as Naveed Mohammad Bashir, was interrogated by police. He was reportedly following Khan’s convoy and intended to kill him. "Imran Khan was misleading the people, and I couldn’t take it anymore. My objective was to kill him, and just him," he said. Eight other leaders of Khan's party were also injured. As we wrote about recently, political long marches in Pakistan rarely end well — and this time was no different. Soon after Khan kicked off his march to demand a snap election that he thinks will return him to power, the head of Pakistan's shadowy ISI intelligence services warned in a rare press conference that there could be violence. So, what happens now? It really depends on how soon the ousted former PM recovers from his injuries and whether the military — once again — steps in to restore order. There's no love lost between Khan and the army, but it's the men in uniform who — directly or indirectly — call all the shots in Pakistan. Still, as GZERO's own Waj Khan tweets, the army-backed government has two options now: placate Khan by agreeing to hold an early election or shut it all down if the violence gets out of hand.