Pakistan’s Hybrid Regime: The Army’s Project Imran Khan

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
— George Orwell, “Animal Farm” (1945)

Pakistan has been under a hybrid martial law regime for over two years now, and it seems that the country’s all-powerful army is unwilling to jettison its Imran Khan project. And why would they? When told by the brass to jump, the army-supported prime minister merely asks how high. While the country’s economy has been sinking since Khan occupied the country’s highest office, the army seems bent on keeping their chosen man afloat.

For all practical purposes it is already impossible to tell where the military’s rule ends and Khan’s begins, just as the befuddled animals in Orwell’s “Animal Farm” could not tell their past and current dictators apart. The most recent evidence of the hybrid nature of the current regime came with the rushed passage of legislation aimed at hounding opposition politicians under the guise of countering money laundering and terror financing.

Pakistan has been on the watchdog Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF’s) grey list for over two years. The so-called grey list implies increased monitoring of countries for “strategic deficiencies in their regimes to counter money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing.” Pakistan showed ostensible compliance with the FATF regimen via the legislation passed in September, ahead of the FATF’s October meetings. That could mean getting a clean bill and transitioning to the white list, while non-compliance could result in blacklisting that entails potentially crippling economic sanctions.

Under the garb of complying with the FATF requirements, Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government steamrolled through eight pieces of legislation in mid-September that target the political opposition. In this effort, the PTI was helped by the army’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). The opposition,  led by ex-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and including the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) led by Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, claimed that its members received mysterious phone calls telling some to stay away from the parliamentary proceedings, thereby paving the way for the regime to bulldoze their way through the joint session of the parliament. The opposition had previously defeated several of the bills in the Senate – the upper house of Pakistan’s bicameral parliament – where it has a numerical majority. But by herding together the Senate with the National Assembly in a joint session, and forcing some three dozen opposition parliamentarians to stay away from the vote, the regime managed to get a wafer-thin majority to piggyback clauses that go way beyond the FATF requirements.

The approved legislation might have closed the loopholes in Pakistan’s existing laws to comply with the FATF requirements, but it has given government agencies unprecedented powers to conduct surveillance of citizens, including monitoring telecommunications and even hacking into computer systems, supposedly contingent upon permission from the courts. The approved bills ominously conflated white-collar crimes with terrorism financing and included the country’s National Accountability Bureau (NAB), which is infamous for persecuting the political opposition, as one of the prosecuting agencies for such crimes.

Still, one might ask: What is wrong with this if it helps nail the bad guys? A lot, and for that, context is important. Pakistan has a long history of coddling jihadist terrorists while harrying the political opposition, activists, and journalists.

Protecting Its Own, Attacking Enemies

When faced with international sanctions, the Pakistani Army gets the government to nominally ban its jihadist proxies, only to let them rebrand and resurface under a new name.

One of the army’s most favored jihadist outfits, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), is essentially a case study in how the army tips off its proxies before their bank accounts and assets are confiscated. After the attack on the Indian parliament 19 years ago, Pakistan’s then army dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, banned LeT and ostensibly froze its assets, after the United Nations and the United States slapped sanctions on the group. But LeT had been warned by the Pakistani authorities that a ban was coming its way according to Stephen Tankel in his book “Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba.” Not only did the outfit move its assets to legal safe havens, it simply doffed its former identity and continued to operate under a new name: Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD). While declaring that it was a strictly Kashmir-based organization, JuD continued to operate freely from outside the metropolis of Lahore, in Pakistan’s Punjab province. Not only did it launch the deadly Mumbai terror attacks in 2008,but  JuD remains the most lethal and largest of the Pakistan Army-backed jihadist groups today. Musharraf was to later proclaim, “I will say it proudly that LeT and JuD are both very good organizations of Pakistan.”

One is hard-pressed to find a Pakistani court prosecuting a terror kingpin with half the zeal they show against elected prime ministers, one of whom was hanged at the army’s directive. Most recently, the Supreme Court of Pakistan (SCP) and the NAB – at behest of the army – did a hatchet job on the country’s thrice-elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. In 2016, Sharif’s family members were named in the so-called Panama Papers for their offshore holdings. This gave Khan, who was in opposition then, and his military backers a chance to pounce at Sharif. The ISI orchestrated street agitation, led by Khan, against Sharif, as it had done before in 2015. Sharif buckled this time and conceded to an inquiry by the SCP, effectively giving up his constitutional right to legal due process involving a trial court first.

The SCP then conducted a prolonged and malicious proceeding during which the judges, brimming with moral certitude, pontificated against Sharif from the bench. One judge went as far as to compare him to Mario Puzo’s fictional mafia don, the Godfather. The joint inquiry team commissioned by the court also included an ISI nominee, something that Sharif did not legally challenge, to his ultimate detriment. Sharif was convicted on an unrelated charge, disqualified from politics, and eventually imprisoned.

The army, for its part, protects not just its favorite jihadists but also its retired dictators and generals. In fact, the army’s beef with Sharif during his third stint in office stemmed from the latter’s instance on letting the legal process take its course in prosecuting Musharraf in a high treason case. During Sharif’s second term as prime minister, Musharraf had launched a coup d’état. The dictator went on to rule for nearly a decade. He fled the country but was tried in absentia, convicted, and awarded capital punishment by a high court last year (that sentence was overturned in early 2020). Musharraf, who is reported to have amassed a fortune worth billions, however, remains at large in the United Arab Emirates.

More recently, the army trotted out its surrogates and partisans to defend a former director general of the Inter-Services Public Relations Directorate (DG ISPR), Lieutenant General (Retired) Asim Saleem Bajwa, who has been implicated in a financial scandal dubbed the Bajwa Leaks by Pakistani social media. The general had also presided over the army’s Southern Command, and currently serves as a special advisor to the prime minister on media affairs, as well as the chair of China-Pakistan Economic (CPEC) Authority, which oversees CPEC projects worth upward of $62 billion. The army first locked horns with the PML-N government over control of CPEC. Bajwa was installed in the CPEC Authority with the intent to consolidate the army's control over the project. Khan’s government didn’t even let out a peep and obliged its army patrons.

An investigative report published recently by Pakistani journalist Ahmad Noorani alleges that Bajwa’s family established overseas businesses worth tens of millions of dollars, synchronous with his rise in power at key military and non-military positions. According to the report, the Bajwa family’s fortunes have risen exponentially since he became a brigadier general during Musharraf’s dictatorship. His five brothers, three sons, and wife subsequently developed and owned – together or individually – 99 companies, over 130 franchises, and 15 commercial and residential properties including two shopping centers and two houses in North America and the Persian Gulf. The general subsequently took to social and conventional media to explain his family’s holdings, but his flimsy rebuttal fell miserably short.

At an organizational level, Pakistan’s army remains one of the largest business houses in the country. From making breakfast cereals to running bakeries, movie theaters, dairy farms, and gas stations, and from road construction and housing societies to banking and airlines, the armed forces and their assorted subsidiaries have got everything in their business portfolio. While the Pakistan army has historically anointed itself the guardian of the country’s so-called ideological frontiers, in addition to the geographical ones, it is this vast and lucrative business empire that the generals are out to guard. But from the outset, the army has framed its ideological narrative in terms of a Pakistani national identity with Islam at its core and the army as its defender. By appropriating the rights to define the national identity and interest, the army also got to label its opponents not just unpatriotic but also un-Islamic.

Military Rule in the Garb of Democracy

When the army first grabbed control just over a decade after Pakistan’s creation, it also realized that despite the power flowing from the barrel of the gun it wielded, it still needed the modicum of legitimacy that can come only from democracy. Unwilling to concede that right to the people, the army toyed with various models of controlled democracy in which ostensibly patriotic and pious civilians – by the army’s definition – were picked as a democratic façade. On other occasions, army dictators got themselves named president through rigged elections (in the case of General Ayub Khan) or referenda (Generals Musharraf and Zia-ul-Haq). And the three dictators held power for a decade each, on average, with the army ruling directly for almost 34 out of Pakistan’s 73 years of existence. On other occasions, it has ruled from behind the scenes with willing or unwilling civilian dispensations at the front in a variety of parliamentary and presidential forms of government. No civilian prime minister has ever completed a full five-year term in the office.

The army’s quest for pliable politicians has led it to usurp the country’s founding party, the Pakistan Muslim League, or carve out new factions from it. Military ruler General Yahya Khan, who had the shortest stint of any of Pakistan’s dictators, presided over a coterie of serving and retired generals, who essentially codified the army’s manipulation of the political process. His minister, General (Retired) Sher Ali Khan Pataudi, formulated that instead of direct intervention, the army should identify and groom so-called patriotic political leaders and parties, to the peril of the “unpatriotic” ones. In essence, this meant political engineering at an industrial scale with the army ensuring, through whatever means necessary, victory of its partisans. Fast forward to 2018, and the formula was put into practice. Khan was installed via a massive election heist.

The army, however, does not want even the nominal parliamentary opposition that existed after the 2018 elections. It not only wants Khan to rule, but to do so for more than one five-year term, and without any hindrances.

To that end, the regime has also gone after Justice Faez Isa on trumped-up graft charges. The smear campaign against Isa started after he delivered a damning judgment criticizing the ISI for its role in the anti-government protests of 2017. Isa is in line to potentially preside over the SCP in 2023, when Pakistan may be holding general elections. The regime fears that were it to go for another election heist that year, the election results may be challenged in the SCP and Isa will not do their bidding. While the Pakistani judiciary has been mostly happy to play second fiddle to the army throughout the country, every now and then a judge does come along who bucks the diktat.

There are other indicators of the long-term nature of the army’s designs, as well. For example, the appointment of Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed Chaudhry, who was Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Qamar Javed Bajwa’s junior in the army’s Baloch regimen, as DG ISI was politically significant. Before his elevation to the DG, Chaudhry was in-charge of the ISI’s political cell and is believed to be the architect of the street protests of 2017 (exactly what Isa criticized). He is also given dubious credit for engineering the 2018 electoral victory for Khan by pre-poll and polling day rigging. Chaudhry will be one of the senior-most generals in November 2022, when COAS Bajwa in anticipated to eventually retire, making him a top contender for the chief post.

There is also a whisper campaign, often fanned by the ruling party’s ministers, that a presidential form of government should replace the current arrangement. In this regard, the most important landmark will be Senate elections, slotted for March 2021, when half the senators are to be reelected. If current trends hold, the opposition will lose its Senate majority, as the senators are elected indirectly by the provincial assemblies, and in three out of four provinces the PTI and its partners hold sway. After the Senate elections, changes could be introduced into the constitution to deface it beyond recognition. The way the recent FATF legislation was rammed through the parliament makes this possibility more likely than not.

The current regime has not faced a coherent political challenge from the opposition parties thus far, for various reasons. In the absence of declared martial law, it is difficult – if not impossible – for the civilian political forces to name and shame the usurper of their power, rally together on a minimum common program, and agitate against the military powers that be. The presence of a parliament, even a rubber stamp one as it is at present, gives a façade of democracy that politicians find difficult to go after, especially if they already are sitting in those assemblies. The provincial and regional political dynamics in Pakistan also mean that different political parties have different immediate and long-term agendas. The biggest challenge to the current regime had come from the cleric-politician Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman, who marched to Islamabad almost a year ago with the intent of toppling the government. The Maulana was unable to enlist meaningful support from the PML-N and PPP, and his march fizzled out. But could that change?

By passing the recent legislation in a most undemocratic manner, Pakistan’s hybrid regime might have bitten off more than it can chew.

Opposition parties gathered in an All Parties Conference (APC) days after the joint session of parliament. Although the APC had already been scheduled, it brought one big surprise: Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif addressed the conference remotely from London, where he has been residing for medical treatment. Sharif, who has been facing one legal battle after the other, had been silent for almost a year. He broke his silence with an address that was essentially a damning indictment of the Pakistan Army for undermining the constitution by usurping the people’s electoral mandate through political engineering to install its favored politicians, using NAB to hound political opponents, silencing and abducting activists and journalists, and the alleged financial corruption of the generals. The former prime minister virtually put the army in the docket for foisting an illegitimate and incompetent government upon Pakistan. Sharif named the generals implicated in political engineering and financial corruption. He clearly stated that the struggle is not against Imran Khan but against those who have installed him in the harness of power. This is a major departure from the past practice and suggests that Sharif is digging in for a political fight.

The APC resulted in the formation of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), which immediately called for Khan’s resignation and asked for the country’s military establishment to stay out of politics, along with assorted other demands. The language used was perhaps the most direct criticism of the army since the protests that led to the ouster of Musharraf over a decade ago. The opposition also gave a timeframe for street mobilization and a potential culmination in Islamabad early next year. The Senate elections, to be held on or before March 6, 2021, present the ominous prospect of a changing political field. And with potential constitutional adjustments in the offing, too, there is a sense of urgency for the opposition.