Cartoon by Peter Brookes

Can Imran Khan fulfil Pakistan’s voters’ hopes and keep the generals at bay? 

The Guardian: It’s not hard to see why Imran Khan’s stunning victory in the Pakistan elections attracted global media coverage. The story of a cricketing hero and former playboy turned political superstar and scourge of the establishment that spawned him was too good to miss.

Given Pakistan’s history of army coups, Khan’s rise to power seemed like a modern parable foretelling the triumph of people’s democracy over the dark-suited, sunglassed forces of “deep state” military control, manipulation and repression.

Beguiling though this storyline is, it did not really happen that way. Indeed, Khan owed his success, in part at least, to the covert meddling of those same shadowy spooks and generals, according to EU poll monitors. Yet who governs Pakistan, and how, is still a matter of high international importance. Take female suffrage. Equal voting rights are absent in some Muslim countries. But Pakistan, where women comprise 44% of eligible voters, has made exceptional progress. Veiled female residents of conservative tribal areas such as South Waziristan made history last Wednesday when they cast votes for the first time.
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Pakistan matters because, with its youthful population of more than 200 million (66% are under 30), it is a country of vast potential handicapped by endemic poverty, illiteracy and inequality. It is also, not coincidentally, a battleground pitting anti-western Islamists, schooled in international jihad in Saudi-funded madrassas, against the secular, anglophone elite. It is central to the “war on terror”. Its stability and security, or lack of it, has a potentially global impact.

For the British, Pakistan exercises an abiding fascination, rooted in the Raj’s disastrous part in its bloody 1947 birth and in continuing, close ethnic and cultural ties. For the Americans, self-anointed heirs to empire, Pakistan plays the dual role of indispensable ally and duplicitous villain in their endless Afghan drama. For many in India, Islamabad is the nuclear-armed bogeyman next door. For expansionist China, Pakistan is a key link in its grandiose Belt and Road trading franchise, reliant on Beijing’s loans, investment and goodwill.

How the untested Khan, wholly lacking in governmental experience, will approach these complex issues and historical burdens is open to question. What is clear is that he has changed radically since his hell-raising West End days. Launching his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, meaning “movement for justice”, in 1996, a newly earnest Khan, now 65, made doing God’s will and fighting corruption his main aims in life.

“Far from being the Islamic welfare state that was envisaged, Pakistan is a country where politics is a game of loot and plunder,” Khan wrote in his memoir, Pakistan: A Personal History. His new party, he said, would strive to “end exploitation and ensure a society based on honesty, merit and integrity”.

Khan espoused a conservative religious outlook, favouring sharia law and controversially backing radical anti-blasphemy laws. His criticism of US drone strikes earned him the nickname “Taliban Khan”. And he rediscovered his family’s Afghan roots and Pashtun tribal identity. Coincidentally or not, this won him support among conservatives.

Likewise, courting populist opinion, Khan turned against Pakistan’s western-educated ruling class, despite graduating from Oxford university. Colonialism had wrought lasting damage across the subcontinent, he wrote, by destroying self-esteem. “The inferiority complex that is ingrained in a conquered nation results in its imitation of some of the worst aspects of the conquerors, while at the same time neglecting its own great traditions.”

Twenty years spent clambering up Disraeli’s greasy pole may have mellowed Khan a little, but not entirely. Observers say he remains a passionate, volatile man with authoritarian instincts.

But the conciliatory tone of Thursday’s victory speech, in which he called for national unity, surprised and relieved critics. Khan said he would seek improved relations with India and Afghanistan, where a nascent peace process is inching forward.

He even offered an inquiry into opposition allegations of vote-rigging. Although the row over the “stolen” election will rumble on – minor parties say they plan street protests – Khan’s offer seems to have drawn its sting. The main opposition, the PMLN, has dropped its threat to boycott parliament and accepted defeat. An editorial in Dawn newspaper, headlined “Time to move on”, declared Khan and the PTI had demonstrated “genuine national political appeal”. For that reason, it said, “he ought to be given the political space to try and turn his ideas into reality”.

Whether Khan can do so, while maintaining a calm, unifying approach, is now the biggest question in Pakistani politics. Two immediate problems stand out. One is how to prevent the economy imploding under rising debt and devaluation pressures. The other is how the new government can escape the embrace of the overbearing military, which will expect payback for its campaign “assistance”.

Pakistan’s generals are accustomed to exercising sole control of foreign and security policy. Challenging them can be a career or even life-ending experience. So if Khan, for example, wants to break with the US, befriend India, or talk to terrorists, he had better watch his back. Whatever the popular storyline says about democracy redux, the hidden hand on the new prime minister’s shoulder is real. It will be hard to shake off.