Pakistan is on the brink

On Tuesday I speculated that Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan, now the opposition leader, was so popular that he might have to be shot by his enemies to prevent him from coming back to power. This was not a throwaway statement. After Sri Lanka and Lebanon, whose political murder rate since the second world war has been off the charts, Pakistan with 44 political murders comes a clear third, not including the peripheral hundreds if not thousands who have died in bombings.

As if in sync with my warning, Tuesday afternoon saw another political murder in Pakistan. Majid Satti, the leader of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party in Rawalpindi was gunned down by a group of armed assassins. Two days previously, the PTI politician Nargis Baloch was shot dead outside Quetta’s Balochistan University by a gunman riding pillion on a motorbike – a method of assassination popular across the subcontinent, particularly in Sri Lanka. Earlier in the year, Nargis Baloch’s two children were gunned down. Can we see a pattern here?

These two PTI politicians become the 45th and 46th respectively to have been assassinated since Pakistan became an independent country. It is a country that started in blood. The botched partition of India by the viceroy Lord Mountbatten led to an estimated million people or more being killed. Political murders started soon afterwards. In 1951, Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan was shot twice in the chest as he was addressing a 100,000 crowd in the Company Gardens in Rawalpindi.

More famous murders were to come. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the hard-left socialist, Oxford-educated, Lincoln’s Inn lawyer, who became Pakistan’s fourth president at the tender age of 43 was sensationally charged with the murder of the father of an opposition politician in 1974. The assassins, probably under torture, admitted the murder charge and the order was traced to the military dictator who had deposed him, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. He was found guilty of conspiracy to murder and hanged. General Zia, who had deposed Bhutto, did not commute the sentence; he claimed that the court papers, which did not arrive in time, had been mislaid.

It is widely believed that the CIA was behind the removal of Bhutto from office and his subsequent judicial murder. Even the former US attorney general Ramsey Clark hinted at this when he opined:

“I do not believe in conspiracy theories in general, but the similarities in the staging of riots in Chile and Pakistan are just too close… Bhutto was falsely accused and brutalized for months during proceedings… before being murdered, then hanged.

No wonder Imran Khan suspects CIA involvement in his parliamentary overthrow in April this year.

General Zia, not included in Pakistan’s assassination statistics, would in turn die in suspicious circumstances in a 1988 plane crash. There was no distress signal and the black box was never found. The board of inquiry concluded that ‘the most probable cause of the crash was a criminal act of sabotage’. It was suspected that a rival general, perhaps acting on behalf of the Soviet Union or India, organised for the occupants of the plane to be gassed.

But it was Benazir Bhutto – a two-time prime minister, a contemporary of Imran Khan at Oxford and, according to his biographer Christopher Sandford, Khan’s lover – who became the most famous victim of assassination in post-war Pakistan. After returning from exile to Pakistan in October 2007, her cavalcade into Karachi was hit by several bombs, killing 149 people. Many hundreds more were injured including foreigners. Urs Gehriger, foreign editor of DieWeltwoche, who was in the cortege, survived because the bus driver in front of him took the full blast.

Benazir survived this assassination attempt too, but not for long. Two months later, after giving a speech in Rawalpindi, she stood up in her car to wave at the crowds; she was hit by two bullets and the assassin then blew himself up with a ball bearings suicide vest. Al-Qaeda claimed credit but other suspects included the Pakistani Taliban, her political opponents including the military dictator, President Pervez Musharraf, and various security services including Pakistan’s ISI.

Bhutto herself was not untarnished by accusations of political murder. Her own brother, Murtaza Bhutto, a political rival to Benazir, was charged with terrorism when he returned to Pakistan in 1993 – echoes here of the terrorist charges laid against Imran Khan this week. After his release Murtaza continued to be a highly vocal critic of his sister. In 1996 he and six companions were stopped by police near his home in Karachi. They shot and killed him and six associates.

Benazir’s government was deposed a month later. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, was then arrested for Murtaza’s murder, though he was acquitted 12 years after Benazir’s assassination and six months before he was elected President of Pakistan. Subsequently in 2017, former president Musharraf sensationally claimed that Zardari ‘was involved in the assassinations of Benazir (his wife) and Murtaza (his brother-in-law).’

Benazir Bhutto was also suspected by many for the 1996 bombing of the Shaukat Khan Memorial Cancer Hospital in Lahore that Imran Khan had built in memory of his mother. Six people were killed and dozens injured. The bombing came after Khan had launched political attacks on Bhutto at a time when he was planning his entry into politics. Benazir had been so alarmed by this development given Imran Khan’s popularity as Pakistan’s cricket world cup winning captain in 1992, that she had already banned fundraising events for the hospital as well as state media reporting on its building.

Against this background of Pakistani political violence, it is no wonder that Imran Khan sees conspiracies all around. He is right to do so. Pakistani politics is a bloody business. Death by assassination is always a risk. The fact that Khan has been charged with terrorism, however spurious the accusations, is a sign that the Pakistani government that overthrew him in April is alarmed at his popularity.

In particular the army chief, General Javed Bajwa, who Imran had apparently tried to remove from his post earlier this year, is unlikely to be happy to see Khan’s recovery as a political force in opposition. It is Bajwa, possibly with the connivance of the CIA, who is suspected to be behind the parliamentary coup that deposed Khan in April. The personal stakes for Bajwa are high therefore as autumn elections approach. Could another in a long line of Pakistani military coups be on the cards? As Pakistan descends into economic chaos with rampant inflation, social unrest, and growing political violence including political assassinations and a likely debt default, the pre-conditions for a coup are all in place.

For the time being Imran’s main concern should be his personal security. Pakistan may risk a military coup, but he risks assassination. However, this is not something that will overly worry him. In the past, I have asked him on several occasions whether he feared assassination. His answer was always clear; ‘I believe in God so why would I fear death?’