No one expected that Imran Khan could be so power-hungry that he would invent a conspiracy, where there was absolutely none, that could do serious damage to Pakistan’s relations with the United States, and thereby jeopardise future political and economic cooperation. And most critically, from Pakistan’s viewpoint, the transfer of technology through potential investments. Imran’s fairy tale of a foreign conspiracy, strongly denied by Pakistan Army and the security establishment, has gone too far to a ridiculous level. Thousands of his cult-like supporters believe him because he has quoted Quranic verses to mobilise his supporters some of whom are conservative and supporters of the Taliban.
His vitriol against his political rivals, comparing them to Muslim princes who sided with the British during their occupation of India, has led some of his frenzied supporters to even compare him to the Prophet Mohammad (PBUP). One such supporter tweeted, “If the chain of prophecy had not ended, then this person would have been the prophet of that time.”
Many of his young supporters (the median age in Pakistan is 23) have been brainwashed through a vicious propaganda campaign to discredit the entire political system, that started in late 2011 as Pakistan’s powerful military establishment decided to back him.
Fahd Husain, a regular columnist for Pakistan’s most respected daily DAWN, recently wrote, “Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) that was reborn, revamped and refuelled somewhere around 2011. PTI’s path to power was red-carpeted by the establishment without much care for nuance or subtlety.” Imran’s image was built up as a messiah. He declared in February 2012 that the “PTI will end corruption in 19 days, terrorism in 90 days.”
Imran Khan’s commitment to eradicate corruption was just a political slogan and Malik Riaz’s case provides clear proof of his dishonesty and duplicity. More than £190m of assets, including a £50m mansion overlooking Hyde Park in London, were seized from the property tycoon after a settlement in a UK police “dirty money” investigation. The UK’s National Crime Agency said Malik Riaz Hussain had agreed to the multimillion-pound settlement in December 2019.
Earlier in March 2019, the Supreme Court of Pakistan had accepted Mr Riaz’s offer of Rs460bn as settlement dues by his real estate firm Bahria Town Ltd after it was found to have illegally acquired thousands of acres of land. The amount recovered from the Riaz family in London in November 2019 was approximately £140m. All of this was transferred to an account administered by the Supreme Court. The PTI government went out of its way to ensure that the property tycoon’s £190m settlement in the UK worked out in his favour by allowing him to pay the Supreme Court’s fine by using the crime proceeds of £140 million. In April 2022, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Pakistan’s parliament grilled National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Chairman retired Justice Javed Iqbal for giving ‘undue favours’ to property tycoon Malik Riaz by allowing him to pay Rs460 billion as a fine to the Supreme Court through the crime proceeds of £140 million that the British National Crime Agency (NCA) had returned to Pakistan.
NAB Chairman had little to say because the deal was approved by a federal cabinet meeting presided by Imran Khan in late December 2019.
During Imran’s almost four year’s rule, newspaper distribution was interrupted, media outlets were threatened with the withdrawal of advertising and TV channel signals were jammed. Journalists who crossed the ‘red lines’ were threatened, abducted and tortured. In the shadows, behind Khan in the limelight, Pakistan relived some of the worst moments of its past military dictatorships.
The former prime minister of Pakistan has been fighting for his political life ever since Pakistan’s powerful military withdrew its support after it got tired of micromanaging a man who virtually claimed to know everything better than anyone but mismanaged a fragile economy and alienated Pakistan’s key allies: China and Saudi Arabia.
Imran Khan won around 30% of the popular vote in the 2018 elections and his (PTI) party won only 149 members out of the 342-members in Pakistan’s parliament. PTI formed a minority government with the help of some smaller parties including the Muhajir Quami Movement (MQM), a party with significant support in major cities of Pakistan’s Sindh province.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jff2Cp7vLjg&authuser=0
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) chairman, declared on 16 January 2021 that tabling a no-confidence motion was the only option to remove Imran Khan and his government and vowed to convince the members of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (an alliance led by former premier Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League party) on the strategy. This was reported by many local and international newspapers including Pakistan's premier English daily DAWN. It should be noted that Joe Biden had not even assumed office when Bilawal made this statement.
On 3 March 2021, PPP leader and former premier Yusuf Raza Gilani defeated Imran Khan’s finance minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh in elections for the Senate, the upper house of Parliament. This came as a major setback for Khan who had personally campaigned for his Cabinet colleague.
On 6 March 2021, Imran Khan won the trust vote in National Assembly following the defeat of his finance minister, ending the political uncertainty in the country. He secured 178 votes – just 6 votes more than the minimum 172 votes required- in the 342-member lower house of Parliament.
On 28 November 2021, PPP stalwart Khursheed Shah, indicating an in-house change in the Parliament, said the Opposition would have enough numbers to oust PM Imran Khan. On December 24, 2021, PML-N leader Ayaz Sadiq also hinted the Opposition was preparing for in-house change.
On 11 February 2022, the chief of Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) – an alliance that included former premier Nawaz Sharif’s party - Maulana Fazlur Rehman, on behalf of the Opposition, announced to bring a no-confidence motion against Imran Khan.
Khan after having lost the support of the seven MQM and a few other parliament members, lost the no-confidence vote on 9 April 2022, as the opposition was finally able to secure 174 votes to oust him. The events showed that it was as simple as that. That the MQM stopped supporting Khan because Pakistan’s military establishment withdrew its support may well have been the case but that is related more to domestic politics than a “global conspiracy” as alleged by Imran.
Imran, sensing his imminent defeat, had told a public meeting 27 March 2022 in Islamabad that a “foreign conspiracy” was behind the no-confidence motion and that “funding was being channelled into Pakistan from abroad. He didn’t name the United States.
After Khan lost the support of the MQM on 30 March 2022, he claimed the following day that the US “threatened” him and was seeking his removal from office in a televised address. He claimed, "...the letter stated that the no-confidence motion was being tabled even before it was filed, which means the Opposition was in contact with them," Imran alleged. As the events unfolded, it turned out that there was no letter at all. What Imran was referring to was a cypher message sent by then Pakistan’s Ambassador Asad Majeed Khan to the foreign ministry in Islamabad on March 7, 2021.
The conversation that set off the so-called ‘Lettergate’ scandal took place on March 7 at a farewell lunch for Asad Majeed Khan at his residence. US officials who attended the lunch included US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu and Deputy Assistant Secretary Lesslie C Viguerie. Such informal conversations are a matter of routine in international diplomacy and the U.S. officials are known to be frank and have used colourful language in the past during their meetings with Pakistani officials.
Pakistan’s local media has been fixated on that cable. It was discussed twice in the national security committee meetings attended by chiefs of armed forces as well as by the head of Pakistan's premier spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). According to an official press release, the National Security Committee (NSC), on 22 April 2022, “after reviewing the contents of the communication, the assessments received, and the conclusions presented by the security agencies, concludes that there has been no foreign conspiracy.”
One cable from an Ambassador, containing his interpretation or assessment, means little. A regime change conspiracy is a huge undertaking. Discussion on a cable without a regional and international context is rather childish. Noam Chomsky, the famed leftwing philosopher and an Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says that using the threatening letter as evidence of a coup is “meaningless”!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWWa9MRIV50&authuser=0
A United States think tank, The German Marshall Fund, published a report in September 2020 titled, Returning to the Shadows: “China, Pakistan, and the Fate of CPEC”. According to the author, Andrew Small, a noted China expert, “China has been sceptical about the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf government led by Prime Minister Imran Khan that took office in 2018.” The report stated: “perhaps the biggest problem for China was Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party. Any criticism was a shock to Beijing, which had been used to a situation where it was virtually untouchable in Pakistan.”
Here it is important to recall that it was Imran Khan’s advisor on trade Mr Razak Dawood who had muddied the Pak China relationship by issuing controversial statements about China Pakistan Economic Corridor program (CPEC) in Sep 2018. On Sep 10, 2018, it was reported by the Reuters: “Abdul Razak Dawood, the Pakistani cabinet member for commerce, industry and investment, suggested that all projects in the $57-billion could be eligible for suspensions.”
Earlier, the Financial Times had quoted Mr Dawood as saying: “Chinese companies received tax breaks, many breaks and have an undue advantage in Pakistan; this is one of the things we’re looking at because it’s not fair that Pakistan companies should be disadvantaged.” Although Dawood tried to clarify this later, but the message had been sent and damage done.
Razak Dawood, Imran’s advisor on trade said 8 February 2020: “We have not yet firmed up exact losses to be incurred because of this virus but it is going to slow down our imports from China”.
Imran Khan was given a frosty treatment on his last visit to China in Feb 2022. He had to wait 3 days before he could see the top leadership. He arrived in China on February 2, 2022, ostensibly to attend the winter Olympics, and it was only on the last day of his visit, on 5 February 2022, that the Chinese leader Xi Jingpin received him. That was the first meeting of the two leaders since the Imran Khan’s visit to China in October 2019.
No wonder, China’s Global Times , a state-backed newspaper, had this to say upon his ouster: “Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted from office in a no-confidence vote in the country's parliament on Sunday, but such a major political upheaval in Islamabad will not affect the solid friendship between China and Pakistan.”
It seems most analysts appearing on Pakistan’s TV channels don’t read international newspapers, they don’t analyse and love to shoot from the hip. It was actually China that was not pleased with Imran Khan. The United States didn’t care much.
Joe Biden didn’t even bother to make a telephone call since assuming office in January 2021. “The president of the United States hasn’t spoken to the prime minister of such an important country who the US itself says is make-or-break in some cases, in some ways, in Afghanistan — we struggle to understand the signal, right?” Moeed Yusuf, Pakistan’s national security adviser, told the Financial Times in an interview at Pakistan’s embassy in Washington. “We’ve been told every time that . . . [the phone call] will happen, it’s technical reasons or whatever. But frankly, people don’t believe it,” he said.
When Imran visited the White House to see Trump in July 2019, he literally stammered when asked a question about Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani serving a sentence in the United States for terrorism-related charges. This showed that despite his posturing at home as a champion of an independent foreign policy, he was keen to expand relations with the United States and sat like an obedient junior and let Donald Trump do most of the talking. Watching this 40-minute video of Imran’s visit to the White House is perhaps better than a thousand words. Imran spoke for barely a few minutes. He sat quietly as Trump made humiliating remarks about Pakistan. “The problem was Pakistan wasn’t doing anything for us. They were subversive,” Trump said. “To be honest, I think we have a better relationship with Pakistan right now.”
All of Imran’s posturing and talk about standing firm against the United States in the recent public meetings is for domestic consumption. However, this time, he has gone too far. His fans, there are millions of them in Pakistan, will find the truth in due course.
His vitriol against his political rivals, comparing them to Muslim princes who sided with the British during their occupation of India, has led some of his frenzied supporters to even compare him to the Prophet Mohammad (PBUP). One such supporter tweeted, “If the chain of prophecy had not ended, then this person would have been the prophet of that time.”
Many of his young supporters (the median age in Pakistan is 23) have been brainwashed through a vicious propaganda campaign to discredit the entire political system, that started in late 2011 as Pakistan’s powerful military establishment decided to back him.
Fahd Husain, a regular columnist for Pakistan’s most respected daily DAWN, recently wrote, “Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) that was reborn, revamped and refuelled somewhere around 2011. PTI’s path to power was red-carpeted by the establishment without much care for nuance or subtlety.” Imran’s image was built up as a messiah. He declared in February 2012 that the “PTI will end corruption in 19 days, terrorism in 90 days.”
Imran Khan’s commitment to eradicate corruption was just a political slogan and Malik Riaz’s case provides clear proof of his dishonesty and duplicity. More than £190m of assets, including a £50m mansion overlooking Hyde Park in London, were seized from the property tycoon after a settlement in a UK police “dirty money” investigation. The UK’s National Crime Agency said Malik Riaz Hussain had agreed to the multimillion-pound settlement in December 2019.
Earlier in March 2019, the Supreme Court of Pakistan had accepted Mr Riaz’s offer of Rs460bn as settlement dues by his real estate firm Bahria Town Ltd after it was found to have illegally acquired thousands of acres of land. The amount recovered from the Riaz family in London in November 2019 was approximately £140m. All of this was transferred to an account administered by the Supreme Court. The PTI government went out of its way to ensure that the property tycoon’s £190m settlement in the UK worked out in his favour by allowing him to pay the Supreme Court’s fine by using the crime proceeds of £140 million. In April 2022, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Pakistan’s parliament grilled National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Chairman retired Justice Javed Iqbal for giving ‘undue favours’ to property tycoon Malik Riaz by allowing him to pay Rs460 billion as a fine to the Supreme Court through the crime proceeds of £140 million that the British National Crime Agency (NCA) had returned to Pakistan.
NAB Chairman had little to say because the deal was approved by a federal cabinet meeting presided by Imran Khan in late December 2019.
During Imran’s almost four year’s rule, newspaper distribution was interrupted, media outlets were threatened with the withdrawal of advertising and TV channel signals were jammed. Journalists who crossed the ‘red lines’ were threatened, abducted and tortured. In the shadows, behind Khan in the limelight, Pakistan relived some of the worst moments of its past military dictatorships.
Many of his young supporters (the median age in Pakistan is 23) have been brainwashed through a vicious propaganda campaign to discredit the entire political system, that started in late 2011 as Pakistan’s powerful military establishment decided to back him.
The former prime minister of Pakistan has been fighting for his political life ever since Pakistan’s powerful military withdrew its support after it got tired of micromanaging a man who virtually claimed to know everything better than anyone but mismanaged a fragile economy and alienated Pakistan’s key allies: China and Saudi Arabia.
Imran Khan won around 30% of the popular vote in the 2018 elections and his (PTI) party won only 149 members out of the 342-members in Pakistan’s parliament. PTI formed a minority government with the help of some smaller parties including the Muhajir Quami Movement (MQM), a party with significant support in major cities of Pakistan’s Sindh province.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jff2Cp7vLjg&authuser=0
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) chairman, declared on 16 January 2021 that tabling a no-confidence motion was the only option to remove Imran Khan and his government and vowed to convince the members of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (an alliance led by former premier Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League party) on the strategy. This was reported by many local and international newspapers including Pakistan's premier English daily DAWN. It should be noted that Joe Biden had not even assumed office when Bilawal made this statement.
On 3 March 2021, PPP leader and former premier Yusuf Raza Gilani defeated Imran Khan’s finance minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh in elections for the Senate, the upper house of Parliament. This came as a major setback for Khan who had personally campaigned for his Cabinet colleague.
On 6 March 2021, Imran Khan won the trust vote in National Assembly following the defeat of his finance minister, ending the political uncertainty in the country. He secured 178 votes – just 6 votes more than the minimum 172 votes required- in the 342-member lower house of Parliament.
On 28 November 2021, PPP stalwart Khursheed Shah, indicating an in-house change in the Parliament, said the Opposition would have enough numbers to oust PM Imran Khan. On December 24, 2021, PML-N leader Ayaz Sadiq also hinted the Opposition was preparing for in-house change.
On 11 February 2022, the chief of Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) – an alliance that included former premier Nawaz Sharif’s party - Maulana Fazlur Rehman, on behalf of the Opposition, announced to bring a no-confidence motion against Imran Khan.
Khan after having lost the support of the seven MQM and a few other parliament members, lost the no-confidence vote on 9 April 2022, as the opposition was finally able to secure 174 votes to oust him. The events showed that it was as simple as that. That the MQM stopped supporting Khan because Pakistan’s military establishment withdrew its support may well have been the case but that is related more to domestic politics than a “global conspiracy” as alleged by Imran.
Imran, sensing his imminent defeat, had told a public meeting 27 March 2022 in Islamabad that a “foreign conspiracy” was behind the no-confidence motion and that “funding was being channelled into Pakistan from abroad. He didn’t name the United States.
After Khan lost the support of the MQM on 30 March 2022, he claimed the following day that the US “threatened” him and was seeking his removal from office in a televised address. He claimed, "...the letter stated that the no-confidence motion was being tabled even before it was filed, which means the Opposition was in contact with them," Imran alleged. As the events unfolded, it turned out that there was no letter at all. What Imran was referring to was a cypher message sent by then Pakistan’s Ambassador Asad Majeed Khan to the foreign ministry in Islamabad on March 7, 2021.
The conversation that set off the so-called ‘Lettergate’ scandal took place on March 7 at a farewell lunch for Asad Majeed Khan at his residence. US officials who attended the lunch included US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu and Deputy Assistant Secretary Lesslie C Viguerie. Such informal conversations are a matter of routine in international diplomacy and the U.S. officials are known to be frank and have used colourful language in the past during their meetings with Pakistani officials.
Pakistan’s local media has been fixated on that cable. It was discussed twice in the national security committee meetings attended by chiefs of armed forces as well as by the head of Pakistan's premier spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). According to an official press release, the National Security Committee (NSC), on 22 April 2022, “after reviewing the contents of the communication, the assessments received, and the conclusions presented by the security agencies, concludes that there has been no foreign conspiracy.”
When Imran visited the White House to see Trump in July 2019, he literally stammered when asked a question about Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani serving a sentence in the United States for terrorism-related charges. This showed that despite his posturing at home as a champion of an independent foreign policy, he was keen to expand relations with the United States and sat like an obedient junior and let Donald Trump do most of the talking.
One cable from an Ambassador, containing his interpretation or assessment, means little. A regime change conspiracy is a huge undertaking. Discussion on a cable without a regional and international context is rather childish. Noam Chomsky, the famed leftwing philosopher and an Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says that using the threatening letter as evidence of a coup is “meaningless”!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWWa9MRIV50&authuser=0
A United States think tank, The German Marshall Fund, published a report in September 2020 titled, Returning to the Shadows: “China, Pakistan, and the Fate of CPEC”. According to the author, Andrew Small, a noted China expert, “China has been sceptical about the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf government led by Prime Minister Imran Khan that took office in 2018.” The report stated: “perhaps the biggest problem for China was Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party. Any criticism was a shock to Beijing, which had been used to a situation where it was virtually untouchable in Pakistan.”
Here it is important to recall that it was Imran Khan’s advisor on trade Mr Razak Dawood who had muddied the Pak China relationship by issuing controversial statements about China Pakistan Economic Corridor program (CPEC) in Sep 2018. On Sep 10, 2018, it was reported by the Reuters: “Abdul Razak Dawood, the Pakistani cabinet member for commerce, industry and investment, suggested that all projects in the $57-billion could be eligible for suspensions.”
Earlier, the Financial Times had quoted Mr Dawood as saying: “Chinese companies received tax breaks, many breaks and have an undue advantage in Pakistan; this is one of the things we’re looking at because it’s not fair that Pakistan companies should be disadvantaged.” Although Dawood tried to clarify this later, but the message had been sent and damage done.
Razak Dawood, Imran’s advisor on trade said 8 February 2020: “We have not yet firmed up exact losses to be incurred because of this virus but it is going to slow down our imports from China”.
Imran Khan was given a frosty treatment on his last visit to China in Feb 2022. He had to wait 3 days before he could see the top leadership. He arrived in China on February 2, 2022, ostensibly to attend the winter Olympics, and it was only on the last day of his visit, on 5 February 2022, that the Chinese leader Xi Jingpin received him. That was the first meeting of the two leaders since the Imran Khan’s visit to China in October 2019.
No wonder, China’s Global Times , a state-backed newspaper, had this to say upon his ouster: “Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted from office in a no-confidence vote in the country's parliament on Sunday, but such a major political upheaval in Islamabad will not affect the solid friendship between China and Pakistan.”
It seems most analysts appearing on Pakistan’s TV channels don’t read international newspapers, they don’t analyse and love to shoot from the hip. It was actually China that was not pleased with Imran Khan. The United States didn’t care much.
Joe Biden didn’t even bother to make a telephone call since assuming office in January 2021. “The president of the United States hasn’t spoken to the prime minister of such an important country who the US itself says is make-or-break in some cases, in some ways, in Afghanistan — we struggle to understand the signal, right?” Moeed Yusuf, Pakistan’s national security adviser, told the Financial Times in an interview at Pakistan’s embassy in Washington. “We’ve been told every time that . . . [the phone call] will happen, it’s technical reasons or whatever. But frankly, people don’t believe it,” he said.
When Imran visited the White House to see Trump in July 2019, he literally stammered when asked a question about Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani serving a sentence in the United States for terrorism-related charges. This showed that despite his posturing at home as a champion of an independent foreign policy, he was keen to expand relations with the United States and sat like an obedient junior and let Donald Trump do most of the talking. Watching this 40-minute video of Imran’s visit to the White House is perhaps better than a thousand words. Imran spoke for barely a few minutes. He sat quietly as Trump made humiliating remarks about Pakistan. “The problem was Pakistan wasn’t doing anything for us. They were subversive,” Trump said. “To be honest, I think we have a better relationship with Pakistan right now.”
All of Imran’s posturing and talk about standing firm against the United States in the recent public meetings is for domestic consumption. However, this time, he has gone too far. His fans, there are millions of them in Pakistan, will find the truth in due course.