Imran Khan as prime minister would be bad news for Pakistan’s democracy

Imran Khan | Commons

Imran Khan would set back Pakistan by reversing progress towards civilian rule in a country long dominated by the army.

As Pakistan lurches toward parliamentary elections on July 25, cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan appears to be the front-runner to become the nuclear-armed Islamic republic’s next prime minister. In my latest Wall Street Journal column (read it here), I argue that this would set back Pakistan by reversing progress toward deepening civilian rule in a country long dominated by the army.

It’s easy to see why many Pakistanis admire Khan. Over the years, the 65-year-old has built a reputation for personal probity that is all too rare in South Asian politics. As captain of Pakistan’s cricket team in the 1980s and 1990s, Khan established himself as an inspirational leader of men. In 1992 he led his country to arguably its greatest sporting achievement: winning the quadrennial cricket World Cup.

Khan founded Pakistan’s first cancer hospital — in memory of his late mother — as well as a private university for underprivileged youth. His education at Oxford and life as a widely-traveled international sportsman have given him more exposure to the world — especially Britain and India — than the run-of-the-mill Pakistani politician.

Nonetheless, there’s reason to worry about what Khan’s ascendance means for Pakistan and South Asia more broadly.

For starters, Khan’s frontrunner status heading into the election is not entirely of his own making. He’s the beneficiary of the army’s determined bid to hobble arguably Pakistan’s most popular grassroots politician — former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Last year, the Supreme Court turfed Sharif out of office on the dubious grounds of not being “truthful and trustworthy” after prosecutors failed to prove corruption charges against him. Earlier this month, an anti-corruption court sentenced Sharif and his daughter and political heir, 44-year-old Maryam Nawaz Sharif, to prison terms for failing to produce a satisfactory money trail to explain their ownership of four luxury apartments in an upscale London neighborhood.

Nobody who follows Pakistan believes that the Sharifs are pure as the driven snow, though the idea of a wealthy business family owning high-end real estate is hardly shocking in itself. Their jailing is widely seen as payback by the military, Pakistan’s most powerful institution, for Nawaz Sharif’s attempt to prosecute former dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and for trying to assert civilian control over national security policy.

As the Pakistani commentator Zaigam Khan points out, “Imran Khan has succeeded in taking Pakistan’s politics back to 1990s.” This was a time when short-lived civilian governments rose and fell on the whims of the generals who actually ran the country from behind the scenes until formally taking charge in a coup in 1999.

If you believe that in the long run only democracy can ameliorate Pakistan’s many problems — in part by allowing elected leaders to channel more resources toward social spending rather than by supporting an over-sized military — then this is an unwelcome development.

According to the journalist Gul Bukhari, among others, Pakistan is already in the midst of an aggressive military crackdown against the media in an effort to ensure that the Sharifs are tarred and Khan gets favorable coverage. Hameed Haroon, the CEO of Dawn, Pakistan’s most respected media group, calls it “a new form of quasi-military censorship that is astonishingly aggressive in using both threats and coercion.”

Apart from his tendency to let the army fight his political battles for him, and lack of any visible attachment to democratic principles such as freedom of the press, Khan also shows a high degree of comfort with radical Islamists. He blames terrorism on America, rather than on the hateful ideology of jihadist groups such as the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Taiba, long backed by Pakistan’s army as proxies against Afghanistan and India.

His reluctance to condemn Islamist militants long ago earned Khan the moniker Taliban Khan. He is also an outspoken supporter of Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy laws, which are often used to terrorize defenseless religious minorities, including Christians, Ahmadiyya Muslims, and Hindus. This week Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, founder of the terrorist groups Harkatul Jihadul Islami and Harkatul Mujahideen, and a signatory of Osama bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of jihad against “the Jews and Crusaders,” joined Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party.

Finally, there’s the question of economics. Pandering to the lowest common denominator among voters, Khan promises to turn Pakistan into an “Islamic welfare state.” In reality, the Pakistani rupee has cratered since last year, and foreign exchange reserves are down to $11.4 billion, barely enough to cover ten weeks of imports. What his country needs is fiscal discipline, law and order to attract investment, and a large dose of free enterprise. Promising the people of a poor and flailing country a welfare state is not just fantastical but also irresponsible.

This article was originally published in American Enterprise Institute.