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In Pakistan, power rarely disappears. It retreats, recalibrates, returns and often in uniform. Since the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan in 2023, the country has been witnessing not merely the prosecution of a politician but the systematic erosion of any space for political dissent. Under Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s military establishment appears to have embarked on a deliberate, incremental campaign to marginalize and potentially erase its most formidable civilian challenger.
The method to silence Khan has not been spectacular but rather procedural in character. From once being seen as the military’s preferred candidate to run the civilian façade of government, he remains imprisoned in Adiala jail under the shadow of the General Headquarters of Rawalpindi. Over the months that have followed since, reports of deteriorating health conditions emerged amid recurrent allegations of mistreatment including torture. While the state has expectedly denied these allegations, yet the recent reports that Khan suffering severe vision loss in his right eye after a medical procedure conducted clandestinely on January 24 night at Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), have intensified concerns among supporters.
The Supreme Court appointed amicus curie, Salman Safdar who met Khan at Adiala jail, told the court that the imprisoned former prime minister had list nearly 85 per cent of eye sight in right eye. Khan’s sister Noreen Niazi accused Army Chief Asim Munir of subjecting him to “unimaginable mistreatment.”
Imran Khan, a global celebrity, a philanthropist, and former prime minister of Pakistan, has endured unimaginable mistreatment in prison under the directives of ‘Asim Law,’ now facing irreversible damage to his right eye as a direct consequence,” Noreen Niazi alleged in an X post, adding, “Why are they rejecting the supervision by Imran Khan’s personal doctors? Why are they rejecting the presence of Imran Khan’s family members? Our family is getting extremely worried. We do NOT accept any medical board they setup and control, we do NOT accept any report they manufacture! Family and personal doctors must be allowed to see Imran Khan!”
Whether these claims are fully verifiable or not, but the political message of the state seems clear: isolation is the objective. the political message is clear: isolation is the objective. Khan has been denied consistent access to family members and his personal physicians whereas his communication with party leaders remains tightly restricted. In modern authoritarian playbooks, the most effective silencing is not necessarily physical elimination but enforced irrelevance. A leader cut off from his movement slowly loses the capacity to mobilize it. And it seems Asim Munir led establishment has decided its course over Imran Khan, which is silence through isolation.
Yet Khan remains Pakistan’s most popular politician with multiple surveys by national and international continuing to place him far ahead of his rivals. For instance, a 2023 Gallup Pakistan report found that over 61 per cent of Pakistanis held a positive opinion of Imran Khan, significantly higher than his rivals. It is that enduring popularity which is precisely what makes him intolerable to the establishment. Interestingly, Khan’s relationship with the military was once considered as symbiotic. When he became prime minister in 2018, his opponents such as Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which are currently in the good books of army establishment, alleged that that his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) benefited from military’s behind-the-scenes support during elections. While Pakistan’s generals have long shaped the country’s political order both overtly through coups and covertly through electoral engineering, Khan, at the time, appeared aligned with that system.
But alliances in Pakistan’s civil-military matrix have always been transactional with Khan’s differences with military establishment on foreign policy and governance becoming visible in late 2021 and early 2022. And when the PTI government was removed through a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April 2022, many believed that Khan’s political rivals were nudged by General Bajwa from behind the scenes to engineer his ouster. And what followed after his removal was unprecedented as Khan did not retreat into quiet opposition. He directly accused the military leadership of political manipulation, including being part of a regime change operation with support from United States. While his rallies drew massive crowds, what was precedented was how for the first time in decades, a mainstream political leader openly named generals as political actors and seeking their return to barracks.
For the military leadership that defiance crossed a red line as no one had ever questioned army even after losing wars with India or having the country axed into two in 1971 with the fall of Dhaka. With Asim Munir succeeding General Bajwa as the Army Chief in late 2022, the establishment’s response hardened. Many factors converged to supplement state’s response towards Imran Khan and his PTI. For one, as prime minister, Khan had previously removed Munir, then a Lt. Gen. rank officer, from his post as Director General of Inter-Services Intelligence, the de facto number two position in Pakistan Army, in 2018. Secondly, his government had earlier sanctioned presidential reference against then Justice Qazi Faez Isa in 2019, who by 2023 became Chief Justice of Pakistan. While personal history may not explain institutional retaliation, but in Pakistan, the institutional and personal often blur.
When Imran Khan was initially arrested from the premises of the Islamabad High Court on May 9, 2023, Pakistan witnessed unprecedented protests with people targeting military installations, including the Corps Commander’s residence in Lahore and other sensitive installations. Pakistan Army framed these violent anti-establishment protests as an assault on the state itself. A sweeping crackdown followed, extending far beyond accountability for vandalism with hundreds of civilians and PTI workers arrested and dozens tried in military courts.
Soon the establishment turned to dismantle Khan PTI with senior party leaders abducted and pressured into televised renunciations. While some left politics altogether, others defected to a new pro-establishment Istehkam-e-Pakistan Party comprising mainly former PTI affiliates. The objective appeared less about punishing lawbreakers and more about dismantling an organizational network. The second prong of the strategy was institutional. The state leveraged legal and administrative tools to weaken PTI’s ability to contest elections effectively. The election commission withdrew party’s electoral symbol, forcing its nominees to run as independents. Yet, when elections were held in February 2024, while Khan’s nominees performed strongly, the fragmented results enabled a coalition of establishment-aligned parties to form government under Shehbaz Sharif.
Khan, meanwhile, faced an avalanche of legal cases. The Toshakhana case involving state gifts resulted in conviction and imprisonment, though higher courts later suspended aspects of the verdict. Yet each time bail appeared possible in one case, new charges emerged in another. By some counts, there are over 90 cases registered against him across Pakistan, which makes it not merely prosecution but legal suffocation. State’s pattern suggests a calibrated strategy to ensure that even if one judicial avenue opens, another closes, thereby keeping defendant and the party perpetually entangled and drain political momentum.
For the military establishment, silencing Imran Khan appears about reasserting the boundaries of permissible politics and preserve Pakistan Army’s hold over the levers of state power, including foreign policy. Khan’s rhetoric threatened to redraw those lines and risked normalizing civilian supremacy in areas the army considers its own.
These developments therefore suggest that the objective of Asim Munir-led establishment does not appear to be martyring Imran Khan through outright elimination, something that could ignite uncontrollable unrest, but neutralizing him through step-by-step approach of attrition. This prison isolation with restricted access to family, doctors and party leadership, a cascade of legal cases, the attempts to fragment PTI, and the coercion of his loyalists, point to a strategy of slow political asphyxiation. While each step taken individually can be justified as “lawful” or “procedural”, but together they form a pattern designed to exhaust, delegitimize and ultimately render irrelevant Pakistan’s most popular political figure. It seems to be a method calibrated to avoid spectacle while ensuring silencing through a steady tightening of institutional pressure.
-Arun Anand
For months, there have been speculations about Imran Khan’s fate behind the high walls of Adiala Jail in the garrison town of Rawalpindi where he remains imprisoned since 2023. But the question took a darker turn when the military establishment abruptly shifted its rhetoric as well as actions. After keeping Khan incommunicado for weeks by denying even routine family visitations, the Army has now begun portraying him as a security threat of unprecedented scale.
On December 5, in a sharply worded press conference, Director General of the Inter-Services Public Relations (DG ISPR) Lt. Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry delivered something far more political than any uniformed official should be comfortable pronouncing: he accused the former prime minister of being a “matter of national security,” a “delusional” leader working in “deep collusion” with foreign actors.
For an institution whose leadership has spent decades insisting on its political neutrality, not that there appeared any given their actions, this was something extraordinary. The Army did not merely criticize a political figure, but declared Imran Khan a national security threat. It is difficult to read such language as anything other than a preparation to shape public opinion before the state contemplates something irreversible. Pakistan’s military spokesmen have long been prone to sweeping condemnations of adversaries, but the intensity, timing, and vocabulary now being deployed against prime minister feels ominously different.
The accusation that Mr. Khan wrote to the International Monetary Fund urging it to halt financial engagement with Pakistan, the insinuation that he encouraged “civil disobedience” and non-payment of electricity bills, and, most seriously, the claim that he directed supporters to “target” the Army’s leadership constitute a narrative engineered to portray him not simply as a political rival, but an existential enemy of the state. What is striking is not whether Army’s allegations against Khan are objectively provable given Pakistanis know well that truth has rarely constrained the military’s political ambitions, but rather why the establishment feels compelled to publicly build a case right now. The last time something like this happened was under Gen. Ziaul Haq against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and everyone knows how that turned into.
Part of the answer lies in timing. Pakistan is no longer simply managing dissent; it is reordering the very architecture of the state. As the military centralizes power, constitutional checks have been amputated one amendment at a time. Judicial independence has been hollowed out. Other political parties, often willing accomplices, have little incentive to resist. In such an environment, the figure who refuses to bow becomes not merely inconvenient but intolerable.
To understand why the military felt the need to drop even the pretence of impartiality, one must look at the dramatic transformation underway within Pakistan’s political and constitutional architecture. Under Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, the military has embarked on the most ambitious power consolidation project in decades in the last three years. What began after the May 9, 2023 protests with the expansion of military courts to try civilians has now morphed into a full-blown restructuring of the state itself. The 26th Constitutional Amendment (October 2024) extended the tenures of the service chiefs across the Army, Navy, and Air Force, eliminating uncertainty around leadership renewal and enhancing institutional continuity in the Army’s favour. But it was the 27th Amendment, passed in November 2025, that fundamentally reconfigured Pakistan’s civil–military equation. It abolished the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, replaced it with the position of Chief of Defence Forces, to be concurrently held by the Army Chief, and effectively subordinated the other services under one office. In a nuclear-armed state with a history of military rule, that consolidation is not merely bureaucratic; it is structural.
Simultaneously, the judiciary, which for long was touted as a democratic bulwark against creeping political entrenchment of the military has been reshaped. First, its governance mechanisms were refashioned (26th Amendment). Then, Supreme Court powers were diluted by the recent creation of a Federal Constitutional Court (27th Amendment). This is not mere influence. It is systemic absorption.
Despite these transformations, one obstacle has stubbornly endured: Imran Khan. He remains, by most accounts, the most popular political figure in Pakistan. His party, which has been repressed, splintered, and blocked electorally, still retains vast grassroots following. For a military trying to secure lifetime authority, a leader with mass legitimacy is a direct threat.
Other political parties have chosen a more convenient path. Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and Pakistan People’s Party, historically adversaries of military dominance, have now become facilitators of constitutional engineering, trading democratic principle for short-term political advantage. Their acquiescence clears the path for the Army. Only Mr. Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) stands outside this arrangement.
Which brings us back to the recent press conference. By designating Mr. Khan a national security threat, the military is not merely attacking his reputation; rather, it is constructing a moral and political foundation upon which the state could justify extreme measures, including the possibility of execution. Such rhetoric helps contain public outrage before it erupts. It tells citizens that the state is acting reluctantly, compelled by a danger that only it fully understands. Because, in countries with fragile institutions like Pakistan, executions are rarely announced but prepared through such manoeuvrings.
For decades, Pakistan’s generals have governed from behind a curtain of denial when not in power through direct coup d’états. They intervened, but insisted they were not intervening. They shaped governments but claimed they were merely “facilitating democracy.” Now, that performance has ended. The uniform seems to be stepping onto the political stage without disguise.
The significance of this shift should not be underestimated. When a military stops pretending, it stops needing permission. When it openly criminalizes popular political leaders, it removes the final brake on its power. Pakistan is now at that precipice. And the most alarming part of the Army’s latest messaging is how carefully choreographed it seems: foreign collusion, national betrayal, internal threat, economic sabotage. These are not random allegations. They are elements of a legal and psychological template historically used to eliminate political enemies. As such, this campaign against Mr. Khan is no spontaneous outburst. It is calculated, sequential, and increasingly extreme. It aims not only to discredit him, but to normalize the idea that removing him, through legal pretexts or through execution, will be a matter of national necessity.
Pakistanis have seen this logic before, and they know where it leads. The difference is that today, the military is not acting in the shadows but speaking in the language of open justification. That should terrify anyone who still believes Pakistan’s future lies in civilian rule. The Army may not yet have decided what it will ultimately do with Imran Khan. But one thing is clear that it is preparing the public emotionally, politically, and morally for a step it once would have feared to take. And if that step comes, no one will be able to say they were not warned.
When waves of youth-led unrest swept across South Asia after Sri Lanka’s uprising in 2022, analysts began to ask which country would be next. While Bangladesh followed the suit in 2024 leading to Sheikh Hasina’s exit and most recently Nepal, many wondered whether it will arrive in Pakistan which ticked every box that fuels such movements: economic collapse in parts, high youth unemployment, cronyism, and a political class that many young people see as tone-deaf.
Yet, unlike Kathmandu, Dhaka or Colombo, Karachi and Lahore did not become the epicentres of mass, ideologically diffuse youth uprisings. The answer to Pakistan’s current insulation from such a rupture lies not in popular contentment but in a set of deliberate institutional, legal, and narrative controls that have blunted the emergence of a nationwide, cross-cutting youth movement.
In case of Pakistan, it all boils down to the state’s most powerful actor: the Pakistan Army. The institution’s unprecedented response to May 9, 2023, violence after former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s arrest made clear that any mass movement threatening the army’s prerogatives would be met with force and lawfare. In the weeks and months that followed, hundreds of civilians accused of taking part in the unrest were tried by military courts. By signalling that protest could carry the risk of military prosecution, the establishment transformed the costs of visible mobilization for would-be demonstrators.
But coercion alone does not explain the lack of a Gen Z wave. The military-dominated state establishment has shored up its actions with a legal and rhetorical infrastructure that normalises repression. As has been demonstrated in the last few years, pliant civilian governments like Shehbaz Sharif’s and a compliant judiciary conferred legality on the state’s repressive measures such as sanctifying military trials of civilians or amending constitutional provisions to further empower the establishment. Those measures do more than punish by creating an atmosphere of fear and unpredictability. Young people who might otherwise risk a night on the streets calculate not only the immediate danger of police or paramilitary response, but the prospect of prolonged detention, disqualification from public life, or long legal battles.
Parallel to legal tools is the information control that has acted as a central plank of the establishment’s strategy. Whenever protests erupt in peripheral provinces of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa predominantly over Pakistan Army’s human rights violations, such protests are often framed as the work of foreign-backed secessionists or direct foreign hands. That securitized framing strips popular grievances of their political valence and paints them as existential threats to national unity. In practice, branding a local protest “anti-state” or “sponsored” is used to delegitimize sympathy from the broader public, making it far harder for disparate movements to coalesce into a national youth narrative. The rise and proscribing of movements by Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) and Baloch Yekjehiti Committees (BYC) show how Pakistani media framing, often echoing official lines, reinforces the divide between “patriotic” majorities and “dangerous” minorities.
Targetted media campaigns have not just been employed in the restive provinces. After the no-confidence motion that ousted Imran Khan’s government in 2022, for example, street mobilisation by the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) demonstrated how quickly the public discourse was polarized. And when May 9 anti-establishment protests against Khan’s arrest saw the sanctity of the military fortresses breached for the first time ever, the state-aligned media quickly presented protesters as partisan, violent, or manipulated by foreign backed actors. Such a characterisation is employed to keep young citizens viewing politics through the prism of party loyalties, ethnic identity, or regional grievance rather than shared economic and civic concerns that cut across such lines.
Economic desperation, however, remains a dormant accelerant. It is not that in this age of information and unprecedented access to social media technologies Pakistan’s young demographic are not aware of stagnant opportunity, rising living costs, and the politics of patronage. What has kept them off the streets is not indifference but fragmentation. Herein, the long cultivated and institutionalized provincial, ethnic and sectarian cleavages work as dampers on the kind of cross-class, cross-regional solidarities that have powered Gen Z uprisings elsewhere in the region. Until youth can imagine a politics that transcends these divisions, protest energy tends to boil over locally and then dissipate.
So, the question arises what would it take for Pakistan’s Gen-Z to break the shackles of current status quo? The foremost answer lies in the creation of a shared political vocabulary that could link bread-and-butter economic grievances to common governance failures, rather than reducing dissent to ethnic or partisan labels. The youth need to see beyond the ethnic and sectarian identities and through the façade of the agendas of current political elite. The recent Gen-Z waves across South Asia show that when youth movements craft a shared language of rights and justice, they can force rapid political concessions. But for such realisation, they ought to avoid being swallowed by existing cleavages.
It is important to note the asymmetry here: the state does not need to be omnipotent to prevent a Gen-Z uprising; it only needs to be better at dividing and dissuading than youth movements are at unifying. Pakistan’s both formal and informal institutions have operated precisely along those lines. They have made it costly to imagine a nationwide movement and profitable, for the moment, to keep politics provincial and securitized. For many young Pakistanis, an act of national solidarity means choosing sides in a polarized landscape where the risks of losing are existential.
That is not to say the powder keg cannot ignite. Economic shocks, a dramatic political miscalculation, or a new generation of conscious young political minds who can tell a cross-communal story of grievance and hope could change the calculus quickly. But for now, Pakistani establishment’s latest respite from a Gen-Z uprising is a function of strategy as much as suppression. This includes a combination of military deterrence, legal architecture, media framing, and the deliberate maintenance of social fissures. If the most connected and potentially volatile cohort of young demographics of the country are to convert frustration into sustained collective action, they will have to imagine a politics that can outmaneuver the state’s oldest playbook: divide, delegitimise, and dominate.
The question for military-dominated Pakistani establishment’s future is not whether its young are angry, which they are anyway, but whether they can learn to be strategic, patient, and cross-communal enough to build a movement that it cannot simply criminalize, fragment, or outbid. Until that happens, the streets will remain dangerous ground that too many are unwilling to risk alone.