Re: Is Imran Khan playing with fire?
Sorry, didn’t mean to rain on the IK parade. Naturally, when someone calls himself a tsunami of revolution but won’t touch the security/military establishment, scrutiny is in order, and not just from the cynicists. His apologist stances are reckless if not disingenuous, and compel some to wonder where his ‘engagement’ starts and his ‘endorsement’ ends. I wouldn’t contradict the idea that he’s the ‘only hope’ for Pakistan right now, and people would be right to vote for him, if not simply to get out of the PPP-PML-MQM rut. But such sentiments say more about our dire straits than his competency. If we are indeed having an ‘Obama moment,’ we would be served well to tread carefully and avoid becoming superfans. As for his views on the Taliban, here’s Jason Burke’s ‘critical perspective’ in an article otherwise quite flattering of IK :
"For all the talk of tolerance, Khan’s party has been keeping some strange company recently, sharing a platform, for example, with the Difa-e-Pakistan or Pakistan Defence Council. This is a coalition of extremist groups which wants to end any Pakistani alliance with the USA and includes people who not only explicitly support the Afghan Taliban but who are associated with terrorist and sectarian violence. At one recent rally of the council in Islamabad, I met members of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, a Sunni group which has murdered thousands of Shias, while around me hundreds chanted: “Death to America.” Lashkar-e-Toiba, the organisation responsible for the 2008 attacks in Mumbai in India in which 166 died, is also part of the coalition. Mian Mohammed Aslam, the head of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a mass Islamist party similar to the Muslim Brotherhood in the Islamic world and dedicated to a similarly hardline, conservative programme, spoke warmly of “close relations” with Khan, even going as far as raising the prospect of an electoral pact with Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf in the coming elections, when I interviewed him.
Take, for example, his analysis of the violent insurgency in the western borders of his country. For most scholars, this is the result of a complex mix of factors: the breakdown of traditional society, war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the 2000s, the generalised radicalisation of the Islamic world since 2001, al-Qaeda’s presence, the Pakistani army’s operations in the area and the civilian casualties caused by drone strikes. The militants themselves, who behead supposed spies and drive out development workers or teachers, are increasingly unpopular. Yet Khan calls the violence a “fight for Pashtun solidarity against a foreign invader”. He insists “there is not a threat to Pakistan from Taliban ideology”.
(^This is the sort of dangerous, sophomoric approach to geopolitics that appeals to mental giants like Ali Azmat).
Imran Khan: the man who would be Pakistan’s next prime minister | World news | The Observer
