Like so much else in Pakistan’s labyrinthine politics, proving the military’s involvement in the Sharifs’ criminal convictions is impossible. It is clear, though, that the Sharifs had been leading in polls until that point, but that the army favored Imran Khan and his Islamist party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Pakistan Movement for Justice). In an interview in May, Khan declared his loyalty to the military. “It is the Pakistan Army and not an enemy army,” he said. “I will carry the army with me.” Two months later, the Sharifs were sitting in Adiala prison, and Khan was giving a victory speech to a rapt Pakistan—promising “open borders” with Afghanistan and an Islamic renaissance of Pakistan (already officially an Islamic Republic). [...]
Khan has played along. In another dog-whistle to hardline Islamists—those like Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, himself a pioneer of the Afghan jihad, who are already in his alliance, and others he hopes to attract—Khan last week reiterated his promise to create the “type of state that was established in Medina,” referring to the first Muslim city-state during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. Seconds earlier, Khan had also promised to make Pakistan the country that Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah had dreamed of.” The two, Jinnah’s secular democracy and Medina’s Islamic state, are polar opposites, but this Janus-faced leader is not bothered by the contradiction. [...]
The Pashtun-dominated Islamic state may be closer to Khan’s truth, and he doesn’t care whom he sacrifices to get it. In the past, Pakistani rulers of doubtful legitimacy have used religious strictures that control women, their clothing and behavior, as a convenient means of rallying support and consolidating political control. Khan looks likely to follow suit. In the past, he has opposed legislation criminalizing domestic violence and expressed his support for enforcing the Zina and Hudood Ordinances, which have been used to imprison women on the basis of unproven accusations of illicit sexual relations.
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