The passage of this historic legislation was celebrated by Prime Minister Modi on X, stating that it would mark a significant milestone for his government together with the abrogation of Article 370, the Citizenship Amendment Act, and the Ram Temple construction. Very grandly put, but the legislation is highly contentious and complicated in its purpose, consequences, and outlook on Waqf properties spread across 9.4 lakh acres across India, making them the third-largest landholder in the country after Railways and Defence Forces.

What Is Waqf, and Why Does It Matter?

In the Islamic system of law, a Waqf is regarded as a charitable trust whereby an individual sets aside property-whether land, buildings, or other assets-for religious or social purposes. In its designation, the property is said to have been transferred to Allah so that it may be administered by a custodian (mutawalli) in fulfilment of specific purposes like the endowment of mosques, graveyards, or welfare activities. In India, this centuries-old practice has, however, been codified and regulated through various enactments starting from the Muslim Wakf Validating Act of 1913 to the Waqf Act of 1995, as amended in 2013. Presently 32 state Waqf Boards and a Central Waqf Council are in charge of these assets.

The scale of Waqf assets is indeed staggering: millions of properties, mosques, cemeteries, shops, and agricultural land. In theory, their income should be utilised for the education, healthcare, and welfare of the Muslim community. Mismanagement, corruption, and a poor revenue-generating capacity remained the catchwords for the schemes in practice-the last being about ₹163 crore a year as per the Sachar Committee Report in 2006. The report mentioned that if properly managed, Waqf could have made 12,000 crore ($1.4 billion) today, establishing a chasm between what could be and what is the functioning by the government, which now claims to correct.

The Bill: Key Changes and Controversies

The Waqf (Amendment) Bill is intended to introduce radical reforms intended to modernise and centralise Waqf administration. Among its most controversial provisions:

1. Abolition of ‘Waqf by User’ and Section 40: It was often said that “Waqf by user” applies to properties that had been put to religious uses for very long periods, such as ancient mosques or graveyards, making them Waqf even in the absence of formal documentation. According to Section 40 of the 1995 Act, it was also possible for Waqf Boards to determine unilaterally whether a property was under their purview. The new bill does away with both provisions and makes it mandatory for district collectors to undertake surveys and verify claims, a move the government says will stem the tide of arbitrary land grabbing. Critics fear, though, that it could endanger myriad undocumented historical sites to litigation and reclamation.

2. Centralised Registration and Transparency: The bill obliges all Waqf properties to be listed on the government portal within six months of its enactment, thereby promoting transparency. Disputes, which were previously adjudicated solely by Waqf Tribunals, can now be appealed in high courts, thus subject to the erstwhile arguments of ensuring justice, but critics say centralising control under the state.

3. Inclusion of Non-Muslims and Women: The bill proposes that in the Central Waqf Council (22 members) and state boards, aside from two Muslim women and representatives of Muslim communities (Pasmanda¹), four and three non-Muslim members, respectively, should be included. The government suggests this is a progressive step since Waqf decisions affect non-Muslims as well. On the other hand, opposition leaders, such as AIMIM’s Asaduddin Owaisi, argue that the diversity is not required for Hindu temple boards, thereby accusing the BJP of selective interference.

4. Inheritance Rights: A prohibition against Waqf dedications that disinherit daughters contributes towards gender equity. However, critics have noted the anomaly-the Hindu law on inheritance continues to allow fathers to discriminate in favour of their sons, and no reforms have been made to address this.

5. Limitation Law: Property disputes will be subject to a limitation period, thereby precluding claims more than “x” years after the event. While this purportedly hastens the wheels of justice, it has evoked opposition, such as by Abhishek Manu Singhvi, who warns that lingering unresolved cases might legitimise illegal encroachments under the evil doctrine of “adverse possession.”

The Debate: Polarization and Power Plays

Confusion and Vast Misdirection: The next step is to satisfy the Parliament’s vagaries. In the Lok Sabha, 288 MPs voted for it and 232 against. The Rajya Sabha saw 128 votes for and 95 against. TDP and JD(U) are allies, while BJP got help from the YSRCP and BJD, which allowed free votes among their MPs to ensure the simple majority was achieved.

Kiren Rijiju, the Minister of Minority Affairs, introduced the bill on April 2, citing “97 lakh petitions” from stakeholders as proof of public demand for one that would uplift poor Muslims and modernise the broken system. He charged Waqf Boards with misusing their powers to lay claims to properties such as that of Delhi’s CGO Complex or land of a 1,500-year-old Tiruchendur temple in Tamil Nadu, aided on many occasions by past Congress governments.

The substantive opposition came from Congress, DMK, and RJD. A. Raja of DMK stated the existing process involving independent survey commissioners and civil procedure codes prevented arbitrary acquisitions and charged that the BJP was exaggerating the ills so that control could be gained via district collectors who lack the independence of earlier officials. Congress member Imran Pratapgarhi disproved all claims that Waqf Tribunals were unaccountable “religious panchayats,” emphasising judicial scrutiny of their operations since the 1995 Act. Manoj Jha from RJD posed the question of how sites centuries old could have modern documentation and predicted a “mountain of litigation.”

Owaisi and others posed a much graver question: the stripping of “Waqf by user” status and demands for paperwork could put historic properties on shaky ground, making them susceptible to takeovers by the government or corporations. They reminded them that of the 14,500 hectares of Waqf land in Uttar Pradesh, 14,000 hectares were recently declared state land, including old mosques and graveyards, a precedent they fear would become widespread.

A Watershed Moment—or a Polarising Ploy?

Crossing the divide, Modi’s term resonates differently. For BJP, the bill is a stroke of genius, falling well into its agenda of uniformity and reform. His supporters contend that it follows in the lines of Waqf modernisation of Muslim countries-transferring lands for public welfare. Rijiju assured that registered Waqf properties would not be touched, letting slide much-elaborated fears of retrospective actions.

But “Jai Shri Ram” chants resounded through parliament once the passage was done, with critics like Uddhav Thackeray branding it a conspiracy to adopt Waqf lands for crony capitalists. The opposition plans to challenge the bill in the Supreme Court, which cites the guarantee of Article 26 on religious autonomy and warns of increased communal tensions as the result of this bill.

The best test for the bill lies ahead yet. Will it streamline Waqf management and improve income back to Muslims, as the government claims? Or will it create polarisation, case-laden challenges, and space grabs as its detractors predict? As 99% of Waqf properties have already been digitised (per an affidavit by the government in 2020), whether such upheaval needs elimination is being debated. As India watches on, this UMEED Act, born of hope, may yet find whether it delivers progress or oozes deeper divides.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Syed Salman Mehdi.

Security forces in Pakistan arrested over 1,000 supporters of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan during a march on the capital of Islamabad. Protesters had vowed to stage a sit-in until Khan — who has been imprisoned since August 2023 on what are widely viewed as politically motivated charges — was released, but ended their efforts after six people were killed. Our guest Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, who teaches political economy at Islamabad’s Quaid-i-Azam University, discusses the political maneuvering behind Khan’s dramatic ouster and explains how Khan’s image as an “outsider” in Pakistani politics contributes to his lasting public appeal.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The journalists are among 13 media workers from four independent outlets charged since November with currency smuggling related to alleged receipt of Western donor funding. The charges have been brought amid a decline in relations between Azerbaijan and the West and as the country prepares to host the COP29 climate conference in November.

“Azerbaijan must stop using incarceration and travel bans as a tactic to silence and intimidate journalists,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “The authorities should drop all charges and restrictions on their movements and immediately release those still in detention.”

Pretrial detentions of the following journalists have been extended since June 10:
* Investigative journalist Hafiz Babali ( two months and one week extension, July 9)
* Toplum TV video editor Mushfig Jabbar (three-month extension, July 4)
* Toplum TV founder Alasgar Mammadli (three-month extension, July 3)
* Kanal 13 director Aziz Orujov (three-month extension, June 25)
* Kanal 13 journalist Shamo Eminov (three-month extension, June 25)
* Meclis.info founder Imran Aliyev (two-month extension, June 13)
* Abzas Media director Ulvi Hasanli, editor-in-chief Sevinj Vagifgizi, and project manager Mahammad Kekalov (three-month extension, June 12)
* Abzas Media journalist Nargiz Absalamova (three-month extension, June 11)
* Abzas Media journalist Elnara Gasimova (two-month extension, June 10).   

Authorities have rejected multiple petitions by Mammadli’s lawyers to transfer him to house arrest so he can undergo further tests for suspected thyroid cancer and he has filed a complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Council following what relatives say was an incomplete medical examination conducted while he was under police guard.

Toplum TV journalists Farid Ismayilov and Elmir Abbasov have been released under travel bans pending trial.

All of the journalists face up to eight years in prison if convicted under Article 206.3.2 of Azerbaijan’s criminal code. Azerbaijani legislation requires official approval for foreign grants, which is routinely denied, while authorities exert pressure on advertisers to squeeze out domestic sources of funding.

Separately, police questioned Shamshad Agha, head of independent news website Arqument.az and a former Toplum TV journalist, on July 5 as a witness in the Toplum TV case and informed him that he was under a travel ban, the journalist told local media. CPJ is investigating reports that at least 20 other journalists may also be banned from leaving the country and that some are also subject to bank account freezes.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, who secured a fifth consecutive term in February, has rejected criticism of the arrests, saying Azerbaijan “must protect [its] media environment from external negative influences” and media representatives “who illegally receive funding from abroad” were arrested within the framework of the law.

CPJ emailed the Ministry of Internal Affairs for comment on the pretrial extensions and travel bans and the Penitentiary Service for comment on Mammadli’s medical examination, but did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Mir, who hosts the flagship political show “Capital Talk” on Geo News and has survived at least two previous assassination attempts, told CPJ that he had received multiple death threats on social media and warnings that his life was in danger from two journalists familiar with the situation. Mir had reported the threats to the police last week in the capital, Islamabad, but they had yet to register a First Information Report needed to open an investigation.

On April 28, journalist Imran Riaz Khan posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he had been told that “preparations are being made to take actions” against Mir for his comments in support of freedom of speech in Pakistan, where journalists say they are often harassed and attacked by the military, political groups, and criminals.

Mir also told CPJ that he saw at least two people filming him last week while he was in his vehicle near his Islamabad home but they ran away when he approached them. Mir also reported this to the police.

On April 24, Mir filed a complaint to the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), which investigates cybercrimes, asking the agency to register a case against Jan Achakzai, the former information minister of southwestern Baluchistan province, for repeatedly insulting Mir on X, including calling him a “traitor.” In the complaint, reviewed by CPJ, Mir said that Achakzai’s “malicious attacks” undermined his credibility and jeopardized his safety.

On May 1, Achakzai said on X that he had been summoned to appear at the FIA’s Cybercrime Reporting Center on May 3. He criticized Mir for advocating for freedom of expression and for using his show to talk to separatists in Baluchistan.

“The threats and online hate campaign against one of Pakistan’s most prominent television anchors illustrate the severity of intimidation and pressure faced by journalists in Pakistan,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi . “Pakistani security agencies must immediately act against those trying to silence Hamid Mir and hold them accountable.” 

Press freedom advocate

Mir has consistently advocated for press freedom in Pakistan.

On April 27, he filed a petition in the Islamabad High Court seeking the formation of a judicial commission to investigate the 2022 killing of Pakistani journalist Arshad Sharif in Kenya. In February, Mir spoke out on “Capital Talk” against the detention of journalists Imran Riaz Khan and Asad Ali Toor. In 2021, Mir was suspended from his talk show at Geo News after criticizing the military at a rally in support of Toor, who had been beaten up by unidentified men.

Mir has survived at least two attempted assassinations — in 2014 he was shot and in 2012 his driver found explosives planted under his car. In 2011, Mir publicly shared a death threat that he received after criticizing the military, judiciary, and intelligence services.

Since 1992, 64 journalists have been killed in connection with their work in Pakistan, CPJ data shows. Pakistan ranked 11th on CPJ’s 2023 Global Impunity Index, which ranks countries by how often the killers of journalists go unpunished.

On April 3, exiled Afghan journalist, Ahmad Hanayesh, was attacked by armed men in Islamabad. On March 14, Pakistani journalist Jam Saghir Ahmed Lar was shot dead in Pakistan’s central Punjab province.

CPJ’s text messages to information minister Attaullah Tarar and Syed Shahzad Nadeem Bukhari, deputy Inspector General of Police in Islamabad, requesting comment on the threats against Mir did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

In Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif was sworn in Monday as prime minister for a second time, days after newly elected members of Parliament were seated amid protests by lawmakers from the party of ousted and jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Sharif will lead a coalition government after none of the major parties won a majority of parliamentary seats in February’s election, when Khan supporters accused the military of election tampering. Regardless of actual policy, Khan’s enduring popularity as an anti-establishment figure comes from “a young, disaffected population, a set of regimes that historically does not deliver, and underlying structural crises that just get worse,” says Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, associate professor of political economy at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. “That’s why I think you have this groundswell of opinion which is both anti-domestic elite and also anti-foreign elite.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On March 1, the journalist—whose current affairs YouTube channel Imran Riaz Khan has some 4.6 million subscribers—was freed on bail in a corruption case and re-arrested hours later, on separate terrorism charges, outside a court in the eastern city of Lahore, according to multiple media reports and Azhar Siddique, one of Khan’s lawyers, who spoke to CPJ.

“Pakistan authorities must immediately and unconditionally release journalist Imran Riaz Khan and stop detaining journalists in retaliation for their work or commentary,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “The detention of Khan and other outspoken journalists highlights the systematic crackdown on the press. Newly elected Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif must end this relentless campaign of intimidation against the media once and for all.”

On Sunday, Pakistan lawmakers elected Sharif as prime minister for a second term, following the February 8 national elections, which were marred by claims of vote-rigging and delayed results. He held the same position between April 2022 and August 2023.

An anti-terrorism court ordered that Khan be held for five days in police custody, until March 6, pending investigation, according to a court order, reviewed by CPJ. The police then transferred Khan to an unknown location outside Lahore, according to Siddique and a journalist familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

Khan was accused of attacking police officials and damaging government vehicles on March 14, 2023, at a protest by supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan in Lahore, according to Siddique, who described the case as “fake and fabricated.”

Khan was at the scene reporting for BOL News, for which he was a news anchor at the time, Faysal Aziz Khan, BOL Network’s President and Chief News Officer, told CPJ via messaging app.

The court ordered that the journalist be remanded in police custody on the basis of a March 2023 police first information report—a document opening an investigation—involving charges of stone-pelting, throwing petrol bombs, and intervening in state matters, according to his lawyer Siddique, who said that neither he nor his client had received a copy of the report.

Khan faces a separate case involving allegations of a corrupt land deal, after police arrested him on February 22 in a night raid on his Lahore home and seized his personal devices, according to news reports and the journalist familiar with the case. Khan was freed on bail on March 1, before his re-arrest later that day on terrorism charges.

Interview with BBC over previous arrest

Prominent Pakistani anchor Hamid Mir told CPJ that he believed Khan’s recent interview with the BBC played a role in his arrest.

In a BBC documentary “Pakistan: Journalists Under Fire,” released on February 16, Khan said that he was held in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer for 142 days after he was arrested in May 2023 at Punjab’s Sialkot Airport.

The journalist’s 2023 arrest came amid a crackdown on supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan—who was ousted after a no-confidence vote in 2022 and jailed in 2023 on corruption charges—and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party.

Khan, who hosts PTI supporters on his talk show and posts pro-PTI content on his YouTube channel, was previously arrested in July 2022 and February 2023 in relation to his political commentary.

Khan was summoned by the Federal Investigation Agency’s cybercrime wing in January and February for questioning over alleged involvement in an anti-judiciary campaign.

Police in Punjab province, of which Lahore is the capital city, did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment via email.

Separately, independent journalist Asad Ali Toor remains in custody more than a week after his February 26 arrest by the Federal Investigation Agency’s cybercrime wing. The agency had summoned Toor, who covers political affairs on his YouTube channel, for questioning.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

WASHINGTON -- U.S. semiconductor firms must strengthen oversight of their foreign partners and work more closely with the government and investigative groups, a group of experts told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, saying the outsourcing of production overseas has made tracking chip sales more difficult, enabling sanctions evasion by Russia and other adversaries.

U.S. semiconductor firms largely produce their chips in China and other Asian countries from where they are further distributed around the world, making it difficult to ascertain who exactly is buying their products, the experts told the committee at a hearing in Washington on February 27.

The United States and the European Union imposed sweeping technology sanctions on Russia to weaken its ability to wage war following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russia’s military industrial complex is heavily reliant on Western technology, including semiconductors, for the production of sophisticated weapons.

“Western companies design chips made by specialized plants in other countries, and they sell them by the millions, with little visibility over the supply chain of their products beyond one or two layers of distribution,” Damien Spleeters, deputy director of operations at Conflict Armament Research, told senators.

He added that, if manufacturers required point-of-sale data from distributors, it would vastly improve their ability to trace the path of semiconductors recovered from Russian weapons and thereby identify sanctions-busting supply networks.

The banned Western chips are said to be flowing to Russia via networks in China, Turkey, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

Spleeters said he discovered a Chinese company diverting millions of dollars of components to sanctioned Russian companies by working with U.S. companies whose chips were found in Russian weapons.

That company was sanctioned earlier this month by the United States.

'It's Going To Be Whack-A-Mole'

The committee is scrutinizing several U.S. chip firms whose products have turned up in Russian weapons, Senator Richard Blumenthal (Democrat-Connecticut) said, adding “these companies know or should know where their components are going.”

Spleeters threw cold water on the idea that Russia is acquiring chips from household appliances such as washing machines or from major online retail websites.

“We have seen no evidence of chips being ripped off and then repurposed for this,” he said.

“It makes little sense that Russia would buy a $500 washing machine for a $1 part that they could obtain more easily,” Spleeters added.

In his opening statement, Senator Ron Johnson (Republican-Wisconsin) said he doubted whether any of the solutions proposed by the experts would work, noting that Russia was ramping up weapons production despite sweeping sanctions.

“You plug one hole, another hole is gonna be opening up, it's gonna be whack-a-mole. So it's a reality we have to face,” said Johnson.

Russia last year imported $1.7 billion worth of foreign-made microchips despite international sanctions, Bloomberg reported last month, citing classified Russian customs service data.

Johnson also expressed concern that sanctions would hurt Western nations and companies.

“My guess is they're just going to get more and more sophisticated evading the sanctions and finding components, or potentially finding other suppliers...like Huawei,” Johnson said.

Huawei is a leading Chinese technology company that produces chips among other products.

James Byrne, the founder and director of the open-source intelligence and analysis group at the Royal United Services Institute, said that officials and companies should not give up trying to track the chips just because it is difficult.

'Shocking' Dependency On Western Technology

He said that the West has leverage because Russia is so dependent on Western technology for its arms industry.

“Modern weapons platforms cannot work without these things. They are the brains of almost all modern weapons platforms,” Byrne said.

“These semiconductors vary in sophistication and importance, but it is fair to say that without them Russia … would not have been able to sustain their war effort,” he said.

Byrne said the depth of the dependency on Western technology -- which goes beyond semiconductors to include carbon fiber, polymers, lenses, and cameras -- was “really quite shocking” considering the Kremlin’s rhetoric about import substitution and independence.

Elina Ribakova, a Russia expert and economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said an analysis of 2,800 components taken from Russian weapons collected in Ukraine showed that 95 percent came from countries allied with Ukraine, with the vast majority coming from the United States. The sample, however, may not be representative of the actual distribution of component origin.

Ribakova warned that Russia has been accelerating imports of semiconductor machine components in case the United States imposes such export controls on China.

China can legally buy advanced Western components for semiconductor manufacturing equipment and use them to manufacture and sell advanced semiconductors to Russia, Senator Margaret Hassan (Democrat-New Hampshire) said.

Ribakova said the manufacturing components would potentially allow Russia to “insulate themselves for somewhat longer.”

Ribakova said technology companies are hesitant to beef up their compliance divisions because it can be costly. She recommended that the United States toughen punishment for noncompliance as the effects would be felt beyond helping Ukraine.

“It is also about the credibility of our whole system of economic statecraft. Malign actors worldwide are watching whether they will be credible or it's just words that were put on paper,” she said.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

“Ukraine is and will remain France’s priority. The defense of the fundamental principles of international law is being played out in Ukraine,” he told a Kyiv news conference alongside his counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, on January 13.

“Russia is hoping that Ukraine and its supporters will tire before it does. We will not weaken. That is the message that I am carrying here to the Ukrainians. Our determination is intact,” said Sejourne, who was making his first foreign journey since being appointed to the position on January 11.

WATCH: After Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a "partial mobilization" in fall 2022, over 300,000 reservists were drafted into the war in Ukraine, which Russia calls a "special military operation." A year later, women formed The Way Home initiative to demand that their family members be discharged and sent back home. The women wear white shawls as a symbol of their protest.

Kuleba thanked Sejourne for making his journey to Kyiv despite “another massive shelling by Russia. I am grateful to him for his courage, for not turning back."

Sejourne arrived in the Ukrainian capital within hours of a combined missile-and-drone attack by Russia that triggered Ukrainian air defenses in several southern and eastern regions early on January 13.

Sejourne's visit represented the latest Western show of support for Kyiv in its ongoing war to repel Russia's 22-month-old full-scale invasion.

"For almost 2 years, Ukraine has been on the front line to defend its sovereignty and ensure the security of Europe," Sejourne said on X, formerly Twitter. "France's aid is long-term."

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

Ukraine has struggled to secure further funding for its campaign from the United States and the European Union, the latter of which is grappling with opposition from member Hungary.

The French Foreign Ministry posted an image of Sejourne and said he'd "arrived in Kyiv for his first trip to the field, in order to continue French diplomatic action there and to reiterate France's commitment to its allies and alongside civilian populations."

"Despite the multiplying crisis, Ukraine is and will remain France's priority," AFP later quoted Sejourne as saying in Kyiv. He said "the fundamental principles of international law and the values of Europe, as well as the security interests of the French" are at stake there.

Earlier, the General Staff of Ukraine's military said Russia had launched 40 missiles and attack drones targeting Ukrainian territory.

It said Ukrainian air defenses shot down eight of the incoming attacks and 20 others missed their targets. It said the Russian weapons included "winged, aerobic, ballistic, aviation, anti-controlled missiles, and impact BPLAs."

They reportedly targeted the eastern Kharkiv, Luhansk, and Donetsk regions.

RFE/RL cannot independently confirm claims by either side in areas of the heaviest combat.

Air alerts sounded in several regions of Ukraine.

A day earlier, Polish radio and other reports quoted recently inaugurated Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk as saying he would visit Ukraine soon to discuss joint security efforts and to talk about Polish truckers' grievances over EU advantages for Ukrainian haulers.

Tusk, a former Polish leader and European Council president who was sworn in for a new term as Polish prime minister in mid-December, has been a vocal advocate of strong Polish and EU support for Ukraine.

"I really want the Ukrainian problems of war and, more broadly security, as well as policy toward Russia, to be joint, so that not only the president and the prime minister, but the Polish state as a whole act in solidarity in these issues," Tusk said.

The U.S. Congress has been divided over additional aid to Ukraine, with many Republicans opposing President Joe Biden's hopes for billions more in support.

An EU aid proposal of around 50 billion euros ($55 billion) was blocked by Hungary, although other members have said they will pursue "technical" or other means of skirting Budapest's resistance as soon as possible.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has warned that delays in aid can severely hamper Ukrainians' ongoing efforts to defeat invading Russian forces.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

A crucial document from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, undermines a major plank in the high-profile prosecution of the country’s former prime minister, Imran Khan.

Khan remains behind bars while he faces trial for allegedly mishandling a secret document, known as a cypher, which the prosecution claims compromised the integrity of the encrypted communication system used by the state’s security apparatus. But according to an ISI analysis leaked to The Intercept, that claim is entirely false. Internally, the agency concluded that the leak of the text of a cypher could in no way compromise the integrity of the system, an assessment contrary to public claims made repeatedly by prosecutors.

The main charge against Khan relates to his handling of a diplomatic cable describing a key meeting in March 2022 between U.S. and Pakistani officials in Washington. Khan, while prime minister, had repeatedly alluded to the existence of a cypher that outlined U.S. pressure on Pakistan to remove him from power in a vote of no confidence. Though he never disclosed its full contents, at times, in public speeches, he quoted statements recorded in it from U.S. officials promising to reward Pakistan for his ouster. At one rally, Khan even waved what he said was the printed text of the document, without revealing its exact contents.

Prosecutors assert that Khan damaged Pakistani national security by exposing the text of this encrypted document, contents they say could potentially be used by rival intelligence agencies to crack the code of a wide range of other secret Pakistani communications. A criminal complaint against Khan alleges that he “compromised the entire cypher security system of the state and secret communication method of Pakistani missions abroad,” through his alleged mishandling of the cypher. The former prime minister faces up to 10 years in prison if found guilty under Pakistan’s Official Secrets Act and could face the death penalty if charged with treason in the case.

On August 9, 2023, The Intercept published the text of the cypher outlining U.S. pressure against Pakistan to remove Khan. Shortly afterward, Pakistan’s own intelligence agency issued an assessment addressing the very question of how damaging publishing such a text would be.

The internal conclusion of the ISI was crystal clear: No threat to Pakistan’s encryption existed.

Pakistan did not respond to a request for comment.

On August 11, two days after The Intercept story was published, an internal request for information was sent to the ISI by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The question at hand: Does the revelation of the plain text of such a cypher compromise the integrity of the system’s encryption? The response, filed by the Inter-Services Intelligence Secretariat under the heading ISI-Policy Matters, and titled “Breach of Crypto Security,” determined that contrary to the present charges against Khan, revealing the text of a cypher poses no risk to the government’s encrypted communications network. “If plain text of an encrypted message (cryptogram) … is leaked it has no effect on security of encryptor,” the analysis, which was filed on August 23, concludes. “Leakage of a plain text message does not compromise the algorithm.”

Concern about the security of an encryption system is not entirely unfounded. Some encryption systems can theoretically be compromised by what is known as a “plaintext attack,” in which an attacker has access to a copy of both the plain and encrypted versions of a document’s text and can use the two versions to determine the encryption system.

But the spy agency’s conclusion in the days following The Intercept’s publication of the secret cypher was that the disclosure of the short piece of text alone — without the encryption key — did not pose a risk.

“If plain text of an encrypted message (cryptogram) using DTE is leaked, it has no effect on security of the encryptor due to following,” the analysis reads, referring to “an offline encryption device.”

“The encryption algorithm,” it goes on to explain, “is designed with an assumption that the plain/cipher text pairs and algorithms are known to the adversary, the security lies in the secrecy of the key. Therefore leakage of a plain text message does not compromise the algorithm.”

According to the agency’s own analysis, to launch a plaintext attack an adversary would need a minimum of 2²⁵⁶ bits of “plain/cipher text data encrypted with the same key” to figure it out. That would be an amount of text that exceeds not just the length of Khan’s diplomatic cable, but also the total amount of digital storage space available worldwide. In other words, there was never any risk whatsoever that publishing the contents of the cypher could allow an adversary to crack the state’s encryption system.

“Not Compromised”

The cypher published by The Intercept deals with a March 7, 2022, meeting between a senior State Department official, Donald Lu, and Pakistan’s then-ambassador to the U.S. The document describes a tense meeting in which State Department officials expressed their concerns about Khan’s stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and threatened that Pakistan could face isolation from the U.S. and European allies. According to the cable, Lu tells the Pakistani ambassador that “all will be forgiven” if Khan were removed from power by a vote of no confidence.

The day after the meeting described in the cypher, on March 8, 2022, Khan’s opponents in Parliament moved forward with a key procedural step toward a no-confidence vote against him — a vote largely seen as having been orchestrated by Pakistan’s powerful military establishment. A month later, Khan was ousted from power, time during which he tried to blow the whistle on U.S. involvement in his removal.

Khan had said that the meeting detailed in the cypher showed proof of a U.S.-led conspiracy against his government. The text of the document published in August 2023 by The Intercept broadly validated his account of that meeting, with portions of it matching word for word what little Khan had quoted from it. (The cypher was leaked to The Intercept by a source within Pakistan’s military, not by Khan.)

Khan, according to prosecutors, did not declassify the cypher document while in office, even as it had become a major part of his battle for political survival. At several points while he was in power, representatives of other branches of the government expressed opposition to declassifying the document, including at a critical March 30 cabinet meeting, arguing that revealing the text of the document would compromise Pakistan’s national security.

Khan’s former foreign secretary echoed these claims, saying that Khan’s government discussed revealing the full text to quiet critics who said he was fabricating the U.S. pressure, but had been informed that doing so might endanger Pakistan’s encrypted communication systems. A probe by Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency this November into Khan’s handling of the document also cited a former aide to the prime minister, Azam Khan, who reportedly told investigators that he warned that the “cipher was a decoded secret document and its contents could neither be disclosed nor be discussed in public.”

The allegation that Khan undermined the cryptographic security now forms a major part of state security charges against the former prime minister, who remains Pakistan’s most popular politician. A conviction on the charges would likely prevent Khan from being able to contest future elections, including those expected early next year.

Smoke from a fire billows during a protest by angry supporters of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan as police fire tear gas to disperse them after the arrest of Khan, in Peshawar, Pakistan, on May 9, 2023.

“Regime Change” Cypher

The scandal over the cypher and Khan’s claim that it described a “regime change” conspiracy has gripped Pakistan since his removal from power in 2022. In public statements, Khan had claimed that attempts had been made by foreign powers “to influence our foreign policy from abroad.” After his removal the U.S. subsequently assisted Pakistan in obtaining a generous IMF loan, while Pakistan began producing ammunition for the war in Ukraine. Khan had sought to keep Pakistan neutral in the conflict, a stance the State Department had angrily objected to in the meeting described in the cypher.

Following Khan’s removal, Pakistan has been gripped by a series of political, economic, and security crises. The country has experienced record-breaking inflation, social unrest, and a wave of terrorist attacks by the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan’s current army chief, Gen. Asim Munir, visited the U.S. last week to build ties with U.S. policymakers, even as the country continues to be nominally led by a civilian caretaker government.

Khan was arrested on August 5, 2023, after being sentenced to three years in prison over a politically dubious corruption case. That conviction was suspended by the High Court later that month, yet he has remained behind bars ever since thanks to subsequent charges made against him over his handling of the cypher.

Khan’s lawyers have criticized his jailing as illegal and unconstitutional. Legal proceedings against him have been mired in secrecy, legal irregularities, and accusations of abuse, including violations of his privacy while imprisoned. Khan’s trial has been under strict controls that have impeded media coverage. During his imprisonment, supporters of his party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, continue to hold large rallies in the country despite attempts at government suppression.

After a long delay, Pakistan is expected to hold elections early next year, though Khan, who polls show would likely win a free vote, is unlikely to participate thanks to his compounding legal challenges. Prominent among these is the charge that Khan’s alleged mishandling of the cypher document risked compromising Pakistan’s encryption systems — notwithstanding the ISI’s own internal conclusion that no such risk existed.

While his state secrets trial continues, there is no public indication that the ISI has turned this exculpatory evidence over to Khan’s defense team.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Murtaza Hussain.

The post The Passion of Imran Khan and the Price of Aggressive Neutrality appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

An explosive leaked document obtained by The Intercept appears to show direct U.S. involvement in former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s ouster in 2022 because of his stance on the war in Ukraine. Khan is currently jailed and facing trial over a slew of corruption charges that his supporters say are intended to keep him from running for office again. The former cricket star was elected in 2018 but lost power in 2022 after a no-confidence vote in Parliament, which he says was engineered by the country’s powerful military with support from the U.S. The diplomatic cable published by The Intercept shows State Department officials pressured their Pakistani counterparts to push Khan out because of his neutrality over the war in Ukraine, promising that “all will be forgiven” if he was to be removed. “This document has been at the center of Pakistan’s political crisis for the past year and a half,” says Murtaza Hussain, senior writer at The Intercept. “Now that we’ve seen this document for the first time, it does seem to validate many of [Khan’s] claims.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

For a year and a half, Pakistani politics has been gripped by word of a diplomatic cable said to describe U.S. State Department officials encouraging the removal of former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan from power. Last week, The Intercept published the contents of the cable, known internally as a cypher, which revealed U.S. diplomats pressing for the removal of Khan over his neutral stance on the conflict in Ukraine.

Since it was published, the response to the story from Pakistani and U.S. officials has been both defensive and contradictory.

Pakistan’s leadership quickly began to question the authenticity of the document. Former Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari — who is part of the political opposition to Khan — had gone public suggesting that the published cable was “inauthentic,” arguing that “anything can be typed up on a piece of paper.” Even so, he blamed Khan and said the former prime minister should be tried under Pakistan’s Official Secrets Act for potentially leaking classified documents.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, in the days after the cable was reported, told local media that the leak represented a “massive crime,” while hedging about whether its contents were true. Just days later, though, Sharif confirmed the document in an interview with The Guardian. “Khan said he had the [cable] but he had lost it,” Sharif, who handed over the government to a caretaker prime minister on Monday, said. “Now it has been published on a website.”

Neither Sharif nor Bhutto Zardari have provided evidence of Khan’s involvement in the leak of the document, which was provided to The Intercept by a source inside the Pakistani military. On Wednesday, a month after it announced an investigation, the Pakistani government filed charges against Khan for mishandling and misusing the cable.

Despite confirming the document’s authenticity, Sharif said that the cable — which quoted U.S. diplomats, furious with Khan for his alleged “aggressive neutrality” toward Russia, threatening Pakistan with “isolation” should he stay in power — did not represent a conspiracy against the former prime minister.

The self-contradictory three-step move — to simultaneously question the document’s authenticity, blame Khan for leaking it in what amounts to a treasonous act, and then add that the substance of the cable is unremarkable — has characterized the Pakistani and State Department response over the past week.

On the U.S. side, the State Department had previously dismissed claims by Khan that the U.S. had pressured him to be removed from power. After the disclosure of the leaked cable, State Department officials told The Intercept that they could not comment on the accuracy of a foreign government document but argued that the comments did not show the U.S. taking sides in Pakistani politics. “Nothing in these purported comments shows the United States taking a position on who the leader of Pakistan should be,” State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said in a statement to The Intercept.

When pressed further on the document at a press briefing, Miller told a reporter, who asked whether the substance of the reported conversation in the cable was accurate, that the report was “close-ish.”

Khan himself has reportedly been placed under escalating pressure while in prison; he is currently serving a three-year sentence for corruption charges that his supporters say are politically motivated. The campaign against Khan culminated in this week’s terror investigation for the cable leak.

A widespread crackdown against his supporters continues, with thousands still languishing in detention over allegations of involvement in his political party and a series of anti-military demonstrations that took place in the country in May.

The U.S. government, meanwhile, deemed the crackdown an “internal matter” for the Pakistani government, while continuing to engage the Pakistani military that is believed to have orchestrated Khan’s removal.

The disclosure of the cable — and the revelation that Khan had been largely truthful in his depiction of its contents, including an accurate quote of a State Department official saying that “all would be forgiven” if Khan were removed from power — could reshape the course of Pakistan’s political crisis. The cable’s publication has already become a major topic of conversation in Pakistani media.

Khan’s own political fate now largely depends on how far the present military-led government decides to pursue its vendetta against him and his supporters. The revelation of the cable’s contents and the divisions that the violent repression of Khan’s party have evidently opened inside the military establishment only further heightens a crisis that has gripped Pakistan since Khan was removed from power last year.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

The U.S. State Department encouraged the Pakistani government in a March 7, 2022, meeting to remove Imran Khan as prime minister over his neutrality on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to a classified Pakistani government document obtained by The Intercept.

The meeting, between the Pakistani ambassador to the United States and two State Department officials, has been the subject of intense scrutiny, controversy, and speculation in Pakistan over the past year and a half, as supporters of Khan and his military and civilian opponents jockeyed for power. The political struggle escalated on August 5 when Khan was sentenced to three years in prison on corruption charges and taken into custody for the second time since his ouster. Khan’s defenders dismiss the charges as baseless. The sentence also blocks Khan, Pakistan’s most popular politician, from contesting elections expected in Pakistan later this year.

One month after the meeting with U.S. officials documented in the leaked Pakistani government document, a no-confidence vote was held in Parliament, leading to Khan’s removal from power. The vote is believed to have been organized with the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military. Since that time, Khan and his supporters have been engaged in a struggle with the military and its civilian allies, whom Khan claims engineered his removal from power at the request of the U.S.

The text of the Pakistani cable, produced from the meeting by the ambassador and transmitted to Pakistan, has not previously been published. The cable, known internally as a “cypher,” reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Khan, promising warmer relations if Khan was removed, and isolation if he was not.

The document, labeled “Secret,” includes an account of the meeting between State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu, and Asad Majeed Khan, who at the time was Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S.

The document was provided to The Intercept by an anonymous source in the Pakistani military who said that they had no ties to Imran Khan or Khan’s party. The Intercept is publishing the body of the cable below, correcting minor typos in the text because such details can be used to watermark documents and track their dissemination.

The cable reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Prime Minister Imran Khan.

The contents of the document obtained by The Intercept are consistent with reporting in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn and elsewhere describing the circumstances of the meeting and details in the cable itself, including in the classification markings omitted from The Intercept’s presentation. The dynamics of the relationship between Pakistan and the U.S. described in the cable were subsequently borne out by events. In the cable, the U.S. objects to Khan’s foreign policy on the Ukraine war. Those positions were quickly reversed after his removal, which was followed, as promised in the meeting, by a warming between the U.S. and Pakistan.

The diplomatic meeting came two weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which launched as Khan was en route to Moscow, a visit that infuriated Washington.

On March 2, just days before the meeting, Lu had been questioned at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing over the neutrality of India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan in the Ukraine conflict. In response to a question from Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., about a recent decision by Pakistan to abstain from a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s role in the conflict, Lu said, “Prime Minister Khan has recently visited Moscow, and so I think we are trying to figure out how to engage specifically with the Prime Minister following that decision.” Van Hollen appeared to be indignant that officials from the State Department were not in communication with Khan about the issue.

The day before the meeting, Khan addressed a rally and responded directly to European calls that Pakistan rally behind Ukraine. “Are we your slaves?” Khan thundered to the crowd. “What do you think of us? That we are your slaves and that we will do whatever you ask of us?” he asked. “We are friends of Russia, and we are also friends of the United States. We are friends of China and Europe. We are not part of any alliance.”

In the meeting, according to the document, Lu spoke in forthright terms about Washington’s displeasure with Pakistan’s stance in the conflict. The document quotes Lu saying that “people here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine), if such a position is even possible. It does not seem such a neutral stand to us.” Lu added that he had held internal discussions with the U.S. National Security Council and that “it seems quite clear that this is the Prime Minister’s policy.”

Lu then bluntly raises the issue of a no-confidence vote: “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister,” Lu said, according to the document. “Otherwise,” he continued, “I think it will be tough going ahead.”

Lu warned that if the situation wasn’t resolved, Pakistan would be marginalized by its Western allies. “I cannot tell how this will be seen by Europe but I suspect their reaction will be similar,” Lu said, adding that Khan could face “isolation” by Europe and the U.S. should he remain in office.

Asked about quotes from Lu in the Pakistani cable, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said, “Nothing in these purported comments shows the United States taking a position on who the leader of Pakistan should be.” Miller said he would not comment on private diplomatic discussions. 

The Pakistani ambassador responded by expressing frustration with the lack of engagement from U.S. leadership: “This reluctance had created a perception in Pakistan that we were being ignored or even taken for granted. There was also a feeling that while the U.S. expected Pakistan’s support on all issues that were important to the U.S., it did not reciprocate.”

“There was also a feeling that while the U.S. expected Pakistan’s support on all issues that were important to the U.S., it did not reciprocate.”

The discussion concluded, according to the document, with the Pakistani ambassador expressing his hope that the issue of the Russia-Ukraine war would not “impact our bilateral ties.” Lu told him that the damage was real but not fatal, and with Khan gone, the relationship could go back to normal. “I would argue that it has already created a dent in the relationship from our perspective,” Lu said, again raising the “political situation” in Pakistan. “Let us wait for a few days to see whether the political situation changes, which would mean that we would not have a big disagreement about this issue and the dent would go away very quickly. Otherwise, we will have to confront this issue head on and decide how to manage it.”

The day after the meeting, on March 8, Khan’s opponents in Parliament moved forward with a key procedural step toward the no-confidence vote.

“Khan’s fate wasn’t sealed at the time that this meeting took place, but it was tenuous,” said Arif Rafiq, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute and specialist on Pakistan. “What you have here is the Biden administration sending a message to the people that they saw as Pakistan’s real rulers, signaling to them that things will better if he is removed from power.”

The Intercept has made extensive efforts to authenticate the document. Given the security climate in Pakistan, independent confirmation from sources in the Pakistani government was not possible. The Pakistan Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment.

Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said, “We had expressed concern about the visit of then-PM Khan to Moscow on the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and have communicated that opposition both publicly and privately.” He added that “allegations that the United States interfered in internal decisions about the leadership of Pakistan are false. They have always been false, and they continue to be.” 

Left/Top: Donald Lu, a diplomat in service and assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, waves toward media personnel upon his arrival at Tribhuvan International Airport on July 14, 2023, in Kathmandu, Nepal. Right/Bottom: Pakistani Foreign Secretary Asad Majeed Khan is seen in Ankara, Turkey, on July 6, 2023. Photos: Photo: Abhishek Maharjan/Sipa via AP Images (left); Ozge Elif Kizil/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images (right)

American Denials

The State Department has previously and on repeated occasions denied that Lu urged the Pakistani government to oust the prime minister. On April 8, 2022, after Khan alleged there was a cable proving his claim of U.S. interference, State Department spokesperson Jalina Porter was asked about its veracity. “Let me just say very bluntly there is absolutely no truth to these allegations,” Porter said.

In early June 2023, Khan sat for an interview with The Intercept and again repeated the allegation. The State Department at the time referred to previous denials in response to a request for comment.

Khan has not backed off, and the State Department again denied the charge throughout June and July, at least three times in press conferences and again in a speech by a deputy assistant secretary of state for Pakistan, who referred to the claims as “propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation.” On the latest occasion, Miller, the State Department spokesperson, ridiculed the question. “I feel like I need to bring just a sign that I can hold up in response to this question and say that that allegation is not true,” Miller said, laughing and drawing cackles from the press. “I don’t know how many times I can say it. … The United States does not have a position on one political candidate or party versus another in Pakistan or any other country.”

While the drama over the cable has played out in public and in the press, the Pakistani military has launched an unprecedented assault on Pakistani civil society to silence whatever dissent and free expression had previously existed in the country.

In recent months, the military-led government cracked down not just on dissidents but also on suspected leakers inside its own institutions, passing a law last week that authorizes warrantless searches and lengthy jail terms for whistleblowers. Shaken by the public display of support for Khan — expressed in a series of mass protests and riots this May — the military has also enshrined authoritarian powers for itself that drastically reduce civil liberties, criminalize criticism of the military, expand the institution’s already expansive role in the country’s economy, and give military leaders a permanent veto over political and civil affairs.

These sweeping attacks on democracy passed largely unremarked upon by U.S. officials. In late July, the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Michael Kurilla, visited Pakistan, then issued a statement saying his visit had been focused on “strengthening the military-to-military relations,” while making no mention of the political situation in the country. This summer, Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, attempted to add a measure to the National Defense Authorization Act directing the State Department to examine democratic backsliding in Pakistan, but it was denied a vote on the House floor.

In a press briefing on Monday, in response to a question about whether Khan received a fair trial, Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said, “We believe that is an internal matter for Pakistan.”

Political Chaos

Khan’s removal from power after falling out with the Pakistani military, the same institution believed to have engineered his political rise, has thrown the nation of 230 million into political and economic turmoil. Protests against Khan’s dismissal and suppression of his party have swept the country and paralyzed its institutions, while Pakistan’s current leaders struggle to confront an economic crisis triggered in part by the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on global energy prices. The present chaos has resulted in staggering rates of inflation and capital flight from the country.

In addition to the worsening situation for ordinary citizens, a regime of extreme censorship has also been put in place at the direction of the Pakistani military, with news outlets effectively barred from even mentioning Khan’s name, as The Intercept previously reported. Thousands of members of civil society, mostly supporters of Khan, have been detained by the military, a crackdown that intensified after Khan was arrested earlier this year and held in custody for four days, sparking nationwide protests. Credible reports have emerged of torture by security forces, with reports of several deaths in custody.

The crackdown on Pakistan’s once-rambunctious press has taken a particularly dark turn. Arshad Sharif, a prominent Pakistani journalist who fled the country, was shot to death in Nairobi last October under circumstances that remain disputed. Another well-known journalist, Imran Riaz Khan, was detained by security forces at an airport this May and has not been seen since. Both had been reporting on the secret cable, which has taken on nearly mythical status in Pakistan, and had been among a handful of journalists briefed on its contents before Khan’s ouster. These attacks on the press have created a climate of fear that has made reporting on the document by reporters and institutions inside Pakistan effectively impossible.

Last November, Khan himself was subject to an attempted assassination when he was shot at a political rally, in an attack that wounded him and killed one of his supporters. His imprisonment has been widely viewed within Pakistan, including among many critics of his government, as an attempt by the military to stop his party from contesting upcoming elections. Polls show that were he allowed to participate in the vote, Khan would likely win.

“Khan was convicted on flimsy charges following a trial where his defense was not even allowed to produce witnesses. He had previously survived an assassination attempt, had a journalist aligned with him murdered, and has seen thousands of his supporters imprisoned. While the Biden administration has said that human rights will be at the forefront of their foreign policy, they are now looking away as Pakistan moves toward becoming a full-fledged military dictatorship,” said Rafiq, the Middle East Institute scholar. “This is ultimately about the Pakistani military using outside forces as a means to preserve their hegemony over the country. Every time there is a grand geopolitical rivalry, whether it is the Cold War, or the war on terror, they know how to manipulate the U.S. in their favor.”

Khan’s repeated references to the cable itself have contributed to his legal troubles, with prosecutors launching a separate investigation into whether he violated state secrets laws by discussing it.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party activists and supporters of former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan clash with police during a protest against the arrest of their leader in Peshawar on May 10, 2023.

Photo: Hussain Ali/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Democracy and the Military

For years, the U.S. government’s patronage relationship with the Pakistani military, which has long acted as the real powerbroker in the country’s politics, has been seen by many Pakistanis as an impenetrable obstacle to the country’s ability to grow its economy, combat endemic corruption, and pursue a constructive foreign policy. The sense that Pakistan has lacked meaningful independence because of this relationship — which, despite trappings of democracy, has made the military an untouchable force in domestic politics — makes the charge of U.S. involvement in the removal of a popular prime minister even more incendiary.

The Intercept’s source, who had access to the document as a member of the military, spoke of their growing disillusionment with the country’s military leadership, the impact on the military’s morale following its involvement in the political fight against Khan, the exploitation of the memory of dead service members for political purposes in recent military propaganda, and widespread public disenchantment with the armed forces amid the crackdown. They believe the military is pushing Pakistan toward a crisis similar to the one in 1971 that led to the secession of Bangladesh.

The source added that they hoped the leaked document would finally confirm what ordinary people, as well as the rank and file of the armed forces, had long suspected about the Pakistani military and force a reckoning within the institution.

This June, amid the crackdown by the military on Khan’s political party, Khan’s former top bureaucrat, Principal Secretary Azam Khan, was arrested and detained for a month. While in detention, Azam Khan reportedly issued a statement recorded in front of a member of the judiciary saying that the cable was indeed real, but that the former prime minister had exaggerated its contents for political gain.

A month after the meeting described in the cable, and just days before Khan was removed from office, then-Pakistan army chief Qamar Bajwa publicly broke with Khan’s neutrality and gave a speech calling the Russian invasion a “huge tragedy” and criticizing Russia. The remarks aligned the public picture with Lu’s private observation, recorded in the cable, that Pakistan’s neutrality was the policy of Khan, but not of the military.

Pakistan’s foreign policy has changed significantly since Khan’s removal, with Pakistan tilting more clearly toward the U.S. and European side in the Ukraine conflict. Abandoning its posture of neutrality, Pakistan has now emerged as a supplier of arms to the Ukrainian military; images of Pakistan-produced shells and ammunition regularly turn up on battlefield footage. In an interview earlier this year, a European Union official confirmed Pakistani military backing to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s foreign minister traveled to Pakistan this July in a visit widely presumed to be about military cooperation, but publicly described as focusing on trade, education, and environmental issues.

This realignment toward the U.S. has appeared to provide dividends to the Pakistani military. On August 3, a Pakistani newspaper reported that Parliament had approved the signing of a defense pact with the U.S. covering “joint exercises, operations, training, basing and equipment.” The agreement was intended to replace a previous 15-year deal between the two countries that expired in 2020.

Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan leaves after appearing at the Supreme Court in Islamabad on July 26, 2023.

Photo: Aamir Qureshi AFP via Getty Images

Pakistani “Assessment”

Lu’s blunt comments on Pakistan’s internal domestic politics raised alarms on the Pakistani side. In a brief “assessment” section at the bottom of the report, the document states: “Don could not have conveyed such a strong demarche without the express approval of the White House, to which he referred repeatedly. Clearly, Don spoke out of turn on Pakistan’s internal political process.” The cable concludes with a recommendation “to seriously reflect on this and consider making an appropriate demarche to the U.S. Cd’ A a.i in Islamabad” — a reference to the chargé d’affaires ad interim, effectively the acting head of a diplomatic mission when its accredited head is absent. A diplomatic protest was later issued by Khan’s government.

On March 27, 2022, the same month as the Lu meeting, Khan spoke publicly about the cable, waving a folded copy of it in the air at a rally. He also reportedly briefed a national security meeting with the heads of Pakistan’s various security agencies on its contents.

It is not clear what happened in Pakistan-U.S. communications during the weeks that followed the meeting reported in the cable. By the following month, however, the political winds had shifted. On April 10, Khan was ousted in a no-confidence vote.

The new prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, eventually confirmed the existence of the cable and acknowledged that some of the message conveyed by Lu was inappropriate. He has said that Pakistan had formally complained but cautioned that the cable did not confirm Khan’s broader claims.

Khan has suggested repeatedly in public that the top-secret cable showed that the U.S. had directed his removal from power, but subsequently revised his assessment as he urged the U.S. to condemn human rights abuses against his supporters. The U.S., he told The Intercept in a June interview, may have urged his ouster, but only did so because it was manipulated by the military.

The disclosure of the full body of the cable, over a year after Khan was deposed and following his arrest, will finally allow the competing claims to be evaluated. On balance, the text of the cypher strongly suggests that the U.S. encouraged Khan’s removal. According to the cable, while Lu did not directly order Khan to be taken out of office, he said that Pakistan would suffer severe consequences, including international isolation, if Khan were to stay on as prime minister, while simultaneously hinting at rewards for his removal. The remarks appear to have been taken as a signal for the Pakistani military to act.

In addition to his other legal problems, Khan himself has continued to be targeted over the handling of the secret cable by the new government. Late last month, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah said that Khan would be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act in connection with the cable. “Khan has hatched a conspiracy against the state’s interests and a case will be initiated against him on behalf of the state for the violation of the Official Secrets Act by exposing a confidential cipher communication from a diplomatic mission,” Sanaullah said.

Khan has now joined a long list of Pakistani politicians who failed to finish their term in office after running afoul of the military. As quoted in the cypher, Khan was being personally blamed by the U.S., according to Lu, for Pakistan’s policy of nonalignment during the Ukraine conflict. The vote of no confidence and its implications for the future of U.S.-Pakistan ties loomed large throughout the conversation.

“Honestly,” Lu is quoted as saying in the document, referring to the prospect of Khan staying in office, “I think isolation of the Prime Minister will become very strong from Europe and the United States.”

March 7, 2022 Pakistani Diplomatic Cypher (Transcription)

The Intercept is publishing the body of the cable below, correcting minor typos in the text because such details can be used to watermark documents and track their dissemination. The Intercept has removed classification markings and numerical elements that could be used for tracking purposes. Labeled “Secret,” the cable includes an account of the meeting between State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu, and Asad Majeed Khan, who at the time was Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S.

I had a luncheon meeting today with Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Donald Lu. He was accompanied by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Les Viguerie. DCM, DA and Counsellor Qasim joined me.

At the outset, Don referred to Pakistan’s position on the Ukraine crisis and said that “people here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine), if such a position is even possible. It does not seem such a neutral stand to us.” He shared that in his discussions with the NSC, “it seems quite clear that this is the Prime Minister’s policy.” He continued that he was of the view that this was “tied to the current political dramas in Islamabad that he (Prime Minister) needs and is trying to show a public face.” I replied that this was not a correct reading of the situation as Pakistan’s position on Ukraine was a result of intense interagency consultations. Pakistan had never resorted to conducting diplomacy in public sphere. The Prime Minister’s remarks during a political rally were in reaction to the public letter by European Ambassadors in Islamabad which was against diplomatic etiquette and protocol. Any political leader, whether in Pakistan or the U.S., would be constrained to give a public reply in such a situation.

I asked Don if the reason for a strong U.S. reaction was Pakistan’s abstention in the voting in the UNGA. He categorically replied in the negative and said that it was due to the Prime Minister’s visit to Moscow. He said that “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead.” He paused and then said “I cannot tell how this will be seen by Europe but I suspect their reaction will be similar.” He then said that “honestly I think isolation of the Prime Minister will become very strong from Europe and the United States.” Don further commented that it seemed that the Prime Minister’s visit to Moscow was planned during the Beijing Olympics and there was an attempt by the Prime Minister to meet Putin which was not successful and then this idea was hatched that he would go to Moscow.

I told Don that this was a completely misinformed and wrong perception. The visit to Moscow had been in the works for at least few years and was the result of a deliberative institutional process. I stressed that when the Prime Minister was flying to Moscow, Russian invasion of Ukraine had not started and there was still hope for a peaceful resolution. I also pointed out that leaders of European countries were also traveling to Moscow around the same time. Don interjected that “those visits were specifically for seeking resolution of the Ukraine standoff while the Prime Minister’s visit was for bilateral economic reasons.” I drew his attention to the fact that the Prime Minister clearly regretted the situation while being in Moscow and had hoped for diplomacy to work. The Prime Minister’s visit, I stressed, was purely in the bilateral context and should not be seen either as a condonation or endorsement of Russia’s action against Ukraine. I said that our position is dictated by our desire to keep the channels of communication with all sides open. Our subsequent statements at the UN and by our Spokesperson spelled that out clearly, while reaffirming our commitment to the principle of UN Charter, non-use or threat of use of force, sovereignty and territorial integrity of States, and pacific settlement of disputes.

I also told Don that Pakistan was worried of how the Ukraine crisis would play out in the context of Afghanistan. We had paid a very high price due to the long-term impact of this conflict. Our priority was to have peace and stability in Afghanistan, for which it was imperative to have cooperation and coordination with all major powers, including Russia. From this perspective as well, keeping the channels of communication open was essential. This factor was also dictating our position on the Ukraine crisis. On my reference to the upcoming Extended Troika meeting in Beijing, Don replied that there were still ongoing discussions in Washington on whether the U.S. should attend the Extended Troika meeting or the upcoming Antalya meeting on Afghanistan with Russian representatives in attendance, as the U.S. focus right now was to discuss only Ukraine with Russia. I replied that this was exactly what we were afraid of. We did not want the Ukraine crisis to divert focus away from Afghanistan. Don did not comment.

I told Don that just like him, I would also convey our perspective in a forthright manner. I said that over the past one year, we had been consistently sensing reluctance on the part of the U.S. leadership to engage with our leadership. This reluctance had created a perception in Pakistan that we were being ignored and even taken for granted. There was also a feeling that while the U.S. expected Pakistan’s support on all issues that were important to the U.S., it did not reciprocate and we do not see much U.S. support on issues of concern for Pakistan, particularly on Kashmir. I said that it was extremely important to have functioning channels of communication at the highest level to remove such perception. I also said that we were surprised that if our position on the Ukraine crisis was so important for the U.S., why the U.S. had not engaged with us at the top leadership level prior to the Moscow visit and even when the UN was scheduled to vote. (The State Department had raised it at the DCM level.) Pakistan valued continued high-level engagement and for this reason the Foreign Minister sought to speak with Secretary Blinken to personally explain Pakistan’s position and perspective on the Ukraine crisis. The call has not materialized yet. Don replied that the thinking in Washington was that given the current political turmoil in Pakistan, this was not the right time for such engagement and it could wait till the political situation in Pakistan settled down.

I reiterated our position that countries should not be made to choose sides in a complex situation like the Ukraine crisis and stressed the need for having active bilateral communications at the political leadership level. Don replied that “you have conveyed your position clearly and I will take it back to my leadership.”

I also told Don that we had seen his defence of the Indian position on the Ukraine crisis during the recently held Senate Sub-Committee hearing on U.S.-India relations. It seemed that the U.S. was applying different criteria for India and Pakistan. Don responded that the U.S. lawmakers’ strong feelings about India’s abstentions in the UNSC and UNGA came out clearly during the hearing. I said that from the hearing, it appeared that the U.S. expected more from India than Pakistan, yet it appeared to be more concerned about Pakistan’s position. Don was evasive and responded that Washington looked at the U.S.-India relationship very much through the lens of what was happening in China. He added that while India had a close relationship with Moscow, “I think we will actually see a change in India’s policy once all Indian students are out of Ukraine.”

I expressed the hope that the issue of the Prime Minister’s visit to Russia will not impact our bilateral ties. Don replied that “I would argue that it has already created a dent in the relationship from our perspective. Let us wait for a few days to see whether the political situation changes, which would mean that we would not have a big disagreement about this issue and the dent would go away very quickly. Otherwise, we will have to confront this issue head on and decide how to manage it.”

We also discussed Afghanistan and other issues pertaining to bilateral ties. A separate communication follows on that part of our conversation.

Assessment

Don could not have conveyed such a strong demarche without the express approval of the White House, to which he referred repeatedly. Clearly, Don spoke out of turn on Pakistan’s internal political process. We need to seriously reflect on this and consider making an appropriate demarche to the U.S. Cd’ A a.i in Islamabad.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

On Saturday, June 10, police in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad opened a criminal and terrorism investigation into freelance U.S.-based journalists Khan and Sehbai, along with two former army officers, for allegedly “inciting people to attack military installations, spread terrorism, and create chaos” on May 9 after the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, according to news reports and the two journalists, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

Separately, on Tuesday, June 13, Islamabad police opened a similar criminal and terrorism investigation into Shakir, a freelance journalist based outside of Pakistan, Moeed Pirzada, U.S.-based editor of the news website Global Village Space, and another former army officer, according to news reports and the two journalists, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

The allegations were brought against the accused in relation to unspecified social media posts and videos by the journalists, according to copies of the first information reports, which cite sections of the penal code including criminal conspiracy and abetting mutiny, and the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997, which carries a maximum punishment of death or life imprisonment.

“It is unconscionable that foreign-based Pakistani journalists Wajahat Saeed Khan, Shaheen Sehbai, Sabir Shakir, and Moeed Pirzada face potential death sentences under terrorism investigations in retaliation for their critical reporting and commentary,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Authorities must immediately drop these investigations and cease the relentless intimidation and censorship of the media.”

Since Imran Khan’s May 9 arrest, when unprecedented protests targeting police and military installations erupted throughout the country, journalists have been arrested, attacked, and harassed. Mainstream Pakistani news channels have ceased coverage of the former prime minister following military pressure. Anchor Imran Riaz Khan has been missing since May 11 following his arrest at Punjab’s Sialkot Airport, his lawyer Azhar Siddique told CPJ via messaging app.

Khan, Sehbai, Shakir, and Pirzada each critically analyzed the former prime minister’s arrest and aftermath on their social media and YouTube channels.

Khan, whose YouTube-based political affairs channel has around 205,000 subscribers, told CPJ he believes authorities are using the unrest as an excuse to target the four journalists for their previous and ongoing extensive critical coverage of the government and army.

The Pakistani government has submitted several unsuccessful requests to Twitter to take down Khan’s content commenting on the political unrest in Pakistan, according to Khan and emails from Twitter to the journalist, which CPJ reviewed. Khan told CPJ that he fears the government will reference the terrorism investigation to social media companies to bolster attempts to censor him online.

Sehbai, former editor of The News International newspaper and a dual U.S.-Pakistan citizen with around 1.8 million subscribers on Twitter and 8,000 subscribers to his political affairs YouTube channel, told CPJ that he believes that he was targeted because of his criticism of the army and said authorities were trying to intimidate him into silence.

Pirzada, who has dual Pakistani and British citizenship and runs a political affairs YouTube channel with around 392,000 subscribers, told CPJ that he believes the case was an attempt to silence him. A former anchor for the privately owned broadcaster 92 News, Pirzada fled Pakistan to the U.S. in November 2022 following the killing of Pakistani anchor Arshad Sharif.

Shakir, who worked as an anchor with ARY News, told CPJ that he went into exile following a series of investigations opened into him and other journalists, including slain anchor Sharif, beginning in April 2022.

CPJ’s calls and messages to Islamabad Police Inspector-General Akbar Nasir Khan and Information Minister Maryam Aurangzeb did not immediately receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

The Pakistani military invited the owners of the country’s major media organizations to Islamabad this week for a secret meeting to discuss coverage of the ongoing political and constitutional crisis, Pakistani journalists familiar with the gathering told The Intercept. The invitation was not one that could be refused, and the message was equally direct: Cease all coverage of former Prime Minister Imran Khan amid his ongoing clash with the military.

Following the meeting, which has not been previously reported, top editors at news organizations across Pakistan issued directives to their journalists to pause coverage of Khan, said the Pakistani journalists, who requested anonymity for fear of their safety. An inspection of Pakistani media sites reveals a stark change. Earlier this week and every day for years before, Khan was a leading subject of coverage. He has effectively vanished from the news. The ban was confirmed by more than a half-dozen Pakistani journalists.

“They have lots of levers to hurt media companies.”

“They have lots of levers to hurt media companies,” said one Pakistani journalist who, like the others, asked for anonymity for fear of arrest, torture, and prosecution. “Messing with their print distribution, messing with their cable distribution are just some. Blackmail is another tool.”

Khan is at the center of a political crisis that has paralyzed Pakistani cities, prompted clashes and riots targeting the all-powerful military, and seen tens of thousands of his political supporters sent to prison. You wouldn’t know that from reading the Pakistani press today, even as he continues a campaign against an attempt by the military to exclude him and his party from contesting upcoming elections.

The recent crisis began when Khan was hit with corruption charges, which he and supporters of his political party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, claim to be a political exercise aimed at excluding him from politics.

Khan, a former cricket player and philanthropist, has become Pakistan’s most-popular politician by galvanizing public anger against the country’s dynastic political parties. He served as prime minister from 2018 to 2022, when he was removed from office by a coalition of opposition parties. While his original rise to power was widely believed to have been patronized from behind the scenes by the military itself, after falling out with military leadership, Khan has become a fierce opponent of their domineering role in politics.

In Pakistan, there is no bigger story than the battle between Khan and the military, which has played out in spectacular fashion, including the extrajudicial arrest of Khan from inside a courtroom, sparking nationwide protests and, eventually, a Supreme Court order to free him. Khan is also the No. 1 driver of ratings and web traffic to news organizations — until Thursday, when he virtually disappeared from the national news media. (The Pakistani embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The explicit directive from the military was not delivered in writing, said sources. A more vaguely worded order was issued by Pakistan’s Electronic Media Regulatory Authority, which oversees television stations, barring coverage of “hate mongers, rioters, their facilitators and perpetrators.” The directive does not name Khan, but its meaning is clear. On May 9, following Khan’s arrest, protests erupted around the country, with some leading to arson. Khan has called for an independent inquiry into the cause of the arson and has suggested the military may have carried it out as to create a pretext for the resulting crackdown.

The PTI’s U.S. Twitter account condemned what it called censorship. “Trying to keep Imran Khan off the media is censorship and curtailment of media freedom by the imposed regime in Pakistan,” the party said.

BBC’s Caroline Davies reported that sources at two different Pakistani TV stations had said they were under orders not to mention Khan, even in the ticker tape running along the bottom.

In the wake of the military’s imposed blackout over Pakistani media, Khan has taken to Western press and social media platforms like Twitter to try and get his message out. Even these platforms have not escaped censorship: Many Pakistani social media users have reported being contacted by the military over their posts and asked to remove them, lest they find themselves in prison as thousands of other supporters of Khan’s party have over the past several weeks.

Thousands of Khan’s loyalists have been imprisoned in recent weeks, and most of his party leadership has similarly been jailed, released only on the condition they publicly resign from the party. Several high-profile former officials have recently been forced to give bizarre press conferences following their arrests in which they announce their resignation from the PTI and, often, politics in general.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

For the past few weeks, former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has been at the center of an unprecedented political crisis. In the lead-up to new elections, Khan was arrested and released on corruption charges intended to keep him out of his office. Meanwhile, his supporters have been facing off against the military, as the armed forces crack down on his political party in a campaign aimed at excluding them from political life. The conflict drives at the heart of the most important issue in Pakistani politics: the reality of military rule. This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain are joined by Omar Waraich — a journalist, human rights advocate, and former head of South Asia for Amnesty International. Waraich provides the historical context, explains the Pakistani military’s role in the country, and where U.S. relations with Pakistan stand.

Transcript coming soon.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Intercepted.

At around 9 p.m. on Wednesday, May 24, between eight and 10 men—some wearing uniforms—detained Abraham, president and anchor of BOL News, while he was going home from the privately owned broadcaster’s office in the capital Islamabad, according to news reports and Raja Amir Abbas, the journalist’s lawyer, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

Abraham’s whereabouts remain unknown as of the evening of Thursday, May 25, Abbas said.

The whereabouts of BOL News anchor Imran Riaz Khan, who has been missing since May 11 following his arrest at Punjab’s Sialkot airport, also remain unknown as of Thursday evening, his lawyer Azhar Siddique told CPJ by phone. Earlier in the day, police failed to present the journalist at the Lahore High Court for a fourth time since his arrest, and a senior Lahore police official told the court that the journalist was not in the custody of the Inter-Services Intelligence or Military Intelligence agencies.

“We are deeply disturbed by the disappearances of journalists Sami Abraham and Imran Riaz Khan amid a worsening media crackdown in Pakistan,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Authorities must respect the rule of law and either present Abraham and Khan in court or immediately release them.”

Journalists have been arrested, attacked, and surveilled after the May 9 arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, also chair of the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, which led to nationwide protests.

Abraham and Imran Riaz Khan, who is not related to the former prime minister, frequently host PTI supporters on their talk shows and post pro-PTI content on their YouTube channels. Two Pakistani journalists who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity – citing fear of reprisal – said they believe the two anchors were targeted as part of the larger crackdown on the party.

Before his disappearance, Abraham posted a series of video reports on his YouTube channel, which has 850,000 subscribers, in support of former Prime Minister Khan and critical of the country’s military establishment.

Abraham was returning home when four cars intercepted his vehicle, and the men forced Abraham out of the car and took him to an unknown location, according to Abbas and a police complaint by Ali Raza, Abraham’s brother. They took Abraham’s two mobile phones, car keys, and the driver’s phone, but did not detain the driver.

In his complaint filed at Islamabad’s Aabpara Police Station, Raza said the journalist had been “abducted.” As of Thursday evening, police have not filed a first information report to formally open an investigation into the complaint, Abbas said.

Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported that unnamed sources said police had arrested Abraham. However, Islamabad police issued a statement on Twitter claiming they would waste no time in searching for Abraham and would fully cooperate with the journalist’s family.

Also on Thursday, Abbas told CPJ that he had filed a petition at the Islamabad High Court requesting authorities present Abraham in court and divulge the grounds upon which he has been detained, adding that the next hearing will be held on Friday morning.

CPJ’s calls and messages to Islamabad Police Inspector-General Akbar Nasir Khan and Information Minister Maryam Aurangzeb received no replies.

Usman Anwar, inspector-general of the Punjab provincial police, told CPJ via messaging app that “all agencies were working on the case” of missing journalist Imran Riaz Khan and are “looking at all the angles.”

“If someone is hiding on his own, it’s quite difficult to find that person,” Anwar said.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Since May 16, police have visited the homes of at least three journalists who reported from the scene of a May 9 protest and attack on an army corps commander’s residence, according to news reports, a statement by the Lahore Press Club reviewed by CPJ, and journalists who spoke to CPJ.

On Tuesday, May 23, the Lahore High Court ordered authorities to cease harassing journalists and media workers who reported from the May 9 protest following a joint petition, according to news reports and one of the petitioners, freelance journalist Shahid Aslam, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

“Pakistani authorities must abide by the Lahore High Court’s order and immediately end the harassment of journalists who reported on recent political gatherings,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “It is crucial for journalists to keep the public informed about the country’s political situation. Authorities must ensure journalists are safe to do so without the fear of surveillance and harassment by law enforcement.”

Following the arrest of opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party chairman and former Prime Minister Imran Khan on May 9, PTI supporters demonstrated outside the army corps commander’s residence in eastern Punjab province’s capital city of Lahore, broke through the gates, and set fire to the premises.

Shahid Aslam

Police were stationed outside Aslam’s Lahore apartment from May 16 to May 22, he told CPJ, adding that officers asked his roommate at least three times about the journalist’s whereabouts and looked through his windows to check if he was present while he was away reporting in Islamabad, the capital.

Aslam reported on the May 9 protest for his political affairs YouTube channel Xposed with Shahid Aslam, which has over 55,000 subscribers. He told CPJ that a senior Lahore police official informed him that he was not wanted in any specific case and had been identified through geofencing, the practice of identifying all active mobile phone numbers in an area.

Jahangir Hayat

On the evening of May 17, two men in police uniforms and six in plainclothes arrived at Hayat’s home in Lahore, according to Lahore Press Club President Azam Chaudhry and Hayat, chief reporter for the privately owned newspaper Daily Business, both of whom spoke with CPJ by phone. The men did not present a warrant but claimed the journalist was wanted for serious criminal offenses, including murder and kidnapping. They then punched his face, breaking his front teeth, and hit his hand with an iron rod, Hayat told CPJ, adding that the men also shoved his 13-year-old son, leading him to hit his head on a motorcycle, and pushed his wife in the chest. 

Hayat, who reported about the protest on his political affairs YouTube channel BoldNews42, which has more than 5,000 subscribers, told CPJ that the men took him inside his home after the journalist appeared faint, and he then managed to escape and take refuge in the Lahore Press Club.

On May 18, while Hayat and his family remained at the press club, authorities raided the journalist’s home searching for him and broke down its iron doors, he said. Hayat and his family returned home on May 21 after Chaudhry contacted multiple senior Lahore police officials, one of whom informed him authorities would open an inquiry into the attack, the two journalists told CPJ.

Sarfraz Ahmed Khan

Between May 21 and 23, police made about 10 visits to the Lahore home of Khan, deputy bureau chief of the privately owned broadcaster GNN. They searched the premises and police officials repeatedly called Khan to tell him an arrest warrant had been issued for him under the Anti-Terrorism Act, according to news reports and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ by phone. Officers also searched the nearby home of Khan’s friend on May 21, claiming the journalist was hiding there.

A police document reviewed by CPJ showed that the journalist was present at the May 9 protest and was identified using facial recognition software. The document also listed personal details, including his address, and was leaked online, leading the journalist to fear for his safety, he told CPJ. 

On May 22, the Punjab police posted a statement on Twitter claiming that Usman Anwar, inspector-general of the Punjab police, had given orders that no innocent citizen, including journalists, would be punished for the attack on the army corps commanders’ residence, and that the issue with Khan had been resolved.

However, on the evening of May 23, police again arrived at Khan’s home, but left after confirming that a senior Lahore police official had issued an internal letter protecting the journalist from harassment, Khan told CPJ.

Separately, on Tuesday, police failed to present journalist Imran Riaz Khan at the Lahore High Court for a third time following his May 11 arrest. The journalist has been missing since May 11 after police claimed to have released him, his lawyer Azhar Siddique told CPJ by phone.

CPJ’s calls and messages to Punjab Police Inspector-General Usman Anwar and Lahore Capital City Police Officer Bilal Kamyana received no response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Since May 16, police have visited the homes of at least three journalists who reported from the scene of a May 9 protest and attack on an army corps commander’s residence, according to news reports, a statement by the Lahore Press Club reviewed by CPJ, and journalists who spoke to CPJ.

On Tuesday, May 23, the Lahore High Court ordered authorities to cease harassing journalists and media workers who reported from the May 9 protest following a joint petition, according to news reports and one of the petitioners, freelance journalist Shahid Aslam, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

“Pakistani authorities must abide by the Lahore High Court’s order and immediately end the harassment of journalists who reported on recent political gatherings,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “It is crucial for journalists to keep the public informed about the country’s political situation. Authorities must ensure journalists are safe to do so without the fear of surveillance and harassment by law enforcement.”

Following the arrest of opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party chairman and former Prime Minister Imran Khan on May 9, PTI supporters demonstrated outside the army corps commander’s residence in eastern Punjab province’s capital city of Lahore, broke through the gates, and set fire to the premises.

Shahid Aslam

Police were stationed outside Aslam’s Lahore apartment from May 16 to May 22, he told CPJ, adding that officers asked his roommate at least three times about the journalist’s whereabouts and looked through his windows to check if he was present while he was away reporting in Islamabad, the capital.

Aslam reported on the May 9 protest for his political affairs YouTube channel Xposed with Shahid Aslam, which has over 55,000 subscribers. He told CPJ that a senior Lahore police official informed him that he was not wanted in any specific case and had been identified through geofencing, the practice of identifying all active mobile phone numbers in an area.

Jahangir Hayat

On the evening of May 17, two men in police uniforms and six in plainclothes arrived at Hayat’s home in Lahore, according to Lahore Press Club President Azam Chaudhry and Hayat, chief reporter for the privately owned newspaper Daily Business, both of whom spoke with CPJ by phone. The men did not present a warrant but claimed the journalist was wanted for serious criminal offenses, including murder and kidnapping. They then punched his face, breaking his front teeth, and hit his hand with an iron rod, Hayat told CPJ, adding that the men also shoved his 13-year-old son, leading him to hit his head on a motorcycle, and pushed his wife in the chest. 

Hayat, who reported about the protest on his political affairs YouTube channel BoldNews42, which has more than 5,000 subscribers, told CPJ that the men took him inside his home after the journalist appeared faint, and he then managed to escape and take refuge in the Lahore Press Club.

On May 18, while Hayat and his family remained at the press club, authorities raided the journalist’s home searching for him and broke down its iron doors, he said. Hayat and his family returned home on May 21 after Chaudhry contacted multiple senior Lahore police officials, one of whom informed him authorities would open an inquiry into the attack, the two journalists told CPJ.

Sarfraz Ahmed Khan

Between May 21 and 23, police made about 10 visits to the Lahore home of Khan, deputy bureau chief of the privately owned broadcaster GNN. They searched the premises and police officials repeatedly called Khan to tell him an arrest warrant had been issued for him under the Anti-Terrorism Act, according to news reports and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ by phone. Officers also searched the nearby home of Khan’s friend on May 21, claiming the journalist was hiding there.

A police document reviewed by CPJ showed that the journalist was present at the May 9 protest and was identified using facial recognition software. The document also listed personal details, including his address, and was leaked online, leading the journalist to fear for his safety, he told CPJ. 

On May 22, the Punjab police posted a statement on Twitter claiming that Usman Anwar, inspector-general of the Punjab police, had given orders that no innocent citizen, including journalists, would be punished for the attack on the army corps commanders’ residence, and that the issue with Khan had been resolved.

However, on the evening of May 23, police again arrived at Khan’s home, but left after confirming that a senior Lahore police official had issued an internal letter protecting the journalist from harassment, Khan told CPJ.

Separately, on Tuesday, police failed to present journalist Imran Riaz Khan at the Lahore High Court for a third time following his May 11 arrest. The journalist has been missing since May 11 after police claimed to have released him, his lawyer Azhar Siddique told CPJ by phone.

CPJ’s calls and messages to Punjab Police Inspector-General Usman Anwar and Lahore Capital City Police Officer Bilal Kamyana received no response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

As per a report in Pakistan-based daily Dawn, Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi are facing a National Accountability Bureau (NAB) inquiry for allegedly “accepting Rs 5 billion and hundreds of kanals (of land) from an Islamabad-based real estate company, Bahria Town, in exchange for protecting the firm in a money laundering case.”

Soon after his arrest, violent protests erupted nationwide and around 1000 protesters were arrested. Following his arrest, several images and videos of Imran Khan have surfaced online with a wide range of claims.

Claim I: Image of Imran Khan in Jail

On May 10, Aaj Tak Bangla published a report claiming that images of Imran Khan in jail had been leaked. The report titled, “Imran Khan Arrest: আগুন জ্বলছে পাকিস্তানে, জেলে কেমন ব্যবস্থা ইমরানের? ছবি Leaked” (Translation: Pakistan Is Burning, What Are The Arrangements For Imran In Jail? Pictures leaked), contained two images of Imran Khan purportedly clicked in jail.

Aaj Tak also used this image several times in their reportage of Imran Khan’s arrest. The segment was hosted by journalist Shubhankar Mishra. (Archive)

The photo was also used by NDTV, Times Now Navbharat and Zee News in reports/bulletins. While Zee News described it as the first photo of Imran Khan since being arrested, Times Now Navbharat said Khan looked desolate and helpless in the photo.

Asianet News Tamil and Naiduniya used one of these images claiming that they were taken during Khan’s first night in jail. Naiduniya claims that Khan looks sick in the picture. They further add that he was not allowed to sleep and was tortured.

Fact Check

We noticed that the text ‘exclusive by midjourney’ is superimposed on one of the images used by Aaj Tak Bangla.

Upon a relevant keyword search on Facebook, we discovered that the other image also carried the same watermark.

Midjourney is an AI tool that generates images from natural language descriptions, called ‘prompts’. According to its website, it is ‘an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species’.

We also noticed several discrepancies with the images. In one of the images, Imran Khan’s feet have seven toes. Below, we have compared it with other images of Imran Khan available online. As is evident, Khan doesn’t have seven toes in reality.

Another discrepancy that is clearly noticeable in the second picture, is Khan’s misshaped hands. It is a common feature in AI-generated images.

According to a New Yorker article, newly accessible tools such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and dall-e are able to render a photorealistic landscape, copy a celebrity’s face, remix an image in any artist’s style, and seamlessly replace image backgrounds, but are unable to compute favourable results when requested to draw hands. A generator can compute that hands have fingers, but it’s harder to train it to know that there should be only five of them, or that the digits have more or less set lengths in relation to one another. This is because hands look very different from different angles.

Hence, it is clear media houses including Aaj Tak and Aaj Tak Bangla used AI-generated images of Imran Khan claiming they were taken during his first night in jail.

Claim II: Protest Against Imran Khan’s Arrest Outside Nawaz Sharif’s House in London

Ashok Swain, a professor of peace and conflict studies at Uppsala University, tweeted a video of a protest claiming that it was shot outside former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s house in London. He claimed that the ‘protest had gone global’. (Archive)

Imran Khan protest goes global – A large number of Pakistanis are protesting Imran Khan’s arrest in front of Nawaz Sharif’s house in London. pic.twitter.com/34V68Ak46G

— Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) May 9, 2023

Several other users also shared the image including Twitter Blue subscribers @Bob_cart124 and @Sajidnawazwattu.

Fact Check

Upon a reverse image search, we found a tweet from November 2022, carrying the same video. The tweet claimed that the video portrayed scenes outside Nawaz Sharif’s Avenfield residence. 

Scenes from outside Nawaz Sharif’s Avenfield residence.

Khan has 3 powers right now:

1) Youth
2) Overseas
3) Social Media

And nobody can buy or beat them on earth #حقیقی_آزادی_لانگ_مارچ pic.twitter.com/5GSM3Rzt8P

— Faisal Khan (@KaliwalYam) November 1, 2022

We found another video tweeted by @iihtishamm with the same visuals from April 2022.

Aerial view of PTI protest out side former PM Nawaz Sharif residency pic.twitter.com/RdwhBP6vBL

— Ihtisham Ul Haq (@iihtishamm) April 17, 2022

Upon comparing visuals from the viral video and the aforementioned tweet, it was evident that both videos were shot during the same event.

According to ThePrint, the supporters of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf were protesting against the ouster of Imran Khan, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan through a no-confidence vote, outside the residence of Pakistan Muslim League supremo Nawaz Sharif.

We also found other tweets from April 2022, portraying the same scenes outside Nawaz Sharif’s house.

Protest in London, Outside of Nawaz Sharif’s Flat pic.twitter.com/0UrzUL6KnC

— Mohsin Haleem (@mohsinhaleem_) April 17, 2022

Hence, a video of demonstrators protesting Imran Khan’s loss after a vote of no-confidence outside Nawaz Sharif’s residence in London in April 2022 has gone viral with the claim that it is recent and the aftermath of Imran Khan’s arrest on May 9, 2023.

Claim III: Agreement on How Khan is to be Treated in Jail

An image of a document is being circulated online with the claim that it shows an agreement signed by Imran Khan, US ambassador to Pakistan Donald Blome and a functionary of the government of Pakistan. The document purportedly shows the terms of agreement for Imran Khan’s arrest, which include points such as him not being raped or interrogated naked.

The terms listed in the document are listed as follows-

• Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi Chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), will not be forced to be naked while being interrogated.
• No one will be allowed to Rape Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi Chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e- Insaf (PTI), specially while he is patient of Piles (Hemorrhoids).
• Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi Chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), will not be tortured with any kind of Rods, Bamboo (Sticks), etc.

Twitter Blue subscriber and ‘Public Speaker for BJP’ Pradeep Mahaur tweeted the document and called it pathetic. The user is followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. (Archive)

Agreement between “Imran Ahmad Khan Niazi” and “Government of Pakistan”
This is pathetic #Pakistan #ImranKhan pic.twitter.com/hK9MWQoVlv

— Pradeep Mahaur (@Pradeep_Mahaur) May 11, 2023

Twitter Blue subscriber Gautam Trivedi also tweeted the document and wrote, “According to confirmed unreliable reports, Imran Khan has entered into an agreement with the Government of Pakistan regarding sureties while he’s in custody”. (Archive)

According to confirmed unreliable reports, Imran Khan has entered into an agreement with the Government of Pakistan regarding sureties while he’s in custody. pic.twitter.com/Kh7sMqxMkg

— Gautam Trivedi (@KaptanHindustan) May 11, 2023

Twitter user @IndianSinghh also tweeted the image and garnered close to 1500 likes and over 390 retweets. (Archive)

Pakistan army was planning to Rape Imran Khan.

Even Former PM is not safe from lust of ISI. pic.twitter.com/Ii2vnIkjo8

— Akshit Singh (@IndianSinghh) May 11, 2023

 Fact Check

We noticed that the signatories included interior secretary Yousaf Naseem Khokhar. However, on probing further, we found that Khokhar had resigned from his duties on March 7 of this year, two months prior to the date mentioned in the viral letter. Moreover, his name has been misspelt as “Yousuf Naseem Khokhar”.

Furthermore, we noticed that Khokhar’s signature doesn’t match the one found on a notice released by the official website of the Pakistani Federal Information Agency.

Similarly, US Ambassador Donald Blome’s signature in the viral image does not match Blome’s signature as seen on the US Embassy’s official website.

We also noticed a couple of dissimilarities in the formatting of the letter. The font in the letterhead as seen in notices released on the official website (on the same date) is different than the one in the viral image. Moreover, the date in the reference number in the original notifications from the PTI website is written in the YYYY format. However, the date is written in YY format in the viral image. The format of the date is also different.

Pakistan-based news outlet Geo TV also fact-checked this claim on May 10, saying, “An official privy to the development told 𝘎𝘦𝘰 𝘍𝘢𝘤𝘵 𝘊𝘩𝘦𝘤𝘬, on the condition of anonymity, that no such agreement was signed between Khan and the U.S. ambassador”.

𝗖𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗺: A letter circulating online claims that an agreement was signed between PTI chairman Imran Khan, the interior secretary Yousuf Khokhar and the U.S. ambassador Donald Blome, where the ambassador offers Khan certain sureties in case of arrest.

𝗙𝗮𝗰𝘁: The letter… pic.twitter.com/wJJ04bKHM8

— Geo Fact Check (@GeoFactCheck) May 10, 2023

Hence, a false document purportedly showing the terms of the agreement for Imran Khan’s arrest is being circulated online. An Alt News analysis shows that the document is fabricated and no such agreement has been signed.

The post Imran Khan arrest: News channels show AI-generated image as real; old video, fake agreement paper viral appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

Amid protests following the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan on Tuesday, May 9, authorities and supporters of Khan’s PTI party have repeatedly attacked and harassed members of the press, according to a statement by the local press freedom group Pakistan Press Foundation and local journalists who spoke to CPJ. On Thursday, Pakistan’s Supreme Court declared Khan’s arrest illegal and ordered his immediate release.

As of the evening of Friday, May 12, at least one journalist, Imran Riaz Khan, was being held in an unidentified location, his lawyer Mian Ali Ashfaq told CPJ by phone.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has also suspended mobile internet services and restricted access to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter in various areas throughout the country since Tuesday.

“Pakistan authorities must unconditionally release journalist Imran Riaz Khan, investigate all attacks on the media, and restore unrestricted access to internet services and social media platforms throughout the country,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director. “The Pakistani people have a right to be informed about the ongoing upheaval in their country. The authorities and the opposition political party must respect that right.”

Authorities arrested Imran Riaz Khan, an anchor with the privately owned broadcaster BOL News, in the early hours of Thursday, May 11, at Punjab’s Sialkot Airport, where he was scheduled to travel to Oman, according to news reports and Ashfaq.

In a detention order reviewed by CPJ, the Sialkot police accused the journalist of repeatedly delivering “provocative speech” and requested that he be detained for 30 days due to the “likelihood that he will create unrest [among] the general public and create [a] law & order situation.”

Prior to his arrest, the journalist had published videos on his personal YouTube channel, where he has about 4 million subscribers, demonstrating support for PTI protesters and sharing reports alleging that the former prime minister had been tortured in custody.

Attacks by pro-PTI protesters

In the Hashtnagri area of Peshawar on Tuesday, protesters used rods to break the windows of a satellite van with the privately owned broadcaster Dawn News TV, leaving correspondent Arif Hayat with an injury to his left shoulder and minor cuts, according to Ali Akber, the broadcaster’s Peshawar bureau chief, and video of the incident reviewed by CPJ.

The demonstrators damaged the crew’s cameras and gathered around the van, blocking it from leaving the area, Akber said, adding that the crew managed to leave after the way was cleared about two hours later. 

Separately, on Wednesday, hundreds of protesters gathered in front of the building housing the public broadcaster Radio Pakistan and the state-owned news agency Associated Press of Pakistan in Peshawar, according to a report by Radio Pakistan as well as Peshawar Press Club President Arshad Aziz Malik and Asmat Shah, an Associated Press of Pakistan reporter, who both spoke with CPJ by phone.

The protesters broke through the building gate and ransacked the outlets’ offices, damaging equipment and breaking windows, and set the building and several of the companies’ vehicles on fire, according to those sources. A Radio Pakistan administrative employee sustained severe burn injuries, Shah said.

CPJ called and messaged Shaukat Ali Yousafzai, the PTI information secretary for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which includes Peshawar, for comment, but did not receive any replies.

Attacks by police

At about 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday, police officers attacked Feezan Ashraf, a producer for the privately owned broadcaster Suno TV, and Syed Mustajab Hassan, a producer for the privately owned broadcaster Express News, while they were attempting to cover a raid on the home of a PTI leader in Rawalpindi, according to a statement by the National Press Club in Islamabad, which CPJ reviewed, and the two journalists, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

Six police officers confronted Ashraf and Hassan, who introduced themselves as journalists and showed the officers their press identification cards. However, the officers proceeded to kick, slap, and beat the journalists with wooden rods for about 15 minutes, they said, adding that officers also broke their mobile phones and forced Hassan to delete a video he captured of the raid.

Ashraf and Hassan sustained significant lesions throughout their bodies and painful injuries, including to their heads, according to the journalists and photos of their injuries reviewed by CPJ. They received treatment at a local hospital and were prescribed painkillers.

Separately, at around 3 a.m. on Thursday, five police officers detained Aftab Iqbal, an anchor with the privately owned broadcaster Samaa TV, at his farmhouse in Lahore, according to a video by the journalist’s wife, Nasreen Iqbal, and Ashfaq, who is also representing Iqbal.

While entering the home’s premises, officers pushed a security guard to the ground, slapped Iqbal’s assistant, and threatened others at the scene to lie down or be shot, Nasreen Iqbal said in that video, adding that her husband did not resist his arrest.

Iqbal had also published videos on YouTube, where he has 1.6 million followers, that showed his support for PTI protesters and Imran Khan. Iqbal was released on Friday following an order by the Lahore High Court, Ashfaq said.

CPJ called and messaged Lahore Capital City Police Officer Bilal Kamyana and emailed the Punjab police for comment but did not immediately receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

The arrest of former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan and leader of the Pakistan Movement for Justice (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI) caused thousands of Pakistanis to take to the streets and protest. However, Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered on May 11 his release, offering a significant victory for the onetime leader responsible for bringing Islamabad closer to Moscow and away from US dominance until his removal from power.

On May 9, Khan was detained and arrested for the alleged embezzlement of 50 billion Pakistani rupees  ($240 million). This unleashed a wave of violent demonstrations in several cities in the country and threatens to unravel the fragile state.

The current situation is taking place against the background of several military coups because the army continues to play an essential role in the critical decisions of state policy. These internal factors had an even more substantial effect on the situation than the fact that Khan was trying to pursue an independent course in foreign policy, particularly with Moscow, whilst deepening his country’s dependency on Beijing. In addition, his domestic policy is rejected by elite military circles that maintain close ties with Britain and the US.

The former prime minister at first did not depend on any political party, and, in fact, he challenged traditional political and military circles. In Pakistan, there are two older parties: the Pakistan Muslim League and the Pakistan People’s Party, which, apart from the military, have maintained political power.

Khan, a former cricket star, emerged as a “revolutionary” by deciding that Pakistan needed to choose another path and divorce itself from Western dominance.

Pakistani voters protested after Khan was removed from power in a soft coup on 10 April 2022 and continued to support him vehemently. Now, the protesters continue to demonstrate against his targeting. Through imprisonment, Khan would have been prevented from participating in the political struggle because the military had already made its position clear — preserving the status quo, i.e., their own personal interests.

As for the US relationship with Pakistan, the latter is vital for the Americans as it is a state that directly borders Afghanistan and influences what is happening there. In particular, they are interested in and very concerned about the multiple links between the Pakistani military and the Afghan Taliban. It is recalled that Pakistan was even part of the bloc that the Americans had created against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Imran Khan brought Islamabad closer to Moscow, and for this reason, the Americans needed him removed. However, due to his immense popularity, the Americans want assurances that he will never return to power so that Pakistan can stay in its orbit of influence. For this reason, the Pakistani military is using every method to keep him out of politics.

Given that Pakistan is at the crossroads between India, China and Iran, the Americans must keep the South Asian country under its control. In addition, Washington wants the Pakistanis to stop cooperating with Russia or limit their association. Effectively, Khan wanted to stop depending on the Americans and sought to develop a relationship with Russia, but he was prevented from doing so.

As for China, it is Pakistan’s traditional “all-time” ally, as the Pakistanis call it. Only on May 10, China delivered two Type 054A/P frigates to Pakistan, meaning that all four warships of this class, first announced in 2018, have been commissioned into the Pakistan Navy. Global Times reported that the program marks the China-Pakistan friendship and the high-level defence cooperation between the two countries.

In fact, the relationship between Pakistan and China is so deep that the latter objected to a recent proposal from India to add the leader of the Pakistan-based terror organisation Jaish-e Mohammed to the UN Security Council’s 1267 ISIL and Al Qaida Sanctions list. It is also recalled that China last year put on hold proposals to blacklist Pakistan-based terrorists Hafiz Talah Saeed, Lashkar-e-Taiba leader Shahid Mahmood, and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba terrorist Sajid Mir under the Al Qaeda Sanctions regime.

Although the Americans will find it difficult to break the Pakistan-China relationship, especially as the East Asian country is one of the few states around the world willing to invest in the financial blackhole that Pakistan has become, it will be an even more difficult task if Khan was in power. His arrest is related to the fact that even though the US-backed Pakistani military removed him from power, there is every chance he could return as Prime Minister if free and fair elections are held, which would be intolerable for Washington.

Khan’s arrest came hours after the military rebuked him for alleging that a senior officer was involved in a plot to assassinate him, something the army has denied. Crucially, criticism of Pakistan’s military is considered a redline, as the state apparatus is effectively controlled by it. Khan poses the greatest threat to their political monopoly, which is why his continued persecution should not be considered surprising.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ahmed Afzaal.

We look at the political crisis in Pakistan as the Islamabad High Court on Friday granted two weeks’ bail to former Prime Minister Imran Khan after his arrest sparked mass protests. Paramilitary forces arrested Khan on corruption charges, but Pakistan’s Supreme Court later ruled his arrest was “invalid and unlawful.” Khan served as prime minister from 2018 to 2022, when he was ousted from office in what he called a “U.S.-backed regime change” plot carried out by his political opposition. Mohammed Hanif, an award-winning writer and journalist based in Karachi, says the corruption accusations are part of a larger power struggle in the country, pitting the extremely popular Khan against the country’s establishment, including the military. “Elections are due, and they want to keep him out of the election race. Either they want to disqualify him or put him behind bars,” says Hanif.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Pakistan's Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that former Prime Minister Imran Khan's arrest on corruption charges earlier this week was illegal and ordered his immediate release.

"Though no longer a prisoner, Khan was ordered to stay in a police guesthouse overnight 'as a guest' under the security of Islamabad police to ensure his protection, and told he could bring 10 people of his choice to join him," The Guardianreported.

After Khan was detained by paramilitary forces on Tuesday, protests erupted throughout Pakistan. Two days later, the popular leader's supporters celebrated news of the high court's decision.

Khan, prime minister from 2018 to 2022, has denied the allegations against him, and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party he previously led calls them politically motivated.

If convicted, Khan would be disqualified from seeking office in the elections scheduled to take place later this year and could possibly receive a lifetime ban.

Clashes between Khan's supporters and the nation's police this week resulted in at least 11 deaths and 2,500 arrests, including seven senior PTI officials.

"Your arrest was invalid so the whole process needs to be backtracked," Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial told Khan.

Khan, who has faced dozens of charges since he was ousted last April after losing a no-confidence vote, had avoided arrest for several months.

As BBC Newsreported:

Previous attempts had ended in near misses. In March, a court order to detain him was thwarted by pitched battles between his supporters and police outside his home in Lahore.

His arrest, which happened while he was in court in the capital Islamabad, was no less dramatic. The 70-year-old is barely visible among a swarm of officers in riot gear as they escort him outside and bundle him into a vehicle.

Speaking before a trio of Supreme Court judges on Thursday, Khan condemned his arrest at the hands of the paramilitary Punjab Rangers.

Former Pakistani ambassador Maleeha Lodhi told the BBC she thought the court's intervention would help reduce tensions in the streets.

"The last couple of days have seen extraordinary violence by protesters who are supporters of Imran Khan, who are obviously enraged by the manner in which he was arrested," she said. "There is still uncertainty, but hopefully the situation will not return to the kind of violent scenes that we have seen."

Although Khan requested that he "be allowed to stay at his home, the court determined that because of the security situation, he would have to remain at the police guesthouse" where he has been since Tuesday, BBC Newsreported. "However, the judges repeatedly emphasized that he would be allowed to have whoever he chooses as a guest."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

Supporters of Imran Khan took to the streets of Pakistan nationwide in angry protest Tuesday after the former Prime Minister was arrested on corruption and embezzlement charges—allegations the champion cricketer turned progressive politician has denied and says are politically motivated.

The protests erupted in various cities—including Karachi, Islamabad, Peshawar, and Lahore—clashed with police who used water cannons and tear gas in an effort to control the crowds.

In Islamabad for a scheduled court appearance over the allegations, Khan was taken into custody upon his arrival. Video footage showed him being taken away by a throng of police in riot gear and placed into an armored vehicle.

Imran Khan Arrested in Islamabad www.youtube.com

According to the Washington Post:

Khan's arrest comes after days of mounting public dispute between the former prime minister, who was ousted from his office last year, the current government, and the country’s powerful military. Khan had recently accused a senior officer of having been part of an assassination attempt against him last year, which he narrowly survived.

The former prime minister's party said there were political motives behind the arrest linked to the current government under Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. Khan's supporters say the government is acting undemocratically, having repeatedly sought to delay key regional votes this year after Khan performed above expectations in by-elections last October.

Pakistan's Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah told reporters that Khan's arrest was "in accordance with the law” and ordered by National Accountability Bureau (NAB). "NAB is an independent institution and we have never tried to control it," Sanaullah explained.

In a video message filmed hours ahead of his arrival in Islamabad—and released by his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party just prior to his arrest—Khan said he was prepared for whatever came next.

\u201c\u0622\u0626\u06cc \u0627\u06cc\u0633 \u067e\u06cc \u0622\u0631 \u06a9\u0648 \u0645\u06cc\u0631\u0627 \u062c\u0648\u0627\u0628 \u0627\u0648\u0631 \u0648\u06c1 \u062f\u0648 \u0628\u0646\u06cc\u0627\u062f\u06cc \u0648\u062c\u0648\u06c1\u0627\u062a \u062c\u0646 \u06a9\u06cc \u0628\u0646\u06cc\u0627\u062f \u067e\u0631 \u067e\u06cc \u0688\u06cc \u0627\u06cc\u0645 \u0627\u0648\u0631 \u0627\u0633 \u06a9\u06d2 \u0633\u0631\u067e\u0631\u0633\u062a \u0645\u062c\u06be\u06d2 \u06af\u0631\u0641\u062a\u0627\u0631 \u06a9\u0631\u0646\u06d2 \u06a9\u06cc \u06a9\u0648\u0634\u0634\u0648\u06ba \u0645\u06cc\u06ba \u0644\u06af\u06d2 \u06c1\u0648\u0626\u06d2 \u06c1\u06cc\u06ba: \n\u06f1\u06d4 \u0645\u062c\u06be\u06d2 \u0627\u0646\u062a\u062e\u0627\u0628\u06cc \u0645\u06c1\u0645 \u0686\u0644\u0627\u0646\u06d2 \u0633\u06d2 \u0631\u0648\u06a9\u0646\u06d2 \u06a9\u06cc\u0644\u0626\u06d2 \u06a9\u06cc\u0648\u0646\u06a9\u06c1 \u0627\u0646\u0634\u0627\u0621\u0627\u0644\u0644\u06c1 \u062c\u0628 \u0627\u0646\u062a\u062e\u0627\u0628\u0627\u062a \u06a9\u0627 \u0627\u0639\u0644\u0627\u0646 \u06c1\u0648\u06af\u0627 \u062a\u0648 \u0645\u06cc\u06ba \u062c\u0644\u0633\u06d2 \u0645\u0646\u0639\u0642\u062f \u06a9\u0631\u0648\u06ba \u06af\u0627\u06d4 \n\u06f2- \u067e\u06cc \u0688\u06cc \u0627\u06cc\u0645 \u062d\u06a9\u0648\u0645\u062a \u0627\u0648\u0631 \u0627\u0633 \u06a9\u06d2\u2026\u201d

— Imran Khan (@Imran Khan) 1683616655

Speaking in Urdu, Khan said the reasons behind his potential arrest were twofold. "One," he said, "to stop me from campaigning" when new elections are announced. And two, he added, "to restrain me from mobilizing the people for a vigorous mass movement in support of the Constitution," which he says has been violated by his political opponents and the ruling government.

"Come to me with warrants, my lawyers will be there," Kahn says in the video. "If you want to send me to jail, I am prepared for it."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jon Queally.

While many base Pakistan’s enmity towards Israel on the latter’s post-1948 transgressions such as occupying Gaza and West Bank, military incursions in Gaza, ethnic cleansing of Arabs, building unlawful Israeli settlements, and innumerable other events, this is an incomplete story. Pakistan’s opposition to Israel can be traced back to Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, two of Pakistan’s founders, when the two nations were nonexistent.

Mr. Iqbal, Mr. Jinnah, and their political party worked selflessly toward the cause of Palestine after World War I, despite chasing the dream of Pakistan. They sent Indian Muslim delegations to aid with the Palestine question, built anti-British/Zionist momentum through scathing letters and speeches, passed countless resolutions for Palestine, organized Palestine Days, and started a Palestine Fund for Arab victims et cetera. They did so much, that on several occasions even the Grand Mufti of Palestine acknowledged their efforts.

Pakistan’s Current Situation

After the Abraham Accords in 2020, the Middle East’s already waning anger toward Israel dissolved further. In a shock move Oman, UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan, recognized Israel. There were similar murmurings of Saudi Arabia being next as it was not possible for UAE, Bahrain, and Oman to recognize Israel without big brother Saudi Arabia’s blessing.

While in office, Pakistan’s ex-PM Imran Khan verified that he was fighting enormous exogenous pressures to recognize Israel. One of the nations placing such pressures, he asserted, was America, yet he abstained from referencing the other countries. However, he did note that they were close allies of Pakistan, which many perceived as Saudi Arabia and UAE. Imran Khan’s position on the Palestine issue, aptly, reflected that of Pakistan’s founders as evidenced by his statement that Pakistan cannot make any decisions on a matter which has been refused by the Palestinians.

Army Chief Qamar Javed Bajwa: A Semi-Closeted Zionist

In April 2022, Imran Khan was ousted through a no-confidence motion. Many in Pakistan, including the former PM, assert that the then-army chief Bajwa was behind this – this is no surprise as the military establishment has ruled for 33 years directly; and always indirectly. After Imran’s removal, information regarding how Bajwa was undermining the ex-PM became public knowledge. While the mainstream media remains largely muzzled, journalists, analysts, and even ex-army officers began unveiling Bajwa’s obfuscated plots via YouTube and Twitter. From ousting Imran Khan to jailing and even torturing critics (politicians and journalists alike), everything was exposed. Videos such as “Woh Kaun Tha?” (Who was he?) by investigative journalist Arshad Shareef, who was later murdered in Kenya under suspicious circumstances, went viral. The video (the original deleted) implied culpability towards Bajwa on his copious behind-the-scene ploys.

One specific area where Bajwa’s manoeuvrings were exposed was vis-à-vis recognizing Israel which Imran Khan was clearly against. This assertion grew more substantial when senior journalists revealed more information. For example, senior anchor Imran Riaz Khan, (unrelated to ex-PM Imran Khan), expressed that when Bajwa met journalists, he would state that Pakistan ought to soften its stance on Israel. Bajwa would express his bafflement in front of the journalists regarding how Arab states were normalizing relations but Pakistan persisted with a stringent anti-recognition of Israel policy. Imran Riaz also noted that while meeting journalists in a one-on-one environment, General Bajwa would push them to start a discussion on the potential of Pakistan-Israel relations on TV and/or social media.

Another senior anchor Hamid Mir expressed that General Bajwa was constantly undermining Imran Khan and was pushing him toward the recognition of Israel. Bajwa’s romance with Israel was additionally established when Hamid Mir wrote in an article, “Gen Bajwa also wanted to engage Israel but Imran Khan was reluctant.” On another anchor’s show on TV, Hamid Mir asserted that Imran Khan should take the name of the person who was pushing his administration to recognize Israel – signifying Bajwa. Due to this and various other conspiracies coming to light, Imran Khan’s popularity has peaked while Bajwa has become one of the most detested figures in Pakistan’s history.

Pakistani-American Delegations Visit Israel

When the new PDM (Pakistan Democratic Movement) government sponsored by and beholden to the army chief and the military establishment took charge, Bajwa’s pro-Israel policies seemed to manifest. In May 2022, a group of Pakistani-Americans visited Israel which set off tremors across Pakistan. Pakistanis were infuriated as this delegation, sponsored by Sharaka (a pro-Israel civil group), met with Israeli president Isaac Herzog. More concerning was that an anchor from PTV (Pakistan’s state telecaster), Ahmed Qureshi, was part of this group. Anila Ali, the head of the delegation gave the Israeli president a book on Pakistan’s founder, Mr. Jinnah – the irony being Mr. Jinnah’s feverish opposition to Zionism. Facing heavy reaction from the public, the PDM government declared that it did not send the group to Israel and that the delegates were dual nationals. They were forced to fire the PTV anchor, however.

A couple of months after this, a second Pakistani-American group sponsored again by Sharaka met the Israeli president. This designation was shockingly headed by Nasim Ashraf, a previous Pakistani minister (and another dual national). These two delegations touted that they were working for the cause of interfaith harmony but many analysts exclaimed conversely. For instance, Electronic Intifada notes “… the real purpose of these visits – typically led by Muslim Zionists – is to open a path to formal diplomatic and even military relations between Islamabad and Tel Aviv.” This is further proven by Sharaka and other like-minded groups’ ties to US government institutes as well as Zionist organizations – the implication being that such groups can be and are used surreptitiously by US-Israel agencies.

Raza Rumi of the Pakistani publication Naya Daur notes: “There must be some debate going on, and this visit was just a testing-the-waters-type visit.” Such delegations are utilized to measure public perception as well as influence it. For instance, in 2017 an interfaith group of Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, and Hindus from Bahrain visited Jerusalem, three years before Bahrain began diplomatic relations with Israel.

Lastly, the timing of these delegations visiting Israel is suspect as they occurred shortly after the pro-Palestine PM Imran Khan was removed from office, and Bajwa, then chief and still a Zionist could pull strings freely.

Will Pakistan Accept Israel?

Pakistan is nearing economic default, industries are shutting down, terrorism is rising once more, and inflation is wreaking havoc. Perhaps the Israel-US nexus could offer monetary relief and perhaps later military aid in exchange for recognition – this might sway the government to build a pro-Israel narrative to sell to the public. Since most of the debilitated PDM government is indebted to Bajwa because of their myriad corruption charges magically evaporating after they assumed power, this might be plausible. Furthermore, the PDM government has realigned towards the US, as Bajwa wanted, which was under threat when Imran Khan was PM. For Israel to attain nuclear Pakistan’s recognition would be a political masterstroke. Netanyahu is on record as claiming that Pakistan is the biggest threat to Israel behind Iran.

Although Bajwa is no longer the army chief, Asim Muneer, his replacement, is accused of being Bajwa’s veritable arm and vehemently anti-Imran Khan as well. Recognizing Israel would be an affront to Pakistan’s revered founders, to the resilient Palestinians, and to the Muslim world. Pakistan’s founding fathers drew a glaring line in the sand when it came to Israel – to cross beyond this pale would be an outright moral catastrophe for the country.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Matildo Khan.

While many base Pakistan’s enmity towards Israel on the latter’s post-1948 transgressions such as occupying Gaza and West Bank, military incursions in Gaza, ethnic cleansing of Arabs, building unlawful Israeli settlements, and innumerable other events, this is an incomplete story. Pakistan’s opposition to Israel can be traced back to Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, two of Pakistan’s founders, when the two nations were nonexistent.

Mr. Iqbal, Mr. Jinnah, and their political party worked selflessly toward the cause of Palestine after World War I, despite chasing the dream of Pakistan. They sent Indian Muslim delegations to aid with the Palestine question, built anti-British/Zionist momentum through scathing letters and speeches, passed countless resolutions for Palestine, organized Palestine Days, and started a Palestine Fund for Arab victims et cetera. They did so much, that on several occasions even the Grand Mufti of Palestine acknowledged their efforts.

Pakistan’s Current Situation

After the Abraham Accords in 2020, the Middle East’s already waning anger toward Israel dissolved further. In a shock move Oman, UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan, recognized Israel. There were similar murmurings of Saudi Arabia being next as it was not possible for UAE, Bahrain, and Oman to recognize Israel without big brother Saudi Arabia’s blessing.

While in office, Pakistan’s ex-PM Imran Khan verified that he was fighting enormous exogenous pressures to recognize Israel. One of the nations placing such pressures, he asserted, was America, yet he abstained from referencing the other countries. However, he did note that they were close allies of Pakistan, which many perceived as Saudi Arabia and UAE. Imran Khan’s position on the Palestine issue, aptly, reflected that of Pakistan’s founders as evidenced by his statement that Pakistan cannot make any decisions on a matter which has been refused by the Palestinians.

Army Chief Qamar Javed Bajwa: A Semi-Closeted Zionist

In April 2022, Imran Khan was ousted through a no-confidence motion. Many in Pakistan, including the former PM, assert that the then-army chief Bajwa was behind this – this is no surprise as the military establishment has ruled for 33 years directly; and always indirectly. After Imran’s removal, information regarding how Bajwa was undermining the ex-PM became public knowledge. While the mainstream media remains largely muzzled, journalists, analysts, and even ex-army officers began unveiling Bajwa’s obfuscated plots via YouTube and Twitter. From ousting Imran Khan to jailing and even torturing critics (politicians and journalists alike), everything was exposed. Videos such as “Woh Kaun Tha?” (Who was he?) by investigative journalist Arshad Shareef, who was later murdered in Kenya under suspicious circumstances, went viral. The video (the original deleted) implied culpability towards Bajwa on his copious behind-the-scene ploys.

One specific area where Bajwa’s manoeuvrings were exposed was vis-à-vis recognizing Israel which Imran Khan was clearly against. This assertion grew more substantial when senior journalists revealed more information. For example, senior anchor Imran Riaz Khan, (unrelated to ex-PM Imran Khan), expressed that when Bajwa met journalists, he would state that Pakistan ought to soften its stance on Israel. Bajwa would express his bafflement in front of the journalists regarding how Arab states were normalizing relations but Pakistan persisted with a stringent anti-recognition of Israel policy. Imran Riaz also noted that while meeting journalists in a one-on-one environment, General Bajwa would push them to start a discussion on the potential of Pakistan-Israel relations on TV and/or social media.

Another senior anchor Hamid Mir expressed that General Bajwa was constantly undermining Imran Khan and was pushing him toward the recognition of Israel. Bajwa’s romance with Israel was additionally established when Hamid Mir wrote in an article, “Gen Bajwa also wanted to engage Israel but Imran Khan was reluctant.” On another anchor’s show on TV, Hamid Mir asserted that Imran Khan should take the name of the person who was pushing his administration to recognize Israel – signifying Bajwa. Due to this and various other conspiracies coming to light, Imran Khan’s popularity has peaked while Bajwa has become one of the most detested figures in Pakistan’s history.

Pakistani-American Delegations Visit Israel

When the new PDM (Pakistan Democratic Movement) government sponsored by and beholden to the army chief and the military establishment took charge, Bajwa’s pro-Israel policies seemed to manifest. In May 2022, a group of Pakistani-Americans visited Israel which set off tremors across Pakistan. Pakistanis were infuriated as this delegation, sponsored by Sharaka (a pro-Israel civil group), met with Israeli president Isaac Herzog. More concerning was that an anchor from PTV (Pakistan’s state telecaster), Ahmed Qureshi, was part of this group. Anila Ali, the head of the delegation gave the Israeli president a book on Pakistan’s founder, Mr. Jinnah – the irony being Mr. Jinnah’s feverish opposition to Zionism. Facing heavy reaction from the public, the PDM government declared that it did not send the group to Israel and that the delegates were dual nationals. They were forced to fire the PTV anchor, however.

A couple of months after this, a second Pakistani-American group sponsored again by Sharaka met the Israeli president. This designation was shockingly headed by Nasim Ashraf, a previous Pakistani minister (and another dual national). These two delegations touted that they were working for the cause of interfaith harmony but many analysts exclaimed conversely. For instance, Electronic Intifada notes “… the real purpose of these visits – typically led by Muslim Zionists – is to open a path to formal diplomatic and even military relations between Islamabad and Tel Aviv.” This is further proven by Sharaka and other like-minded groups’ ties to US government institutes as well as Zionist organizations – the implication being that such groups can be and are used surreptitiously by US-Israel agencies.

Raza Rumi of the Pakistani publication Naya Daur notes: “There must be some debate going on, and this visit was just a testing-the-waters-type visit.” Such delegations are utilized to measure public perception as well as influence it. For instance, in 2017 an interfaith group of Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, and Hindus from Bahrain visited Jerusalem, three years before Bahrain began diplomatic relations with Israel.

Lastly, the timing of these delegations visiting Israel is suspect as they occurred shortly after the pro-Palestine PM Imran Khan was removed from office, and Bajwa, then chief and still a Zionist could pull strings freely.

Will Pakistan Accept Israel?

Pakistan is nearing economic default, industries are shutting down, terrorism is rising once more, and inflation is wreaking havoc. Perhaps the Israel-US nexus could offer monetary relief and perhaps later military aid in exchange for recognition – this might sway the government to build a pro-Israel narrative to sell to the public. Since most of the debilitated PDM government is indebted to Bajwa because of their myriad corruption charges magically evaporating after they assumed power, this might be plausible. Furthermore, the PDM government has realigned towards the US, as Bajwa wanted, which was under threat when Imran Khan was PM. For Israel to attain nuclear Pakistan’s recognition would be a political masterstroke. Netanyahu is on record as claiming that Pakistan is the biggest threat to Israel behind Iran.

Although Bajwa is no longer the army chief, Asim Muneer, his replacement, is accused of being Bajwa’s veritable arm and vehemently anti-Imran Khan as well. Recognizing Israel would be an affront to Pakistan’s revered founders, to the resilient Palestinians, and to the Muslim world. Pakistan’s founding fathers drew a glaring line in the sand when it came to Israel – to cross beyond this pale would be an outright moral catastrophe for the country.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Matildo Khan.

On the evening of Sunday, March 5, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority, the country’s broadcast regulator, issued the ban on airing Khan’s speeches, which went into effect on Monday, and warned that violators will have their licenses canceled, according to news reports.

Hours after the order was announced on Sunday, PEMRA suspended ARY News’ license for broadcasting a speech by Khan, according to those sources and ARY News CEO Salman Iqbal, who spoke to CPJ by phone. ARY News remains off the air as of Monday evening, Iqbal said.

“Pakistan’s ban on satellite television channels broadcasting former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s speeches and the suspension of ARY News’ license are the government’s latest attacks on press freedom and the right to information,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Authorities must immediately reverse these blatant acts of censorship and allow the media to report on key political developments in the country freely.”

PEMRA’s order followed a Sunday speech by Khan, head of the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party who has been pushing for early elections, in which he alleged that former army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa had orchestrated Khan’s removal from power in April 2022, according to those sources. Before the speech, authorities unsuccessfully attempted to arrest Khan on corruption charges.

Iqbal told CPJ that although other Pakistani television channels broadcasted Khan’s speech Sunday, only ARY News had its license suspended. The outlet plans to file a petition against the suspension at the Sindh High Court on Tuesday, he said.

On Monday, Khan filed a petition at the Lahore High Court challenging the ban, according to reports. PEMRA previously banned live telecasts of Khan’s speeches in August and November 2022, and both orders were later reversed, according to news reports.

CPJ emailed PEMRA and called and messaged Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb for comment, but did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

In the early hours of Thursday, February 2, officers with Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency arrested Khan, an anchor with the privately owned broadcaster BOL News and host of a YouTube channel with about 3.8 million subscribers, according to news reports.

FIA officers arrested Khan at Lahore’s Allama Iqbal International Airport, where he was leaving for the United Arab Emirates, in response to an investigation into alleged hate speech, according to those sources.

The first information report in Khan’s case, a document opening an investigation, was shared on Twitter and shows that the FIA’s cybercrime wing is investigating Khan under the 2016 Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act and the penal code. CPJ has repeatedly documented how the PECA has been used to detain, investigate, and harass journalists in retaliation for their work.

“Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency must immediately release journalist Imran Riaz Khan and drop any investigation in retaliation for his work,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Authorities must allow journalists to freely comment on state institutions, including the military. Arresting journalists for their commentary or reporting smacks of a desperate attempt to silence criticism.”

The first information report alleges that Khan engaged in “hate speech” aimed at creating a “rift between the general public and the state institutions” during his speech at a January 30 seminar on violence against journalists in Pakistan, clips of which were shared on social media. In that speech, Khan questioned Qamar Javed Bajwa, a former army general, who said in his final speech before his retirement in November 2022 that the army would remain apolitical in Pakistan.

Authorities accuse Khan of violating sections of the PECA pertaining to electronic forgery, malicious code, and committing an offense in relation to an information system, according to the first information report, which says he is also accused under the penal code of abetment of mutiny, defamation, and public mischief. Abetment of mutiny can carry a punishment of life imprisonment, according to the law.

On January 13, FIA officers arrested journalist Shahid Aslam, alleging he was involved in coverage of the assets of Bajwa and his family. He was released on bail on January 18, news reports said.

CPJ was unable to locate contact details for Bajwa. CPJ emailed the FIA for comment but did not receive any response.

In May 2022, the Islamabad High Court ordered the director of the FIA cybercrime wing to coordinate with the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists and other representative bodies prior to initiating punitive action against journalists, according to news reports. The union plans to file a petition in court challenging Khan’s arrest on Friday, BOL News reported.

Police previously detained Khan from July 5 to 9, 2022, after a slew of cases were registered against him, according to CPJ reporting and news reports. On July 14, 2022, authorities ordered Khan off a Dubai-bound flight from the Lahore airport, according to a tweet by the journalist and his lawyer, Mian Ali Ashfaq, who spoke with CPJ via messaging app at the time.

CPJ called Ashfaq and contacted him via messaging app for comment on Khan’s latest arrest but did not immediately receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On November 3, a spine-chilling assassination attempt was mounted on Pakistan’s most charismatic and popular political leader, Imran Khan, while he was addressing a political rally in Wazirabad, a small town near the capital of Pakistan’s Punjab province, Lahore.

As corroborated by eye witness accounts, there were two shooters. One of them was an amateur religious zealot armed with a pistol and meant as a diversion who was caught by the supporters of PTI, Imran Khan’s political party. The other was a professionally trained sniper who shot a burst of bullets at Imran Khan’s container with a sub-machine gun and escaped the crime scene unharmed.

It’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t an assassination attempt but a shot across the bow meant to send a loud and clear warning to the leadership of Imran Khan’s PTI. The sharp shooter aimed the gun at Imran Khan’s legs and emptied an entire magazine of the sub-machine gun, and hit the bull’s eye.

Clearly, the assassin had explicit instructions only to target lower limbs of victims and avoid hitting vital organs in upper body that could’ve caused deaths and needless public furor. Injuries suffered by the rest of PTI leadership, mainly in the legs, and bystanders was collateral damage. One bystander, named Moazzam, was killed on the spot, but circumstantial evidence points that he was likely shot dead from the bullets shot by the guards protecting the container who mistakenly assumed that he was the shooter.

Multiple bullets and fragments of lead from two to three feet high metal plate around the container pierced Imran Khan’s both legs. After taking a close look at Imran Khan’s x-rays, as shown by his personal physician, Dr. Faisal, one bullet fractured Imran Khan’s right shin bone. A tiny piece of shrapnel landed near patella on the knee-cap. Another lead fragment almost pierced femoral artery that could’ve caused profuse bleeding and even death if left untreated for long.

The amateur zealot, identified as Naveed s/o Bashir, was armed with a locally made pistol he had bought for Rs.20,000 ($100). Most pistols found in Pakistan are semi-automatic and are utterly unreliable. They seldom fire an entire magazine without misfiring a couple of bullets. That’s what happened with the shooter, too. A bullet got stuck in the chamber and a valiant PTI supporter, Ibtisam Hassan, leapt on him and snatched the pistol from his hands.

Russian-made Kalashnikovs, on the other hand, are weapons of choice for sharp shooters. And since the times of the Soviet-Afghan war in the eighties, Kalashnikovs are so easily available in Pakistan that one could conveniently get an AK-47 from any arms dealer. In all likelihood, the sniper was armed with an AK-47, as the classic rattling sound of a Kalashnikov burst could be clearly heard in the video of the incident, and he likely escaped the crime scene in the narrow alleys of the town on a motor-bike with an accomplice.

The confessional statement of Naveed s/o Bashir was an eyewash, as he was a decoy. The whole assassination attempt appeared astutely choreographed. The purported assassin was not only caught red-handed but was also filmed shooting bullets in the air with a pistol while the actual hitman who professionally executed the assassination attempt remains as elusive as the masterminds of the cowardly plot.

Subsequently, Imran Khan implicated incumbent Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah and DG-C of ISI Major Gen. Faisal Naseer in the plot to assassinate him. But the police refused to register the first information report due to fear of repercussions from the deep state for naming a serving military officer in the police report.

In any case, the director of intelligence couldn’t have ordered mounting an assassination attempt on a popular political leader and the country’s former prime minister all by himself without a nod of approval from Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, then the army chief of Pakistan’s military, who retired from service on November 29, weeks following the assassination plot on November 3.

In Pakistan’s context, the national security establishment originally meant civil-military bureaucracy. Though over the years, civil bureaucracy has taken a backseat and now “the establishment” is defined as military’s top brass that has dictated Pakistan’s security and defense policy since its inception.

Paradoxically, security establishments do not have ideologies, they simply have interests. For instance, the General Ayub-led administration in the sixties was regarded as a liberal establishment. Then, the General Zia-led administration during the eighties was manifestly a religious conservative establishment. And lastly, the General Musharraf-led administration from 1999 to 2008 was once again deemed a liberal establishment.

The deep state does not judge on the basis of ideology, it simply looks for weakness. If a liberal political party is unassailable in a political system, it will join forces with conservatives; and if conservatives cannot be beaten in a system, it will form an alliance with liberals to perpetuate the stranglehold of “the deep state” on policymaking organs of state.

The biggest threat to nascent democracies all over the world does not come from external enemies but from their internal enemies, the national security establishments, because military generals always have a chauvinistic mindset and an undemocratic temperament. An additional aggravating factor that increases the likelihood of military coups in developing democracies is that they lack firm traditions of democracy, rule of law and constitutionalism which act as bars against martial laws.

All political parties in Pakistan at some point in time in history were groomed by the security establishment. The founder of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was groomed by General Ayub’s establishment as a counterweight to Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League, the founder of Bangladesh, during the sixties.

Nawaz Sharif was nurtured by General Zia’s administration during the eighties to offset the influence of Bhutto’s People’s Party. But he was cast aside after he capitulated to the pressure of the Clinton administration during the Kargil conflict of 1999 in disputed Kashmir region and ceded Pakistan’s military positions to arch-rival India, leading to Gen. Musharraf’s coup against Nawaz Sharif’s government in October 1999.

Imran Khan’s PTI draws popular support from Pakistani masses, particularly from younger generations and women that are full of political enthusiasm. PTI won the general elections of 2018 and formed a coalition government, and Imran Khan was elected prime minister. But a rift emerged between Imran Khan’s elected government and the top brass of Pakistan’s military in November 2021 over the appointment of the director general of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence service.

Eventually, Imran Khan succumbed to pressure and appointed the spymaster nominated by the top brass. But by then, the military had decided that Imran Khan had become too powerful a political leader and was encroaching on the military’s traditional domains, defense and national security policy. Therefore, deploying the astute divide-and-conquer strategy, the deep state lent its weight behind the opposition political alliance. Imran Khan’s political allies abandoned the PTI government and the coalition government fell apart in April.

Due to the British imperial legacy and subsequent close working relationship between the security agencies of Pakistan and the US during the Soviet-Afghan war of the eighties, Pakistan’s security establishment works hand in glove with the deep state of the United States, like the Turkish security establishment which is a NATO member.

Before his ouster as prime minister in a no-trust motion in the parliament on April 10, Imran Khan claimed that Pakistan’s Ambassador to US, Asad Majeed, was warned by Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu that Khan’s continuation in office would have repercussions for bilateral ties between the two nations.

Shireen Mazari, a Pakistani politician who served as the Federal Minister for Human Rights under the Imran Khan government, quoted Donald Lu as saying: “If Prime Minister Imran Khan remained in office, then Pakistan will be isolated from the United States and we will take the issue head on; but if the vote of no-confidence succeeds, all will be forgiven.”

Imran Khan fell from the grace of the Biden administration, whose record-breaking popularity ratings plummeted after the precipitous fall of Kabul in August 2021, reminiscent of the Fall of Saigon in April 1975, with Chinook helicopters hovering over US embassy evacuating diplomatic staff to the airport, and Washington accused Pakistan for the debacle.

After the United States “nation-building project” failed in Afghanistan during its two-decade occupation of the embattled country from October 2001 to August 2021, it accused regional powers of lending covert support to Afghan insurgents battling the occupation forces.

The occupation and Washington’s customary blame game accusing “malign regional forces” of insidiously destabilizing Afghanistan and undermining US-led “benevolent imperialism” instead of accepting responsibility for its botched invasion and occupation of Afghanistan brought Pakistan and Russia closer against a common adversary in their backyard, and the two countries even managed to forge defense ties, particularly during the three and a half years of Imran Khan’s government from July 2018 to April 2022.

Since the announcement of a peace deal with the Taliban by the Trump administration in February 2020, regional powers, China and Russia in particular, hosted international conferences and invited the representatives of the US-backed Afghanistan government and the Taliban for peace negotiations.

After the departure of US forces from “the graveyard of the empires,” although Washington is trying to starve the hapless Afghan masses to death in retribution for inflicting a humiliating defeat on the global hegemon by imposing economic sanctions on the Taliban government and browbeating international community to desist from lending formal diplomatic recognition or having trade relations with Afghanistan, China and Russia have provided generous humanitarian and developmental assistance to Afghanistan.

Imran Khan’s ouster from power for daring to stand up to the United States harks back to the toppling and subsequent assassination of Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in April 1979 by the martial law regime of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq.

The United States not only turned a blind eye but tacitly approved the elimination of Bhutto from Pakistan’s political scene because, being a socialist, Bhutto not only nurtured cordial ties with communist China but was also courting Washington’s arch-rival, the former Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union played the role of a mediator at the signing of the Tashkent Agreement for the cessation of hostilities following the 1965 India-Pakistan War over the disputed Kashmir region, in which Bhutto represented Pakistan as the foreign minister of the Gen. Ayub Khan-led government.

Like Imran Khan, the United States “deep state” regarded Bhutto as a political liability and an obstacle in the way of mounting the Operation Cyclone to provoke the former Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan and the subsequent waging of a decade-long war of attrition, using Afghan jihadists as cannon fodder who were generously funded, trained and armed by the CIA and Pakistan’s security agencies in the Af-Pak border regions, in order to “bleed the Soviet forces” and destabilize and weaken the rival global power.

Regarding the objectives of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, then American envoy to Kabul, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, was assassinated on the Valentine’s Day, on 14 February 1979, the same day that Iranian revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran.

The former Soviet Union was wary that its forty-million Muslims were susceptible to radicalism, because Islamic radicalism was infiltrating across the border into the Central Asian States from Afghanistan. Therefore, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 in support of the Afghan communists to forestall the likelihood of Islamist insurgencies spreading to the Central Asian States bordering Afghanistan.

According to documents declassified by the White House, CIA and State Department in January 2019, as reported by Tim Weiner for the Washington Post, the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December that year.

The revelation doesn’t come as a surprise, though, because more than two decades before the declassification of the State Department documents, in the 1998 interview cited in CounterPunch, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, confessed that the president signed the directive to provide secret aid to the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan six months later in December 1979.

Here is a poignant excerpt from the interview. The interviewer puts the question: “And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic jihadists, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?” Brzezinski replies: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to Zbigniew Brzezinski that at least he had the courage to speak the unembellished truth. It’s worth noting, however, that the aforementioned interview was recorded in 1998. After the 9/11 terror attack, no Western policymaker can now dare to be as blunt and forthright as Brzezinski.

Regardless, that the CIA was arming the Afghan jihadists six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan has been proven by the State Department’s declassified documents; fact of the matter, however, is that the nexus between the CIA, Pakistan’s security agencies and the Gulf Arab States to train and arm the Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union was forged years before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Pakistan joined the American-led, anticommunist SEATO and CENTO regional alliances in the 1950s and played the role of Washington’s client state since its inception in 1947. So much so that when a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance deep into Soviet territory, Pakistan’s then President Ayub Khan openly acknowledged the reconnaissance aircraft flew from an American airbase in Peshawar, a city in northwest Pakistan.

Then during the 1970s, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government began aiding the Afghan Islamists against Sardar Daud’s government, who had toppled his first cousin King Zahir Shah in a palace coup in 1973 and had proclaimed himself the president of Afghanistan.

Sardar Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and laid claim to Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun-majority province. Pakistan’s security agencies were alarmed by his irredentist claims and used Islamists to weaken his rule in Afghanistan. He was eventually assassinated in 1978 as a consequence of the Saur Revolution led by the Afghan communists.

It’s worth pointing out, however, that although the Bhutto government did provide political and diplomatic support on a limited scale to Islamists in their struggle for power against Pashtun nationalists in Afghanistan, being a secular and progressive politician, he would never have permitted opening the floodgates for flushing the Af-Pak region with weapons, petrodollars and radical jihadist ideology as his successor, Zia-ul-Haq, an Islamist military general, did by becoming a willing tool of religious extremism and militarism in the hands of neocolonial powers.

Image credit: MinuteMirror.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Nauman Sadiq.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by George Galloway.

Footage of the firing. Assassination attempt on Imran Khan. pic.twitter.com/fmSgI2E8jc

— Ihtisham Ul Haq (@iihtishamm) November 3, 2022

Soon after the reports came in, several photos started circulating on social media as visuals of the attack and its immediate aftermath. News24 shared two photos on Twitter with the caption, “Photos of Imran Khan have surfaced after he was shot. 9 people were injured in the attack, and 1 dead.” (Archive.)

The same visuals were shared by multiple Indian news outlets, including NDTV, Times Now Navbharat, ET Now Swadesh, Zee Salaam, News1India, Zee Delhi-NCR Haryana, and Inextlive.

Various Indian journalists shared the same visuals on Twitter. Among them are multimedia journalist Abhishek Tiwari, manager of India TV Jay Ram Patel, independent journalist Ashish Bhatt, Dainik Bhaskar correspondent Tarun Sharma, and News9 journalist Jacob Mathew.

International publications such as The New York Times, The Economist and The Guardian also used the same visual as the aftermath of the assassination attempt. The New York Times mentioned (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, via Associated Press’ as photo credit while The Guardians credited Associated Press for the photo and said it was released by Khan’s party Tehreek-e-Insaf.

Fact-check

Photo 1

When Alt News performed a Google reverse image search on the first photo of Imran Khan laying on the ground with his arms up, we came across a tweet from 2014 by Imran Khan with the caption, ‘Night at the dharna [protest].’

Night at the dharna. pic.twitter.com/5ppIGJAs1S

— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) August 17, 2014

This photo was clicked in August of 2014 when Khan had challenged the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to resign after allegations of ‘electoral match-fixing’ were made against the latter. Khan and Tahirul Qadri of Pakistan Awami Tehreek had started separate rallies from Lahore and reached Islamabad after 35 hours of march. The now-viral photo was clicked during this journey where Imran Khan had camped for the night.

Photo 2

For the second photo in which we can see a bleeding Imran Khan being carried by his aides, we again performed a Google reverse image search and found various news reports. Among them was a Time of India fact-check from 2018 that carried the same image. This photo was in circulation in 2018 when claims were made on social media that the Pakistani leader was shot or beaten to death. Alt News had also done a fact-check on the same when it was in circulation in 2018.

The article mentions that the photo is from 2013 when Khan injured his head after falling off a forklift that was taking him onto a stage at an election rally in Lahore.

A video of the incident can also be found on Al Jazeera English’s YouTube channel.

To sum it up, almost decade-old photos were circulated by journalists and media organisations in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on former Pakistan PM Imran Khan on November 3.

The post Leading media outlets use old photos of Imran Khan claiming them to be of Nov 3 attack appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kalim Ahmed.

The complaint stems from a video investigation by Titu, which was broadcast by Ekattor TV on March 1, 2022, alleging that a local shrine’s management committee, led by Shahidul Islam Mollik, general secretary of the Mirzaganj Union Parishad, an administrative government unit, had engaged in corruption.

Mollik’s nephew, Badal Hossain, filed the complaint, which accused the journalist of violating three sections of the Digital Security Act, pertaining to defamation, unauthorized collection of identity information, and publication of false, threatening, or offensive information, according to those sources. Each of those offenses can carry a prison sentence of between three and five years, and a fine between 300,000 taka (US$3,160) and 1,000,000 taka (US $10,530). 

Titu told CPJ that after conducting research for the investigation in Mirzaganj, Hossain had called him on February 19 and urged him not to publish the report.

On February 20, Hossain came to the Ekattor TV office in the town of Patuakhali and offered the journalist a bribe in exchange for agreeing not to publish the report, according to Titu and CCTV footage of the incident, which was shown in Titu’s video investigation.

When reached via messaging app, Hossain denied the allegations that he pressured Titu not to publish the report.

Titu told CPJ that after accepting the complaint, the Barisal Cyber Tribunal subsequently ordered the Mirzaganj police station to investigate the complaint. Anowar Hossain Talukdar, the station’s officer in charge, is the vice president of the shrine’s management, according to Titu and a document issued by the Waqf Administration, a regulatory agency under the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which CPJ reviewed.

Mollik and Talukdar did not respond to CPJ’s requests for comment sent via messaging app.

Titu said that he expects to be summoned for further hearings after the police submits its investigative report to the tribunal. Under Section 40 of the Digital Security Act, investigations are to be completed within 60 days, with the possibility of extension upon court approval. Titu told CPJ that police did not complete the investigation within the 60-day period, adding that he was not informed that they were granted an extension.

Titu said he has repeatedly received direct, in-person threats from politicians and their associates for his extensive reporting on their alleged corruption. He fears these political leaders have banded together in recent months, he told CPJ, and are planning further retaliation against him, including possibly arrest.

CPJ has repeatedly documented the use of the Digital Security Act to harass journalists in retaliation for their work, and has called for the law’s repeal.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Jennifer Dunham.

We speak to the Pakistani British historian and writer Tariq Ali about new anti-terrorism charges brought against former Prime Minister Imran Khan after he spoke out against the country’s police and a judge who presided over the arrest of one of his aides. His rivals have pressed for severe charges against Khan to keep him out of the next elections as his popularity grows across the country, says Ali. Ali also discusses devastating floods in Pakistan, which have killed nearly 800 people over the past two months, and have never happened “on this scale.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On the evening of Tuesday, July 5, police in the outskirts of Islamabad, the capital, arrested Khan, an anchor with the privately owned broadcaster Express News and host of a YouTube channel with over 3 million subscribers, according to news reports and a statement by the Pakistan Press Foundation, a local press freedom group.

Police arrested him in response to a complaint filed to authorities in Attock, in northeast Punjab province, according to those reports. A court in Attock ordered that Khan be freed on Thursday, but police from the Punjab city of Chawkal re-arrested him outside the courtroom immediately after his release, according to news reports.

“The repeated arrests of Pakistani journalist Imran Riaz Khan and the slew of cases registered against him are pure harassment, and must come to an immediate end,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director. “Authorities must immediately release Khan and ensure that journalists can safely and freely comment on state institutions, including the military.”

Khan is a vocal critic of the government led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and is a supporter of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who was ousted from power in April and is not related to the journalist, according to CPJ reporting and The Express Tribune.

In a video published on his YouTube channel on Monday, addressed to Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa, Khan alleged that actors within the military were threatening him for questioning the military’s role in political affairs.

Attock police arrested Khan the following day in Islamabad in response to a complaint filed by a man identified as Malik Mureed Abbas, citing an unspecified video on social media that featured Khan, according to news reports.

CPJ was unable to find any contact information for Abbas. Khan’s lawyer Mian Ali Ashfaq told Dawn that the journalist had been named in 17 separate cases across Punjab. When reached via messaging app, Ashfaq told CPJ that he was unable to immediately comment.

On Wednesday, Dawn reported that Khan had been accused of violating several sections of Pakistan’s penal code, including defamation and publication of statements conducive to public mischief, as well as various sections of the 2016 Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act.

According to the penal code, those offenses can carry prison sentences of two to seven years and an unspecified fine. That Dawn report said a court had ordered authorities not to pursue charges under the PECA.

On Thursday, a court ordered Khan to be released, but police immediately re-arrested him as part of an investigation that is “sealed” and the details of which have not been made public, according to The Express Tribune.

CPJ emailed Sarfraz Hussain, a spokesperson for Pakistan’s Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the Punjab police for comment, but did not receive any replies. CPJ also contacted Ambreen Jan, director general of the external publicity wing of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, via messaging app, but did not receive any response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Since May 18, police across Pakistan have filed multiple first information reports (FIR), which open an investigation, against Abraham, an anchor with the privately owned broadcaster BOL News and the host of a popular current affairs YouTube channel, Khan, an anchor with the privately owned broadcaster Express News, and Sharif and Shakir, both anchors with the privately owned broadcaster ARY News, according to news reports and the journalists, who spoke with CPJ via phone and messaging app. 

The spate of investigations come amid physical, legal, and online harassment of journalists following the parliament’s election of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on April 11, after ousting former Prime Minister Imran Khan in a no-confidence vote. On May 4, Prime Minister Sharif tweeted that the new government was “fully committed to freedom of press & speech.”

The four journalists are known as supporters of former Prime Minister Khan, according to news reports.

Among other offenses, the multiple FIRs all accuse the four journalists violating sections of Pakistan’s penal code pertaining to abetment of mutiny and publication of statements causing public mischief by criticizing state institutions and the army in their journalistic work and unspecified social media posts. Abetment of mutiny can carry life imprisonment and an unspecified fine, and the public mischief accusation can carry a prison sentence of seven years and an unspecified fine, according to the law. 

“Pakistan authorities’ launch of a blizzard of harassing criminal investigations into journalists seen as sympathetic to the former ruling party makes a mockery of its claims to uphold press freedom,” said Steven Butler, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. “Authorities should withdraw the investigations into Sami Abraham, Imran Riaz Khan, Arshad Sharif, and Sabir Shakir and ensure that members of the press do not face retaliation for their commentary on the military or any other institutions in Pakistan.”

In at least three of the FIRS – which were filed by police in Quetta, Pishin, and Chaman in southwest Balochistan province – Abraham, Sharif, and Shakir are co-accused of working together to malign state institutions through their journalistic work and commentary, according to those three journalists and copies of the FIRS which CPJ reviewed. 

In at least one FIR– filed by police in Dadu in southeast Sindh province– Sharif and Shakir are accused of using derogatory language about the army and state institutions and drawing analogies to controversial historical figures through their journalistic work and commentary, according to the two journalists and news reports. 

Abraham told CPJ via phone that he is the subject of at least one additional FIR, filed by police in Attock in northeast Punjab province on May 18, accusing him of planning a conspiracy and criticizing state institutions and the army on his YouTube channel, without citing specific videos.  

Sharif told CPJ that since May 19, police have registered at least two additional FIRs against him, in Karachi and Hyderabad in southeast Sindh province. The Karachi police’s FIR against Sharif, which CPJ reviewed, broadly cites a May 12 interview that Sharif provided to journalist Matiullah Jan outside the Islamabad High Court, in which he discussed the court’s ruling that day extending his April 28 protection order against the Federal Investigation Agency and Islamabad police, and later asserted that the army should not intervene in state affairs. Sharif told CPJ that he received the order after plainclothes officers he believed to be with the agency showed up at the his home at 1:30 a.m. on April 28.

On May 21, police in Mirpur Khas, in Sindh province, registered an additional FIR against Shakir, which accused him of criticizing state institutions, according to Shakir and a report by his outlet. 

Khan told CPJ via messaging app that police have filed three FIRs against him in total. 

In one of the FIRs, filed on May 22 by Dhabeji police in the Thatta district of Sindh province, a complainant is cited accusing Khan of writing about the army and state institutions using “derogatory and provocative language” on social media, according to news reports and a copy of the FIR Khan posted on Twitter.

Khan did not immediately respond to CPJ’s request for copies of the other two FIRs.

Three of the four journalists — Sharif, Abraham, and Khan — sought protective bail, a court order protecting them from arrest in relation to the FIRs. 

On May 23, the Islamabad High Court granted protective bail to Sharif and Abraham until at least May 30, pending a hearing that day, and ordered the Interior Secretary of Pakistan to disclose the total number of FIRs filed against the journalists, according to news reports and Sharif. 

(Another journalist, Moeed Pirzada, CEO and editor of the online news website Global Village Space and an anchor with the privately owned broadcaster 92 News, was granted protective bail in the same May 23 court order after he said he received threatening phone calls, the reports said. Pirzada did not respond to CPJ’s calls and WhatsApp messages requesting comment.) 

On May 23, the Lahore High Court granted protective bail to Khan in relation to two of the FIRs; his protection lasts until May 27 in one case and May 31 in the other, according to news reports. 

Information Minister Maryam Aurangzeb did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment sent via messaging app.The office of Ambreen Jan, director-general of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s external publicity wing, did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment sent via email and messaging app. The offices of Abdul Quddus Bizenjo, chief minister of Balochistan; Syed Murad Ali Shah, chief minister of Sindh province; and Hamza Shahbaz Sharif, chief minister of Punjab province, did not respond to CPJ’s emailed requests for comment.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Manuel Pérez-Rocha wrote a piece “Ousted Pakistani Leader Was Challenging Investment Treaties That Give Corporations Excessive Power: Mexico and many other countries are facing anti-democratic corporate lawsuits like the case that pushed Khan to withdraw from international investment agreements.” He notes: “The parliament of Pakistan recently ousted Prime Minister Imran Khan in a no-confidence vote. The reasons for the former cricket star’s political downfall are not entirely clear. His economic policies were a mixed bag at best, but he deserves credit for one thing: he’d taken a bold stand against international investment agreements that give transnational corporations excessive power over national governments.”

This piece led noted author and activist Maude Barlow to tweet: “Wonder if this is why he was thrown over…”

I was just looking at Khan’s statement to the UN General Assembly from last September and it’s quite remarkable:

Because of the plunder of the developing world by their corrupt ruling elites, the gap between the rich and the poor countries is increasing at an alarming speed.

Through this platform, I have been drawing the world’s attention towards the scourge of illicit financial flows from developing countries.

The Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Financial Accountability, Transparency and Integrity (FACTI) has calculated that a staggering 7 trillion dollars in stolen assets are parked in the financial “haven” destinations.

This organized theft and illegal transfer of assets has profound consequences for the developing nations. It depletes their already meagre resources, accentuates the levels of poverty especially when laundered money puts pressure on the currency and leads to its devaluation. At the current rate, when the FACTI Panel estimates that a trillion dollar every year is taken out of the developing world, there will be mass exodus of economic migrants towards the richer nations.

What the East India Company did to India, the crooked ruling elites are doing to developing world – plundering the wealth and transferring to western capitals and offshore tax havens.

And Mr. President, retrieving the stolen assets from the developed countries is impossible for poor nations. The rich countries have no incentives, or compulsion, to return this ill-gotten wealth, and this ill-gotten wealth belongs to the masses of the developing world. I foresee, in the not-too-distant future a time will come when the rich countries will be forced to build walls to keep out economic migrants from these poor countries.

I fear a few “wealthy islands” in the sea of poverty will also turn into a global calamity, like climate change.

The General Assembly must take steps meaningfully to address this deeply disturbing, and morally repugnant, situation. Naming and shaming the ‘haven’ destinations and developing a comprehensive legal framework to halt and reverse the illicit financial flows are most critical actions to stop this grave economic injustice.

And at a minimum, the recommendations of Secretary General’s FACTI panel should be fully implemented.

See Khan’s full remarks to the UN General Assembly [PDF] and video starting at 4:55. See related press release from FACTI.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Husseini.

Justice department assistant attorney Joshua Rothstein asked a judge not to release Arian Taherzadeh and Haider Ali, the men arrested on April 6 for posing as Department of Homeland Security investigators for two years before the arrest, the Guardian reported on April 8.

The men also stand accused of providing lucrative favors to members of the Secret Service, including one agent on the security detail of the first lady, Jill Biden. Prosecutors said in court filings they seized a cache of weapons from multiple DC apartments tied to the defendants.

Federal prosecutor Rothstein alleged one of the suspects, Haider Ali, “made claims to witnesses that he had connections to the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence service.” The Department of Justice (DoJ) is treating the case as a criminal matter and not a national security issue. But the Secret Service suspended four agents over their involvement with the suspects.

“All personnel involved in this matter are on administrative leave and are restricted from accessing Secret Service facilities, equipment, and systems,” the Secret Service said in a statement.

Clearly, planning and preparations were underway to declare Pakistan a rogue actor sponsoring acts of subversion against the United States. Soon after the US-led “regime change” in Pakistan and the formation of government by imperialist stooges, however, the tone of the judge and prosecutors changed. The defendants were released on bail and placed in home detention, though they will not be allowed to go to airports or foreign embassies or to talk to any of the federal agents they allegedly duped.

During his hour-long ruling, Magistrate Judge Michael Harvey lambasted the Justice Department’s claims that the men were dangerous, were trying to compromise agents and were tied to a foreign government, the CNN reported on April 13.

Before his ouster as prime minister in a no-trust motion in the parliament on April 10, Imran Khan claimed that Pakistan’s Ambassador to US, Asad Majeed, was warned by Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu that Khan’s continuation in office would have repercussions for bilateral ties between the two nations.

Shireen Mazari, a Pakistani politician who served as the Federal Minister for Human Rights under the Imran Khan government, quoted Donald Lu as saying: “If Prime Minister Imran Khan remained in office, then Pakistan will be isolated from the United States and we will take the issue head on; but if the vote of no-confidence succeeds, all will be forgiven.”

During Imran Khan’s historic two-day official visit to Moscow on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, besides signing several bilateral contracts in agricultural and energy sectors, President Putin reportedly offered Imran Khan the S-300 air defense system, Sukhoi aircraft as replacement for the Pakistan Air Force’s dependence on American F-16s and an array of advanced Russian military equipment on the condition that Pakistan abandons its traditional alliance with Washington and forge defense ties with Russia, according to two government officials who accompanied Imran Khan on the Moscow visit.

Alongside China, India and Iran, Pakistan under the leadership of Imran Khan was one of the few countries that adopted a non-aligned stance and refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, despite diplomatic pressure from Washington.

After the United States “nation-building project” failed in Afghanistan during its two-decade occupation of the embattled country from Oct. 2001 to August 2021, it accused regional powers of lending covert support to Afghan insurgents battling the occupation forces.

The occupation and Washington’s customary blame game accusing “malign regional forces” of insidiously destabilizing Afghanistan and undermining US-led “benevolent imperialism” instead of accepting responsibility for its botched invasion and occupation of Afghanistan brought Pakistan and Russia closer against a common adversary in their backyard, and the two countries even managed to forge defense ties, particularly during the four years of the Imran Khan government from July 2018 to April 2022.

Since the announcement of a peace deal with the Taliban by the Trump administration in Feb. 2020, regional powers, China and Russia in particular, hosted international conferences and invited the representatives of the US-backed Afghanistan government and the Taliban for peace negotiations.

After the departure of US forces from “the graveyard of the empires,” although Washington is trying to starve the hapless Afghan masses to death in retribution for inflicting a humiliating defeat on the global hegemon by imposing economic sanctions on the Taliban government and browbeating international community to desist from lending formal diplomatic recognition or having trade relations with Afghanistan, China and Russia have provided generous humanitarian and developmental assistance to Afghanistan.

Imran Khan fell from the grace of the Biden administration, whose record-breaking popularity ratings plummeted after the precipitous fall of US in Kabul last August, reminiscent of the Fall of US in Saigon in April 1975, with Chinook helicopters hovering over US embassy evacuating diplomatic staff to the airport, and Washington accused Pakistan for the debacle.

Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley squeamishly described the Kabul takeover in his historic Congressional testimony that several hundred Pashtun cowboys riding on motorbikes and brandishing Kalashnikovs overran Kabul without a shot being fired, and the world’s most lethal military force fled with tail neatly folded between legs, hastily evacuating diplomatic staff from sprawling 36-acre US embassy in Chinook helicopters to airport secured by the insurgents.

Apart from indiscriminate B-52 bombing raids mounted by Americans, Afghan security forces didn’t put up serious resistance anywhere in Afghanistan and simply surrendered territory to the Taliban. The fate of Afghanistan was sealed as soon as the US forces evacuated Bagram airbase in the dead of the night on July 1, six weeks before the inevitable fall of Kabul on August 15.

The sprawling Bagram airbase was the nerve center from where all the operations across Afghanistan were directed, specifically the vital air support to the US-backed Afghan security forces without which they were simply irregular militias waiting to be devoured by the wolves.

In southern Afghanistan, the traditional stronghold of the Pashtun ethnic group from which the Taliban draws most of its support, the Taliban military offensive was spearheaded by Mullah Yaqoob, the illustrious son of the Taliban’s late founder Mullah Omar and the newly appointed defense minister of the Taliban government, as district after district in southwest Afghanistan, including the birthplace of the Taliban movement Kandahar and Helmand, fell in quick succession.

What has stunned military strategists and longtime observers of the Afghan war, though, was the Taliban’s northern blitz, occupying almost the whole of northern Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, as northern Afghanistan was the bastion of the Northern Alliance comprising the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups. In recent years, however, the Taliban has made inroads into the heartland of the Northern Alliance, too.

The ignominious fall of Kabul clearly demonstrates the days of American hegemony over the world are numbered. If ragtag Taliban militants could liberate their homeland from imperialist clutches without a fight, imagine what would happen if the United States confronted equal military powers such as Russia and China. The much-touted myth of American military supremacy is clearly more psychological than real.

Imran Khan is an educated and charismatic leader. Being an Oxford graduate, he is much better informed than most Pakistani politicians. And he is a liberal at heart. Most readers might disagree with the assertion due to his fierce anti-imperialism and West-bashing demagoguery, but allow me to explain.

It’s not just Imran Khan’s celebrity lifestyle that makes him a progressive. He also derives his intellectual inspiration from the Western tradition. The ideal role model in his mind is the Scandinavian social democratic model which he has mentioned on numerous occasions, especially in his speech at Karachi before a massive rally of singing and cheering crowd in December 2012.

His relentless anti-imperialism as a political stance should be viewed in the backdrop of Western military interventions in the Islamic countries. The conflagration that neocolonial powers have caused in the Middle East evokes strong feelings of resentment among Muslims all over the world. Moreover, Imran Khan also uses anti-America rhetoric as an electoral strategy to attract conservative masses, particularly the impressionable youth.

It’s also noteworthy that Imran Khan’s political party draws most of its electoral support from women, youth voters and Pakistani expats residing in the Gulf and Western countries. All these segments of society, especially the women, are drawn more toward egalitarian liberalism than patriarchal conservatism, because liberalism promotes women’s rights and its biggest plus point is its emphasis on equality, emancipation and empowerment of women who constitute over half of population in every society.

Imran Khan’s ouster from power for daring to stand up to the United States harks back to the toppling and subsequent assassination of Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in April 1979 by the martial law regime of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq.

The United States not only turned a blind eye but tacitly approved the elimination of Bhutto from Pakistan’s political scene because, being a socialist, Bhutto not only nurtured cordial ties with communist China but was also courting Washington’s arch-rival, the former Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union played the role of a mediator at the signing of the Tashkent Agreement for the cessation of hostilities following the 1965 India-Pakistan War over the disputed Kashmir region, in which Bhutto represented Pakistan as the foreign minister of the Gen. Ayub Khan-led government.

Like Imran Khan, the United States “deep state” regarded Bhutto as a political liability and an obstacle in the way of mounting the Operation Cyclone to provoke the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan and the subsequent waging of a decade-long war of attrition, using Afghan jihadists as cannon fodder who were generously funded, trained and armed by the CIA and Pakistan’s security agencies in the Af-Pak border regions, in order to “bleed the Soviet forces” and destabilize and weaken the rival global power.

Karl Marx famously said: “History repeats itself, first as a tragedy and then as a farce.” In addition to a longstanding CIA program aimed at cultivating an anti-Russian insurgency in Ukraine by training, arming and international legitimizing neo-Nazi militias in Donbas, Canada’s Department of National Defense revealed on January 26, two days following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that the Canadian Armed Forces had trained “nearly 33,000 Ukrainian military and security personnel in a range of tactical and advanced military skills.” While the United Kingdom, via Operation Orbital, had trained 22,000 Ukrainian fighters.

A “prophetic” RAND Corporation report titled “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia” published in 2019 declares the stated goal of American policymakers is “to undermine Russia just as the US subversively destabilized the former Soviet Union during the Cold War,” and predicts to the letter the crisis unfolding in Ukraine as a consequence of the eight-year proxy war mounted by NATO in Russian-majority Donbas region in east Ukraine on Russia’s vulnerable western flank since the 2014 Maidan coup, toppling Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and consequent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia.

Nonetheless, regarding the objectives of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, then American envoy to Kabul, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, was assassinated on the Valentine’s Day, on 14 Feb 1979, the same day that Iranian revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran.

The former Soviet Union was wary that its forty-million Muslims were susceptible to radicalism, because Islamic radicalism was infiltrating across the border into the Central Asian States from Afghanistan. Therefore, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 in support of the Afghan communists to forestall the likelihood of Islamist insurgencies spreading to the Central Asian States bordering Afghanistan.

According to documents declassified by the White House, CIA and State Department in January 2019, as reported by Tim Weiner for the Washington Post, the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December the same year.

The revelation doesn’t come as a surprise, though, because more than two decades before the declassification of the State Department documents, in the 1998 interview to CounterPunch magazine, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, confessed that the president signed the directive to provide secret aid to the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan six months later in December 1979.

Here is a poignant excerpt from the interview. The interviewer puts the question: “And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic jihadists, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?” Brzezinski replies: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to Zbigniew Brzezinski that at least he had the courage to speak the unembellished truth. It’s worth noting, however, that the aforementioned interview was recorded in 1998. After the 9/11 terror attack, no Western policymaker can now dare to be as blunt and forthright as Brzezinski.

Regardless, that the CIA was arming the Afghan jihadists six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan has been proven by the State Department’s declassified documents; fact of the matter, however, is that the nexus between the CIA, Pakistan’s security agencies and the Gulf states to train and arm the Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union was forged years before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Pakistan joined the American-led, anticommunist SEATO and CENTO regional alliances in the 1950s and played the role of Washington’s client state since its inception in 1947. So much so that when a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance deep into Soviet territory, Pakistan’s then President Ayub Khan openly acknowledged the reconnaissance aircraft flew from an American airbase in Peshawar, a city in northwest Pakistan.

Then during the 1970s, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government began aiding the Afghan Islamists against Sardar Daud’s government, who had toppled his first cousin King Zahir Shah in a palace coup in 1973 and had proclaimed himself the president of Afghanistan.

Sardar Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and laid claim to Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun-majority province. Pakistan’s security agencies were alarmed by his irredentist claims and used Islamists to weaken his rule in Afghanistan. He was eventually assassinated in 1978 as a consequence of the Saur Revolution led by the Afghan communists.

It’s worth pointing out, however, that although the Bhutto government did provide political and diplomatic support on a limited scale to Islamists in their struggle for power against Pashtun nationalists in Afghanistan, being a secular and progressive politician, he would never have permitted opening the floodgates for flushing the Af-Pak region with weapons, petrodollars and radical jihadist ideology as his successor, Zia-ul-Haq, an Islamist military general, did by becoming a willing tool of religious extremism and militarism in the hands of neocolonial powers.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Nauman Sadiq.

The post Ousted Pakistani Leader, Imran Khan, Was Challenging Investment Treaties That Give Corporations Excessive Power appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Manuel Perez-Rocha.

Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain

This Sunday, cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan was removed from his prime ministerial post in a no-confidence vote in the Pakistani parliament by a slim margin of 174 votes out of the 342-member legislative body.

The vote came after a dramatic week in which the Supreme Court of Pakistan deemed unconstitutional a move by the deputy speaker, a member of Khan’s party, to block the no-confidence motion.

While Khan is the first Prime Minister to be removed by the parliament in such a way, his removal continues the tradition of holders of the post not finishing their terms, with the list coming to nineteen and counting.

While opposition supporters and other sections of the international media are framing Khan’s dismissal as a victory for democracy and rule of law, the reality is that this action is likely to have deleterious effects on Pakistan’s fragile democracy that will be more apparent in the months and years to come.

Who is Khan?

Imran Khan was already a national celebrity in Pakistan before entering politics in 1996, having a glamorous twenty-year career in cricket which ended with him as captain of Pakistan’s first World Cup-winning cricket team.

Khan spent the next 15 years on the margins of Pakistan’s political scene, before emerging as a potent third political force in 2011. His party, the Tehreek-e-Insaaf, became a viable electoral entity in competition with the two major parties, the PPP and PMLN, both ruled in a dynastic fashion and dominated by feudal constituents.

Khan is known for his brand of populist street politics, anti-corruption rhetoric and Islamic-themed public messaging. He was a trenchant critic of Pakistan’s involvement in the US War on Terror and occupation of Afghanistan, and regularly held rallies condemning the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan as a violation of sovereignty and human rights.

In 2018, Khan assumed the post of Prime Minister after his party formed a coalition government in an election contested by the opposition of having been rigged. The reality is that no civilian government can assume power in the country without the active hand of Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment, the most powerful institution in the country.

Mission Improbable

Upon assuming power, Khan faced an unprecedented de-legitimization campaign in the Western press, accusing him of being a loose cannon and a pawn for the military.

Claiming he would usher in a progressive era of ‘New Pakistan’, Khan was confronted with an unprecedented series of challenges in his three and a half years. His own inexperience, a weak coalition government, strident opposition and entrenched systemic corruption meant his odds of delivering on his lofty campaign promises were slim from the outset.

The most immediate issue was the currency crisis, with Pakistan’s foreign reserves having been so depleted that Khan was forced to appeal to ally states and the IMF for resources to stabilize Pakistan’s economy.

Policy-wise, his tenure was a mixed bag. Khan’s government introduced much-needed programs on social welfare and the environment, and his measured pandemic response earned international praise. He was criticized for crackdowns on press freedom and for certain cabinet selections, as well as his silence on China’s persecution of the Uighurs.

The inability to curb the rapid inflation and rising prices on food and essentials, a global phenomenon but particularly acute in Pakistan, is what the coalition of opposition parties seized upon late last year when they launched their bid to remove Khan.

US Regime Change?

The specter of the US relations looms large on Pakistan politics. As the vote neared end of March, Khan announced at a public rally that a foreign hand is behind the drive by the opposition. He claimed that the Biden administration was directly threatening Pakistan with dire consequences if the no-confidence vote was not passed.

He pointed to an ambassadorial meeting with Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Donald Lu, in which this threat was communicated through official channels to his government. His party supporters also point to a flurry of meetings at the US embassy of defecting members of his party close in the announcement of the no-confidence vote as further evidence of conspiracy, which the Biden administration denies and the opposition rubbishes.

Despite fraternal relations of Khan with the Trump administration, Biden’s office has yet to be so accommodating, having not even shared a phone call with the premier. This cold shoulder treatment continued even during the US’ withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Khan made an ill-timed visit to Russia to meet with Putin at the eve of the launch of their Ukrainian invasion. According to Khan, this visit and the previous efforts of his administration to initiate an independent foreign policy outside of the US orbit, so incensed the Biden administration that they were leveraging their diplomatic pressure to ensure the no-confidence vote passed. In the background, the military establishment appears to have cooled their own relations with Khan and are trying to salvage the strategic relationship with the US.

Trying to prove such an active conspiracy is difficult yet the possibility of foreign interference cannot be discounted. The US has a long history of involvement in Pakistan’s internal affairs, from steady support to its military generals to drone strikes inside its tribal areas to the Abbottabad operation. Most notably, the US is widely believed to have actively supported the opposition movement to the popular Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, leading to his removal by the military in 1977 and eventual judicial murder.

Uncertainty Ahead

Though Khan is no longer prime minister, his narrative of a foreign conspiracy appears to have resonated with a wide section of the public and support base is growing. The opposition, now in charge, faces the unenviable task of steadying Pakistan’s economic ship while simultaneously being accused of being an ‘imported government’ by Khan.

What would have been more beneficial for Pakistan’s democracy rather than this destabilizing status quo would have been for Khan to finish his prime ministerial term by the stated date of October 2023 and then have the public determine his fate in a general election. Basic trust in continuity in the democratic process would have at least been established.

His removal based on the flimsy pretext of poor economic performance is a new low and ensures future leaders will always be on slippery ground, at the mercy of being displaced by a constellation of forces, inside and outside the country, as has been the case in Pakistan’s history. What more, the fragmented dynamics of Pakistan’s political party representation means that it is unlikely for any party in the future, either Khan’s party or its rivals,  to be able to form a strong clear parliamentary majority in the center  unless without heavy rigging, leading to rickety coalitions headed by leaders at constant risk of being dismissed.

Political backrooms deals have replaced the choices of voters and reduced elections to further insignificance. The no-confidence motion, far from being a check on non-performing leaders in charge, only weakens Pakistan’s democratic setup that badly needs stability and trust on the ballot.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Saqib Sheikh.

Shahbaz Sharif was chosen as Pakistan’s new prime minister on Monday after Imran Khan was removed in a no-confidence vote in Parliament on Sunday. Khan’s ouster came after the nation’s Supreme Court ruled Khan’s attempt to dissolve Parliament earlier this month was illegal. Khan blamed his removal on a “U.S.-backed regime change” plot backed by his opposition, and lawmakers of his party have resigned en masse. We go to Islamabad to speak with Tooba Syed, a member of Pakistan’s left-wing Awami Workers Party, who says Khan’s allegations aren’t substantiated by evidence and come amid Khan’s tendency to use anti-American sentiment to strengthen his populist platform while upholding policies that hurt working-class Pakistani people and women. We also speak with historian Tariq Ali, who says the major Pakistani political parties are ravaged by corruption and overinfluenced by the military and financial incentives. Both Ali and Syed agree the election of establishment politician Shahbaz Sharif will not change conditions in Pakistan.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Pakistan is facing a constitutional crisis after Prime Minister Imran Khan dissolved the country’s National Assembly and called for new elections in an effort to block an attempt to remove him from power. Khan was facing a no-confidence vote in Parliament that would have unseated him, but his allies blocked the vote from happening. Pakistan’s Supreme Court is now hearing a pivotal case on whether it was within the authority of the speaker of the National Assembly to reject the motion for a vote of no confidence, says Pakistani journalist Munizae Jahangir.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.