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Analysis/0072/August/2026/London-Dialogue. 30 August 2026
Pakistan in 2026 presents a stark paradox: a nuclear-armed state of more than 240 million people that cannot reliably guarantee its citizens a stable currency, physical security, or a government they actually chose. What confronts the country is not one institutional failure but the simultaneous strain of several, for its economy is kept solvent only by emergency external financing, its security is deteriorating across Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, its political order commands a legitimacy that is openly disputed at home and abroad, and its governing arrangement is one that many Pakistanis, and no small number of outside observers, describe as civilian in form yet military in substance. In the middle of this wreckage stands one man, imprisoned and largely silenced, whose name still commands a loyalty that no other figure in the country can rival, and that man is Imran Khan. A man who has become a symbol of national unity, trust and confidence.
This analysis advances a deliberate argument: Khan’s continued centrality in Pakistani politics is not a function of celebrity or nostalgia but a rational public response to a political system that has failed on its own terms. His release, followed by rehabilitation through a genuinely free electoral process, represents the most plausible pathway back to domestic stability and regional predictability. The claim is not that Khan is without fault; rather, it is that the alternative currently imposed under General Asim Munir, an engineered political order sustained through coercive instruments, has already been attempted and has demonstrably failed.
A State in Compounding Crisis
Pakistan has spent the past three years lurching from one balance-of-payments emergency to the next, surviving on the terms of an International Monetary Fund programme that has stabilised the headline figures even as it has squeezed ordinary households to the point of despair. Inflation through 2023 and 2024 climbed to levels not seen in the country’s modern history (see Figure 1), the rupee shed much of its value, and energy tariffs rose sharply as subsidies were withdrawn, while growth remained anaemic, foreign investment stayed thin, and the tax burden fell, as ever, upon those least able to bear it. Stabilisation on paper has not translated into relief within the home, and even the government’s own supporters privately concede that the recovery is fragile, externally financed, and politically hollow.
Figure 1. CPI inflation, Pakistan, FY2021 to FY2025 (annual average). FY2025 provisional (*).
A generation of educated young Pakistanis, confronting joblessness and a shrinking horizon, is voting with its feet, and applications to emigrate have surged as the country exports precisely the doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs that it can least afford to lose. Remittances from that same diaspora now help to keep the external account afloat, which is itself a quiet admission that the state cannot generate at home the opportunity its people are compelled to seek abroad. When a country’s most capable citizens conclude that their future lies elsewhere, the crisis has moved from the balance sheet to the national spirit.
In Baluchistan, a long-running insurgency has intensified, with separatist groups mounting increasingly ambitious attacks upon infrastructure, upon security forces, and, most disturbingly of all, upon civilians. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former tribal districts, the resurgence of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan following the collapse of an earlier ceasefire has driven a sustained rise in militant violence, a trend clearly visible in independent conflict monitoring. Because the state’s response has too often been to meet political grievance with force, the result is a widening gulf between the periphery and the centre, and no country can plausibly claim internal stability while entire provinces experience the writ of the state primarily as coercion.
These crises share a common root, and it is neither primarily economic nor tactical but rather a crisis of legitimacy. A government that its own citizens do not believe they chose cannot credibly ask them to accept painful reforms, to endure security operations, or to trust that sacrifice made today will yield fairness tomorrow. Legitimacy is the currency in which difficult governance is ultimately paid for, and Pakistan’s rulers have run that account deep into deficit.
The Manufactured Mandate
The legitimacy deficit has a specific origin in the general election of February 2024, before which Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, was systematically dismantled as an electoral force. It was stripped of its ballot symbol, which compelled its candidates to contest as independents, its leaders were arrested or driven into hiding, and on polling day itself the country experienced a nationwide mobile and internet shutdown as the results were inexplicably delayed. Domestic monitors such as FAFEN and international observers alike catalogued serious irregularities, and, most tellingly of all, the candidates aligned with Khan still won more seats than any other single bloc, only to be shut out of power by a coalition of the very parties that voters had, by any plain reading of the result, declined to endorse, while Amnesty International and others called for investigations that never meaningfully came.
The manipulation did not end at the ballot box, for critics point to a far broader pattern of institutional capture that encompasses constitutional amendments widely read as curbing judicial independence, expanded powers to police online speech, and mounting pressure upon the press. Both the Committee to Protect Journalists and Human Rights Watch have documented the harassment of reporters, the throttling of social media platforms, and the steady shrinking of the space available for dissent. When courts, regulators, and newsrooms alike are bent toward a single predetermined outcome, elections become little more than theatre, and the electorate understands this perfectly well.
Nowhere has this capture proved more consequential than within the courts, where a sweeping constitutional amendment, pushed through in late 2024 amid considerable procedural controversy, reshaped judicial appointments and the composition of benches in ways that senior members of the bar publicly warned would erode the independence of the judiciary. Cases central both to Khan’s fate and to the legitimacy of the government itself have since moved through a system whose impartiality is no longer widely assumed, and where the superior judiciary once served, however imperfectly, as a check upon executive overreach, it is now too often perceived as an instrument of that overreach. A judiciary that cannot be trusted to rule against power ceases, in any meaningful sense, to be a judiciary at all.
The Militarisation of Politics
Behind these developments lies the enduring reality of Pakistani politics, which is the dominance of the military establishment over civilian affairs. Pakistan has spent roughly half of its existence under direct military rule and much of the remainder under what scholars describe as a hybrid arrangement, in which elected governments survive only at the establishment’s discretion, and the present order is widely understood to be the sharpest expression of that model in a generation. Under the current army chief, General Asim Munir, elevated in 2025 to the rank of field marshal, the distinction between institutional interest and national interest has grown dangerously blurred.
Recent defence understandings with Saudi Arabia, together with a closer strategic alignment with Turkey, have been presented as significant diplomatic achievements, yet critics argue, with some plausibility, that their principal value lies in the external validation and financial cushion they offer the government rather than in any durable enhancement of Pakistani security. A foreign policy oriented toward regime survival rather than national strategy is a foreign policy without a compass, and Pakistan’s partners are unlikely to mistake borrowed legitimacy for the genuine article.
This entanglement in partisan affairs has exacted a heavy price upon the institution itself, for through most of Pakistan’s history the army enjoyed a reservoir of public esteem that survived even its periods of direct rule, and yet under the current command that reservoir has drained to a degree without modern precedent. By drawing the military ever deeper into the management of elections, the suppression of a popular movement, and the policing of dissent, the present leadership has spent the institution’s hard-won professional prestige upon narrowly political ends, and surveys of public sentiment suggest that confidence in the armed forces, once close to unconditional, has fallen sharply as a consequence. An institution that once stood visibly above the fray is now widely seen as its principal player, and the standing that an army accumulates over decades is not easily recovered once a public has begun to withdraw its trust.
There is a deep irony in all of this, because the figure best placed to restore the army’s reputation is the very man whom it has worked hardest to remove. The damage to the institution flows directly from its immersion in politics, and the only genuine remedy is a return to the professional, apolitical role that earned it respect in the first place, a line that can be drawn and made to hold only by a civilian leader who commands a real popular mandate and who cannot be dismissed as a creation of the establishment. Khan, precisely because he owes the military nothing and has defied it at great personal cost, is uniquely placed to offer the armed forces a route back to the standing they have lost, one in which, restored to their proper place beneath a legitimate civilian authority, they would once again be regarded not as the arbiters of the nation’s politics but as its respected guardians. In labouring to rescue Pakistan’s democracy, Khan may well prove to be the only leader capable of also rescuing the reputation of its army.
The Man They Could Not Break
Against this backdrop, the figure of Imran Khan acquires a significance that transcends ordinary party politics. Imprisoned since August 2023 and convicted in a succession of cases that his supporters, and many neutral observers, regard as politically motivated, Khan has refused the exit that tempted so many Pakistani leaders before him, whether the quiet deal, the negotiated departure, or the comfortable exile granted in exchange for silence. He has chosen instead a prolonged confinement, reportedly for extended periods in conditions his lawyers describe as solitary, over any accommodation with the military establishment and Sharif’s government, and whatever one may make of his politics, that refusal is entirely real and has not gone unnoticed by a public long accustomed to seeing its leaders bargain their principles away.
That refusal explains a phenomenon the military establishment plainly did not anticipate, which is that its repression has amplified Khan’s standing rather than diminished it. Independent polling has consistently placed him as the country’s most popular political figure, with approval ratings that dwarf those of his rivals, and his appeal cuts across the very fault lines that ordinarily fracture Pakistani politics, drawing support from Punjab and from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, from the young and the urban, from the vast overseas diaspora, and increasingly from communities that have long felt alienated from Islamabad. In a country so often defined by ethnic and provincial division, the sheer breadth of that coalition is itself a political fact of the first importance.
What is most striking of all is how little the removal of its leadership has fractured the movement, for the conventional wisdom held that a party built around a single personality would collapse the moment that personality was isolated, and yet the opposite has occurred. Deprived of its rallies, of its television access, and even of its founder’s voice, the party has migrated to digital platforms, sustained an unusually mobilised base, and turned each fresh act of suppression into a grievance that binds its supporters more closely together. A movement that grows under pressure is not merely a cult of personality; it is a political demand that has, in an important sense, outgrown any single leader even as it remains organised around him.
The Unlawful Treatment of a Political Prisoner
The manner of Khan’s imprisonment has itself become a constitutional and humanitarian scandal that the courts can no longer responsibly ignore, since, according to his legal team and his family, he has been held for extended periods in conditions amounting to solitary confinement and prolonged isolation, with restricted access to his lawyers, to family visits, and at times to the outside world altogether. Whatever the charges he may face, treatment of this kind is not a punishment authorised by any court; it is a punishment inflicted outside the law altogether, and its continuation steadily corrodes the legitimacy of the entire system that permits it.
The relevant standards are neither obscure nor seriously contested. The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, universally known as the Nelson Mandela Rules, define solitary confinement in excess of fifteen consecutive days as prolonged and prohibit it outright, recognising that isolation of that duration can amount to torture or to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Pakistan’s own Constitution offers protections that are no less clear, for Article 9 guarantees that no person shall be deprived of liberty save in accordance with law, Article 14 declares the dignity of the individual to be inviolable and forbids torture, and Article 10A guarantees the right to a fair trial and to due process, so that a regime of indefinite isolation, imposed administratively and without specific judicial sanction, cannot be reconciled with any of these guarantees (see Table 1).
Table 1. Legal standards on isolation and the reported conditions of Imran Khan’s detention:
The remedy lies with the judiciary, and the urgency of the matter is real. The superior courts possess both the jurisdiction and the constitutional duty to enquire into the conditions of any prisoner’s detention and to order relief wherever those conditions are found to breach the law, and they should therefore take up the question of Khan’s confinement without delay, bring the solitary confinement and isolation to an immediate end, guarantee him unimpeded access to counsel and to proper medical care, and place his treatment under continuing judicial supervision. A court that will not protect the basic rights of the most prominent prisoner in the country can hardly claim to protect anyone else’s, and this is not a partisan demand but the very minimum that the rule of law requires, a test that the judiciary cannot afford to fail.
Why Khan Represents Stability, Not Chaos
The establishment’s case against Khan rests on the claim that he is a source of instability and that his removal was therefore necessary to restore order, and yet the evidence points firmly in the other direction. It is worth setting out plainly what a legitimate Khan-led government, restored to office through a fair vote, would actually offer the country.
The first dividend is the restoration of democratic legitimacy, for Pakistan’s deepest problem is not the absence of good policies but the absence of a government with the authority to impose costs, and only a leader with a genuine mandate can ask a nation to accept fiscal discipline, tax reform, and hard security choices and be believed. A manufactured government can coerce, but it cannot persuade, and persuasion is precisely what serious reform requires.
The second requirement is a rebalancing of civil–military relations toward constitutional norms. Pakistan’s single greatest structural obstacle to development remains the subordination of elected authority to unelected power. A restored Khan, having paid a significant personal cost on precisely this issue, would be uniquely positioned to renegotiate that relationship. The objective would not be confrontation for its own sake, but the reassertion of constitutional supremacy, a foundational principle of any functioning democracy.
The third is the recovery of economic confidence, because capital is cautious by nature and takes flight from uncertainty and lawlessness, and investors at home and abroad will not commit to countries in which property, contract, and political outcomes turn upon the preferences of an opaque establishment. A government that is visibly legitimate and rules-based would do far more to restore that confidence than any number of bailout tranches ever could.
The fourth is the return of regional stability, for a Pakistan governed by consent rather than coercion is a more predictable neighbour, and a leadership secure in its domestic mandate can afford the pragmatism that de-escalation with India and stabilisation along the Afghan frontier both demands. Regimes that rule by force at home tend, sooner or later, to project the very same insecurity abroad.
The Counterargument and Why It Falls Short
None of this requires ignoring the honest case against Khan, and intellectual seriousness demands that it be stated fairly. His own term in office, which ran from 2018 to 2022, was marked by economic difficulty, by a confrontational style, and by frequent friction with institutions, and his critics point to the unrest of May 2023, when protests following his arrest saw attacks on military installations, as clear evidence of the disorder his movement can unleash, while others argue that his populism is corrosive, that his policy record is uneven, and that his own willingness to bend institutions to his purposes, during the years in which he held power, was not obviously different from that of his opponents.
Each of these points deserves a considered response rather than a summary dismissal. On the record in office, it is worth recalling that Khan governed for less than four years, much of it during a global pandemic and under the same establishment interference that he now resists, and, far from faltering under that strain, his government’s handling of Covid-19 drew international recognition, since a targeted policy of smart lockdowns kept the economy breathing while protecting the vulnerable, the Ehsaas cash-transfer programme cushioned the poorest households, and growth rebounded strongly to rates the country has not matched since (see Figure 2). The economic difficulties of his tenure, real as they undoubtedly were, look modest indeed beside the sustained crisis that has followed his removal.
Figure 2. Real GDP growth, Pakistan, FY2019 to FY2025. FY2025 provisional (*).
The events of May 2023 require the same clear-eyed treatment, for their trigger was anything but gratuitous. On 9 May, paramilitary forces seized Khan from within the very premises of the Islamabad High Court, an act that his supporters experienced as an assault upon the judiciary itself and upon the person of the country’s most popular leader, and the public reaction that followed was an eruption of long-accumulated grievance. The destruction of property that accompanied those protests was serious and cannot be condoned, but the lawful response to it was due process in open court and not the mass detention, the trial of civilians before military courts, and the collective punishment that were visited upon his supporters instead.
On the wider charge of populism and institutional friction, the decisive question is not whether Khan is a flawless democrat but whether Pakistanis are permitted to choose their own government, and the argument advanced here is finally about process rather than personality. A nation of 240 million people has the right to elect its own leaders, and a system that denies that right in the name of stability will, in the end, deliver neither stability nor legitimacy.
The International Dimension
The wider world has a direct stake in how this crisis is resolved, for Pakistan sits at the intersection of some of the most sensitive fault lines in global security, possessing a nuclear arsenal, sharing a volatile frontier with a nuclear-armed India, bordering an unstable Afghanistan to the west, and occupying a pivotal place in the calculations of China, the Gulf states, and the United States. Instability in such a country is never a purely domestic affair, and yet Western governments that prize Pakistan’s cooperation on counter-terrorism and regional balance have largely opted for a quiet accommodation with the present arrangement, reasoning that a compliant establishment is preferable to the uncertainties of genuine democracy. That reasoning is deeply short-sighted, because a Pakistan whose government rests upon coercion rather than consent is inherently brittle, and brittle nuclear states are the last thing that a turbulent region needs, so the international community’s long-term interest lies not in the durability of any particular set of rulers but in the legitimacy of Pakistani institutions, and legitimacy is the one thing that cannot ever be manufactured.
These stakes have been thrown into sharp relief by the present crisis in the Middle East, where a major conflict centred on Iran has sent shocks through global energy markets and regional security, and its reverberations reach directly into Pakistan, a neighbour of Iran, a partner of the Gulf states, and one of the largest Muslim-majority nations on earth. In such a moment Pakistan could play a genuinely constructive part, serving as a bridge between adversaries, as a voice for de-escalation, and as a stabilising weight in a dangerous region, but diplomacy of that ambition requires a government that can speak with real authority, and authority is precisely what a manufactured administration lacks. Only a leadership that carries the confidence of its own people and the credibility that flows from a real mandate can act decisively on the international stage rather than merely react to events, and while a legitimate government under Khan could offer exactly that, the present arrangement, wholly absorbed in its own survival, cannot.
The Choice Before Pakistan
Pakistan now faces a choice that it cannot indefinitely postpone, because a nuclear-armed state cannot govern in perpetuity by suppressing the political preferences of its own majority. The energy required to contain a popular movement, to manage a compromised judiciary, to police the press, and to hold restive provinces by force is energy that is not being spent on the country’s staggering development needs, and the present arrangement is therefore not stability at all but rather the deferral of instability at compounding interest.
The way out is neither mysterious nor radical, for it runs through the release of political prisoners, with Khan foremost among them, through a genuine national dialogue that includes rather than excludes the country’s most popular party, through the restoration of judicial and electoral independence, and, above all, through a free and fair election whose result is honoured. This is not a call for upheaval but a call for the ordinary, unglamorous machinery of constitutional democracy, the very machinery that Pakistan’s rulers have spent years dismantling.
Nowhere would the dividend of legitimacy be felt sooner than in the economy, since, set against the backdrop of a steepening decline, a credible and elected government under Khan could begin to reverse the slide, not through slogans but through the patient restoration of trust, by mobilising the immense goodwill and resources of the overseas Pakistani community that he has rallied to national causes before, by drawing in the investment that always flees uncertainty, and by pursuing structural reform with a mandate strong enough to make it hold. Economic recovery in Pakistan has always been, at bottom, a question of confidence, and confidence is something that only a legitimate government can ever truly command.
Imran Khan is not the last hope of a nation because he is a saviour, for no individual ever is. Khan is the last hope because, at this precise moment, he is the one figure around whom a genuine national consensus can plausibly form, across provinces, across ethnicities, and across the generational divide that will shape the country’s future, and he has become the test case for whether the popular will means anything in Pakistan at all. A country that can find its way back to governing by consent will have many hopes before it, while a country that cannot may yet discover that it has run out of them, and the choice, for now, still belongs to Pakistan, though it will assuredly not remain open forever.
Tahir Azad
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