With the departure of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement from the ruling coalition leaving the PTI-led government as a minority in Parliament, Khan is set to lose an Opposition no-confidence motion expected to be voted upon on April 3. Within his own party, 22 parliamentarians were supping with the combined Opposition parties Wednesday night.

Until late in the evening, Khan was closeted with aides as rumours flew he might step down and not face the vote. Opposition leaders demanded that the vote on the trust motion be tomorrow. Amid this uncertainty, Army Chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa and ISI chief Lt. Gen Nadeem Anjum paid a visit to Khan at his home in the evening. Khan cancelled a pre-announced address to the nation.

Khan’s continuance in office had begun to look shaky since last October, when he faced down the Army over differences on the appointment of the ISI chief. The Prime Minister is supposed to sign off on the Army chief’s choice for this post but Khan made Bajwa wait for three weeks, making obvious his opposition to the transfer out of then incumbent Lt. Gen Faiz Hameed.

For Bajwa, that was possibly the last straw in a relationship that Khan frequently eulogised as “same page”. For the first time, Pakistan’s civilian-military arrangement came to be known as a “hybrid regime”, signalling that both sides had arrived at a new modus vivendi.

Ideologically, Imran Khan is possibly the closest to the Army of all the civilian political entities in Pakistan, said military analyst and commentator Ayesha Siddiqa.

“He was the Army’s chosen one. As a champion of Pakistan’s middle classes, he was supposed to bring about a revolution in Pakistan that reflected the military’s own middle class ethos, with the expectation that he would not try to undermine their institutional supremacy,” Siddiqa said.

MQM’s Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui (centre), with Opp leaders (from left) Aktar Mangel, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, Shahbaz Sharif and Maulana Fazlur Rehman in Islamabad, Wednesday. (AP)

Khan’s fumbling over Bajwa’s first extension back in 2019 was the first disappointment. “He showed himself to be kachcha in the way he imagined his relationship with the military, how he imagined he had control of the institution that had brought him to power in the first place,” she said.

The growing disenchantment with the PTI, for its sub-par record in governance after promising no less than a modern day Medina, partly due to its own incapacity, and party due to the COVID pandemic, also led to an increasing distance between the two.

The Army no longer wanted to be identified with with an unpopular leader – it is no secret that the Army and ISI put in much grunt work to get him elected and stitch together his coalition.

The US loss of interest in Pakistan after its withdrawal from Afghanistan was all the more acute because of the complete absence of chemistry between the Biden Administration and Khan – the two leaders did not have a single phone conversation since the time of Joe Biden’s election.

This was another red flag for the Army which, for all its proximity to China, still craves American indulgence. Khan’s visit to Russia on the day Putin invaded Ukraine, was one more foreign policy gaffe.

Last week, Khan alleged that his troubles were the result of a foreign hand, and that there were forces outside the country that were trying to influence Pakistan’s foreign policy, an oblique reference to the US.

Khan also did not seem to be on the same page with Bajwa over his stated desire to improve relations with India by starting trade.

The February 2021 India-Pakistan agreement that silenced the guns at the Line of Control, was concluded between the two armies through a security establishment-led backchannel process in which the Pakistan government’s involvement appears minimal. That process is still alive and Imran Khan’s departure may see it producing some thaw in the Pakistan-India relationship.

The opposition, which had been rallying against the government’s failures over the last two years, exploited the rift artfully by coming together to submit a no-confidence motion, making it seem like democracy in action. In reality, the opposite is true.

But it is an open secret that it would not have come to this pass had the Army not declared itself “neutral” in this crisis for Khan, which, in effect, meant that it was not on his side, or else he would not be beset with so many defections from his own party, or the departure of his key coalition allies.

Any new dispensation, even a caretaker arrangement, will need to accept the rules of the hybrid game. The military does not trust either the Pakistan Muslim League (N) or the Pakistan People’s Party, the two main opposition parties.

A desperate deal earlier this week between Khan and the PML(Q) — a party hacked out of the PML(N) by the military after the 1999 coup – to hand over the provincial Punjab government to the Q League in a bid to retain it in his coalition, may have effectively helped the Army keep Nawaz Sharif’s party out of Pakistan’s most powerful province.

A caretaker PM could either call an election immediately or carry on until 2023 when parliamentary elections are due next. While Shehbaz Sharif – he is the brother of Nawaz Sharif who lives in self-exile in London — is rumoured to be the most acceptable choice for the establishment, a politician with good administration skills who will run the show until the election without rocking the civilian-military boat, the Pakistan Army can be expected to make sure that the next election will not throw up any big winners who can challenge its dominance. Imran Khan may yet emerge as a powerful opposition.

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