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| Is Pakistan’s establishment reducing its dependence on PML-N? Signals of possible reconciliation with Imran Khan raise a harder question about the political arrangement that emerged after 2022 |
Something Changed in the Language
Yesterday morning in Karachi, I was reading the Reuters interview with Zulfikar Bukhari when one passage stopped me. Bukhari said Imran Khan would not confront Pakistan's military or Field Marshal Asim Munir if Khan came out of prison. After years in which PTI's politics became inseparable from its conflict with the military establishment, the choice of words felt deliberate. (reuters.com)
I read the report again.
Bukhari spoke of reconciliation and suggested that Munir could extend what he called a "healing hand." Reuters described his comments as one of the strongest signals yet that PTI may want reconciliation with the military, but it also identified the crucial unknown: nobody has established that Khan himself shares Bukhari's position. PTI, meanwhile, still plans a nationwide march for September 27 demanding Khan's release and faster legal proceedings. (reuters.com)
I do not know of a deal. Nor have I found evidence that Munir has decided to abandon PML-N. My argument starts where the evidence stops: I want to examine why reducing dependence on PML-N would make institutional sense if PTI's reconciliation signal develops into something real.
The timing deserves attention.
The Supreme Court ordered Khan transferred from Adiala Jail to Shifa International Hospital in Islamabad for medical treatment. He went to Shifa early on August 21 and returned to Adiala after spending several hours there. Reuters reported that the transfer was being seen as a possible first step towards easing the confrontation between PTI and the military establishment. (reuters.com)
A hospital visit proves no political bargain. A court order proves even less about the army's intentions. But when judicial movement appears beside a striking change in PTI's public language, I stop looking for dramatic secret meetings and start watching incentives.
One question keeps returning.
If Pakistan's establishment discovers that it can live with a less confrontational Imran Khan, what exactly does it still need PML-N for?
Pakistan's Establishment Needs Arrangements, Not Friends
Pakistani politics often gets explained as a collection of personal alliances. A general supposedly chooses a politician, the politician becomes "the establishment's man," and another favourite eventually replaces him. I find that explanation too simple for an institution that has shaped Pakistan's political order for decades.
The military establishment needs workable political arrangements.
Nawaz Sharif's career supplies enough evidence. His political rise began during the Zia era, yet by October 1999 his confrontation with General Pervez Musharraf ended in a military coup and eventually exile. A politician can move from useful civilian partner to institutional problem once the distribution of power changes.
Imran Khan travelled through a different version of the same machinery. His opponents accused the military establishment of helping create the political conditions for his 2018 victory, while Khan's relationship with the army later deteriorated sharply before his government fell in April 2022. Khan subsequently accused the military of participating in his political destruction, an allegation the army has rejected. (reuters.com)
I do not treat Nawaz and Khan as identical cases. The circumstances differ too much. I see a narrower institutional rule: civilian usefulness lasts only while the political arrangement continues to solve a problem for the dominant power structure.
PML-N should understand that rule better than most.
February 2024 Exposed the Real Problem
Removing Khan from government did not remove him from politics. His imprisonment did not accomplish it either. February 8, 2024 made the distinction difficult to ignore.
PTI entered that election under extraordinary constraints. Khan sat in prison, and PTI had lost its familiar cricket-bat electoral symbol, forcing its candidates to contest as independents. Yet PTI-backed independents still won more National Assembly seats than any rival political grouping. (reuters.com)
They could not translate that result into control of the federal government. Shehbaz Sharif eventually assembled the coalition that put PML-N back in the prime minister's office. The parliamentary problem had been solved, but the election had exposed something harder: federal power and popular political energy were no longer sitting comfortably in the same place.
I noticed the split even in ordinary Karachi conversation.
Islamabad had a functioning government, and ministers appeared on television as usual. Economic policy continued through familiar offices, yet discussions over tea and endless WhatsApp exchanges kept circling back to one man sitting in Adiala Jail. Power had moved.
Politics had not.
PML-N therefore performed an important function in the post-2022 order. It supplied a civilian government capable of operating the federal system while PTI remained outside power. I am describing political utility here, not claiming evidence of a secret contract between PML-N and the army.
Utility can expire.
The Establishment Faces Two Different Risks
A hybrid political system does not need universal consent. It needs enough important actors to operate inside boundaries that the dominant institutions can tolerate. Pakistan's present arrangement becomes unstable when maintaining those boundaries costs more than changing them.
The establishment now faces two different risks.
The first comes from allowing Khan back into normal political competition. He could resume confrontation with the military leadership, mobilise his supporters around accountability for the events since 2022 and turn political victory into another institutional showdown.
The second risk runs in the opposite direction, and I think it receives too little attention. Keeping Pakistan's most electorally potent opposition movement permanently outside the governing system creates its own pressure, particularly when imprisonment and legal restrictions fail to drain the leader's political support.
The establishment does not need to decide that Imran Khan is safe.
It needs only to conclude that permanently excluding him has become more dangerous than containing him inside negotiated political limits. Those calculations are not the same, and Pakistan's next political turn may begin if the second risk starts to exceed the first.
Khan's imprisonment illustrates the problem.
Courts have become part of the political struggle surrounding him, and even disputes over prison conditions can acquire national significance. The Shifa episode showed the mechanism in miniature: a medical question travelled from Adiala Jail to the Supreme Court and then became international political news. (reuters.com)
Prison has contained the man.
It has not settled the political question.
PML-N's Real Danger Is Not Khan Defeating It
Here I will say what cautious commentary usually avoids saying.
PML-N's greatest strategic danger may no longer be Imran Khan defeating it. Its greater danger is the establishment deciding that it can manage Imran Khan without PML-N.
Consider what would have to change.
PTI would need to convince the military leadership that Khan's return to political space would not immediately restart an institutional war. The army would not need to trust Khan personally. It would need confidence that confrontation could remain within tolerable limits.
Accommodation requires no friendship.
It requires boundaries.
Bukhari's Reuters interview matters for exactly that reason. His language places a possible formula into public circulation: Khan returns to political space, while PTI avoids a direct confrontation with Munir and the military institution. (reuters.com)
Munir can reject the signal. Khan can disown it when he speaks for himself. Neither possibility changes what Bukhari has already done: a senior PTI figure has publicly described a political future in which Khan's freedom and non-confrontation with the army can coexist.
PML-N has to hear that message too.
Think of It as Political Concentration Risk
I would not describe the possible shift as Munir suddenly dumping Nawaz Sharif or Shehbaz Sharif. Such language makes Pakistan's power structure sound more sentimental than it is. My banking experience gives me a colder way to look at it: concentration risk.
A bank becomes vulnerable when too much exposure sits with one counterparty. Political institutions operate differently, but the risk principle still helps. If the establishment depends heavily on one civilian coalition to keep the federal system functioning while the country's strongest opposition movement remains excluded, its political exposure becomes concentrated.
I recognise the logic from cross-border banking.
A payment route can work perfectly for years, and people start treating its availability as permanent. Trouble arrives when the route fails and everybody discovers, rather late, why alternative channels mattered in the first place.
Political diversification would not require the establishment to sell PML-N and buy PTI.
It would require reducing dependence on PML-N as the principal civilian vehicle capable of running the federal system without Khan. Keeping a usable relationship with PML-N while reopening political space for PTI would give the establishment something more valuable than permanent loyalty from either party: room to manoeuvre.
Such an arrangement could also reduce the political cost of containing Khan.
He has remained imprisoned since August 2023, yet his name still structures much of Pakistan's political argument. Legal cases have restricted his physical movement without extinguishing his ability to dominate political conversation. (reuters.com)
The system has spent years containing him without proving that containment can erase him.
At some point, institutions calculate the bill.
Why Reconciliation Could Frighten PML-N More Than Confrontation
Open conflict between Khan and the army gives PML-N political space. Every escalation makes accommodation harder. A politician locked in permanent confrontation with the military cannot easily return to the centre of Pakistan's governing system.
Reconciliation reverses the calculation.
If Khan becomes institutionally tolerable again, his political value can start being determined through electoral competition on terms closer to normal politics. PML-N would then face a politician whose years in prison may have strengthened his anti-system appeal instead of destroying it.
February 2024 already supplied the warning.
PTI-backed independents won more National Assembly seats than any rival grouping despite Khan's imprisonment and the loss of the party's electoral symbol. PML-N still reached the prime minister's office through coalition politics, but the result did not establish that it had displaced Khan's movement as the country's strongest electoral force. (reuters.com)
I would worry about that result if I sat in Raiwind.
Not because Munir has announced a new favourite. He has not. I would worry because the political system that once benefited from PML-N's ability to govern without Khan may discover that controlled coexistence with Khan carries a lower cost.
PML-N does not need to be dumped for its strategic value to fall.
It only needs to become less necessary.
PML-N May Have Been a Bridge, Not the Destination
Pakistani political commentary becomes obsessed with personalities very quickly. Nawaz versus Imran soon turns into Imran versus Munir, while institutional incentives disappear behind television arguments about who hates whom.
I keep returning to February 2024.
PML-N holds federal office without having demonstrated uncontested electoral supremacy, while the political force that lost federal power in 2022 remains capable of turning the medical treatment of its imprisoned leader into a national political event. Such an arrangement can continue for years. Duration does not guarantee permanence.
The August heat in Karachi makes political speculation feel stale by afternoon. A ceiling fan pushes warm air across the room, television panels repeat familiar names, and before long somebody announces that another secret "deal" has been completed behind a closed door.
I have found no evidence of such a deal.
What I can see is a change in language. Bukhari has publicly described a future in which Khan can leave prison without confronting Munir, while the Supreme Court's intervention has produced movement over Khan's medical treatment. Reuters reports that the hospital transfer has been viewed as a possible opening in the long confrontation. (reuters.com) (reuters.com)
None of those facts proves that Munir intends to abandon PML-N.
They reveal something more interesting.
A political system that has spent years trying to contain Imran Khan now has a possible formula under public discussion for living with him. If the establishment ever concludes that Khan can operate inside acceptable institutional boundaries, part of the function that made PML-N so useful after his fall begins to disappear.
I would watch what happens next to Khan, but I would watch Raiwind just as closely.
PML-N spent years worrying about what would happen if Imran Khan returned.
A more disturbing question has now appeared: what happens to PML-N if the establishment decides his return can be managed?
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