By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Imran Khan should not be confused with a hero. He is really more of a dick, which I believe is the politically correct term for ‘politician’ now that most westerners have soured on ‘pig-raping cunt-devil.’ An international cricket star with a flair for the camera, Khan was part of a global trend of wealthy conmen posing as populist savior figures. He successfully ran for Pakistan’s perpetually embattled premiership in 2018 under the banner of his Movement for Justice (PTI) Party with the promise of taking on the financial gangsters in the IMF and overseeing the institution of a grand “Islamic welfare state.”

What Khan delivered upon his victory was really more of a series of concessions to his fellow elites, asking Pakistan’s working class to shoulder the weight of a globally mandated austerity regime while the oligarchs who financed Khan’s campaign continued to count their bounty untaxed and unmolested. It’s for these reasons and many more that it has been very easy to discount Imran Khan’s claims to be the victim of an American conspiracy to keep him out of power as just another theatrical circus trick by a daft political acrobat but just because you’re a dick doesn’t mean that they’re not after you.

Pakistan has been a nation in catastrophic upheaval since Imran Khan was ousted as Prime Minister after an abrupt no-confidence vote in parliament last year. Such an event can’t exactly be seen as particularly shocking considering that in the last 75 years no prime minister of an elected government in Pakistan has ever completed a full fiver year term, but the timing of this latest legislative coup is more than a little suspicious.

After Khan provoked the ire of the western foreign policy establishment by refusing to join them in freezing out Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine, America’s Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, Donald Lu, met with Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States, Asad Majeed Khan (no relation) the day before the telltale vote took place. Imran insists that the US demanded at this meeting that the Pakistani establishment, desperate for American aid, purge the prime minister from their ranks and cables recently leaked to the Intercept by anonymous military sources seem to corroborate this story.

Unsurprisingly, Imran Khan has refused to go silently into that good night. In the months that have followed his ouster, with Pakistan teetering precariously on the brink of outright civil war, Khan’s supporters in the PTI have held massive and at times downright violent demonstrations targeting the embattled playboy’s former allies in the nation’s notoriously corrupt military. The military in turn has lashed back with increasingly draconian crackdowns on dissidents that have seen thousands arrested and tried before military tribunals as a slew of laws have been passed crushing civil liberties, criminalizing criticism of the armed forces and granting those forces veto power over virtually all political and civil affairs.

During this time, Khan himself has been arrested, shot and arrested again as he continues an increasingly quixotic crusade to reclaim his leadership. His latest arrest on corruption charges has seen him barred from political office for five years in the months leading up to an election that most polls show Khan leading and this is where that dick’s enemies find themselves in a potentially violent jam. The more aggressively the system opposes the former premier’s demands for democratic restitution, the guiltier they look to a nation sick and tired of being the plaything of international power brokers, and confronting those powers was the one thing that Imran Khan did right.

For however you or I may feel about Mr. Khan and his dubious ambitions, the man is not being persecuted for the sin of corruption. That crime comes with the territory of running any state, especially in the post-colonial mire of the third world. No, Imran Khan was targeted because he is a neutralist, specifically in regard to the west’s newly revived cold war against Russia and China. Secretary Lu made this quite clear during his thinly veiled threats at the Pakistani Embassy exposed by the Intercept. Before stating ominously that “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington” that vaunted statesman mused in all his marbled omnipotence that “People here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position, if such a position is even possible.”

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