Rumors about former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s death in custody have once again exposed the deep mistrust that defines Pakistan’s political landscape. Officials have rejected the claims, calling them the product of misinformation campaigns. Yet the very speed with which these rumors spread tells a larger story.
Field Marshal General Asim Munir understands that eliminating Khan would be a self-destructive blunder that the establishment can ill-afford. Munir, in his long military career, has seen the disastrous results of the impulsive policies of his predecessors, such as Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s reckless actions, including the killing of Nawab Akbar Bugti in 2006 and the Lal Masjid operation in 2007. Pakistan is still reeling from the aftermath of these events.
Another reason the army cannot afford to eliminate a leader from Punjab — Pakistan’s biggest province and the army’s largest catchment area — is the political risk such an act would carry. Many observers believe that former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was allowed to go to England for medical treatment in 2019, after his blood platelet count dropped to a critically low level, because the establishment knew it could not provoke a backlash in Punjab by letting a Punjabi leader die in custody. This caution underscores a fundamental reality: the army’s power, recruitment, and legitimacy are deeply intertwined with Punjab’s political sentiment.
It is for this reason that the establishment could get away with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging in 1979 or the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007. Except for limited demonstrations in Sindh, the rest of Pakistan — especially Punjab — remained largely unmoved. The military faced criticism, but not a nationwide revolt nor a crisis that threatened its core constituency.
Khan represents a fundamentally different political reality. Although he is not ethnically a Punjabi but a Pashtun, Khan hails from Punjab. His support is national, spanning Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and the global diaspora. His arrest in May 2023 triggered unprecedented scenes of unrest, including attacks on military installations — events unimaginable in any previous political confrontation. For the first time, the establishment witnessed direct anger erupting not in peripheral provinces but in Punjab itself, the heart of its recruitment base, administrative machinery, and political weight. Whatever the interpretations of those events, they revealed one unavoidably clear truth: eliminating Khan risks igniting political unrest of a scale the army would be unable to contain, especially at a time when the country’s economy is in the doldrums.
More importantly, eliminating Khan would create a martyr of unprecedented scale in Pakistani politics.
Bhutto and his daughter Benazir became icons in death, but their martyrdoms were largely confined to loyal party bases. Khan’s martyrdom would be qualitatively different. His appeal cuts across class, province, and age. He commands a digitally mobilized youth base that sees him not just as a political leader but as a symbol of resistance. A figure with this kind of emotional resonance does not disappear when eliminated — he expands. His movement would radicalize. The state would face the fiercest political backlash in its history.
The establishment knows this, and it remembers the Bhutto precedent well enough not to repeat such a disastrous course. Even with the expanded powers held by the military leadership today, political reality imposes limits that no institution can ignore. Imran Khan is not Bhutto in 1979, nor is this the Pakistan of 2007. He is a national figure with deep roots in the province that the state relies on most. Eliminating him would not end the crisis; it would unleash one that the state may not survive.
For all its strength, the military cannot afford that gamble. And that is why, despite the rumors, the establishment knows that removing Imran Khan is a risk far greater than any conceivable benefit.
