Summarize in up to four sentences.: Imran Khan isn’t a martyr for freedom. He’s a friend of the West’s worst enemies
Isabel Oakeshott
Sat, August 26, 2023 at 3:00 a.m. EDT·4 min read
Pakistan's former prime minister Imran Khan
Pakistan's former prime minister Imran Khan
Pity Prisoner 804, currently languishing in a rat-infested Pakistani jail. In his latest brilliant piece of PR, Imran Khan, the former world-class cricketer turned politician, is pictured staring through the bars of a cell, hands clasped as if in silent prayer.

Juxtaposing clips of his proudest moments as the 22nd prime minister of Pakistan with images of Punjab’s notorious Attock prison, a dramatic new social media video portrays him as a martyr paying a terrible price for his patriotism. According to the voiceover, Khan, who went to school in Worcester and studied at Oxford before becoming an international sports star and marrying a British socialite, “gave up his life of comfort” to “awaken the nation,” selflessly setting up cancer hospitals and campaigning for the poor.

He is credited with teaching Pakistanis to “stand up for their rights and rise against tyranny”, and taking on “all the mafias”. “These are big crimes,” says the narrator sardonically, painting our hero as such a threat to the forces of evil in Pakistan that he had to be silenced.

As Khan tries to figure out how to overturn a three-year jail sentence for corruption that bars him from returning to politics for five years, this clever video has gone viral. On TikTok, Instagram and Twitter, it has prompted an outpouring of support from many ordinary voters, who continue to believe Khan (who leads the country’s main opposition party, Tehreek-e-Insaf) is the answer to their country’s chronic political instability and deepening economic and social woes. They call him the “PM of hearts” and weep over his ill-treatment.

His conviction is seen as no stain on his character. But the video is not just aimed at a domestic audience: it is designed to impress those in the West, where casual observers of Pakistan’s bewildering political scene can be forgiven for assuming that he must at the very least be the best of a bad lot.

After all, he has a fine English education, looks and sounds the part, and is impeccably connected to British high society via his first marriage to Jemima Goldsmith. It is natural to imagine that he shares our values. Certainly, he deserves credit for entering public life when he could have simply kicked back and enjoyed his fame and wealth.

But hang on a minute! Who’s that lurking in the video? Do I spy an image of Khan gladhanding Vladimir Putin, even as the Russian president rained bombs on Ukraine? Of all the many pictures his spin doctors could have selected of their man on the world stage, they chose this one, as well as an image of their leader meeting Xi Jinping, the Chinese president. What a blunder – and what a disturbing insight into Khan’s new allegiances, now he has left his colourful playboy past behind.

Once upon a time, he loved being photographed with scantily clad beauties. These days he is an ultra devout Muslim, who seems to think that rape victims are partly to blame for “wearing very few clothes”.

Beneath the smooth surface lurk darker sides to Mr Khan. For all his huffing and puffing about abuse of power in Pakistan, his period in office was marred by allegations of political persecutions and theatrical stunts designed to make him look more popular than he is.

Far more worrying for the West than this stuff (quite the norm in Pakistan) is his well documented sympathy for the Taliban, his insistence that there is “no such thing as radical Islam” and his campaign, during the pandemic, for the lifting of sanctions on Iran. Worse still is his courtship of Russia and China.

Within weeks of his ill-judged February 2022 meeting in Moscow, he was thrown out of power, following a no-confidence vote he tried to block by dissolving parliament. A sensational report by The Intercept claims that a leaked Pakistani government document shows his deposal was actively encouraged by the US State Department. No wonder! As the West united to support Ukraine, what was he doing gravitating towards the Kremlin?

While his supporters wring their hands over his plight, others may be relieved that this complex character no longer has his finger on a nuclear button.

Isabel Oakeshott is international editor of Talk TV