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Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan has unloaded his anger on former Army chief Gen. (retd.) Qamar Javed Bajwa, holding him solely responsible for the PTI’s ouster from power in April and condemning a “double-game” of undermining his government’s policies. There is much in this statement—apart from an absence of veracity that Khan doesn’t care about—that even PTI supporters find hard to go along with, including ally Parvez Elahi, the current Chief Minister of Punjab.
While Bajwa has shunned any public statements since his retirement, sources close to him claim he was okay with Khan and the PTI till they started playing around with foreign policy. That the Army always liked the PTI chief for his reputation of honesty and religious sincerity makes it quite easy to understand why Bajwa was enamored of him till he started violating the unspoken realism of Pakistan’s foreign policy, especially his distancing from the Arabs and his confrontational challenge to the United States.
The press also often discussed the ‘Bajwa Doctrine,’ which might have brought the two on a collision course. The doctrine, as reported, can be summarized better ties with regional states and a balance in dealing with world powers; mainstreaming jihadists; and rejection of the 18th Amendment of the Constitution. Khan’s “greatness”—which appealed to Pakistanis at large—was challenging the powerful through foreign policy isolationism. It is no surprise that Bajwa decided to part ways with a popular prime minister who took on the U.S., India and the Arabs while also offending the Chinese. The policy gave popular stature to Khan but damaged Pakistan’s interests, compelling the more realistic Army chief to safeguard old equations.
Shortly after assuming power, then-prime minister Khan sought to bypass the Arabs and OIC by organizing a “rebellious” Islamic Conference in Malaysia alongside Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan, which mercifully flopped. He also agreed with Erdogan to hold a military exercise in Azerbaijan, offending Iran, and doing little to make amends. Bajwa, meanwhile, realistically looked at the danger coming from across the Durand Line and sought to counter it through a border fence and warnings of the threat posed by the Afghan Taliban. Khan, whose PTI still rules in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, chose to remain silent as the provincial government rapidly lost its writ.
What likely hurt Bajwa the most—compelling him to visit China to allay the Chinese government’s concerns—was Khan’s reckless discord with Beijing over the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor that Pakistan sees as essential for its economic future. In more ways than one, General Bajwa was a different kind of Army chief whose realistic outlook did not gibe with Imran Khan’s “charismatic” but inward-looking worldview that risked inflicting more grief on Pakistan than under any leader in the past who brought misfortune through misplaced egoism.