The renowned TIME magazine has declared former prime minister and PTI Chief Imran Khan responsible for country’s economic woes.
The cover story accused him of ignoring fundamental structural issues to reform the economy.
The TIME magazine on Tuesday published a cover story written by Charlie Campbell on Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan titled ‘The Astonishing Saga of Imran Khan’ which contains some praise and harsh criticism of the former premier.
Watch: An interview with Imran Khan https://t.co/057q2MPkvf pic.twitter.com/jRGivuyKjG
— TIME (@TIME) April 4, 2023
Talking about economy, Khan said “Our economy has gone into a tailspin. We now have the worst economic indicators in our history.”
The TIME magazine wrote if Pakistan’s economic woes are reaching a new nadir, the trajectory was established during Khan’s term. A revolving door of Finance Ministers was compounded by bowing to hardliners. (After appointing renowned Princeton economist Atif Mian as an adviser, Khan fired him just days later owing to a backlash from hardliners because Mian is an Ahmadi). In 2018, Khan pledged not to follow previous administrations’ “begging bowl” tactics of foreign borrowing, in order to end Pakistan’s cycle of debt. But less than a year later, he struck a deal with the IMF to cut social and development spending while raising taxes in exchange for a $6 billion loan. Mismanagement exacerbated global headwinds from the pandemic and soaring oil prices.
Meanwhile, little was done to address Pakistan’s fundamental structural issues: few people pay tax, least of all the feudal landowners who control traditional low-added-value industries like sugar farms, textile mills, and agricultural interests while wielding huge political-patronage networks stemming from their workers’ votes. In 2021, only 2.5 million Pakistanis filed tax returns—less than 1% of the adult population. “People don’t pay tax, especially the rich elite,” says Khan. “They just siphon out money and launder it abroad.”
But if Khan recognized the problem, he did little to solve it. After his election in 2018, he was in an uncommonly strong position with the backing of the military and progressives, as well as the tolerance of the Islamists. Now, with all the bad blood and open warfare among these factions, even if he claws his way back, “he’ll be in a weaker position to actually effect any reforms,” says Munter, the former U.S. ambassador, “if he had any reforms to begin with.”
According to the magazine, the sympathy is slim in a West put off by Khan’s years of anti-American bluster and cozying up to autocrats and extremists, including the Taliban. He visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on the eve of the Ukraine invasion, remarking on “so much excitement.” Khan can both repeatedly declare Osama bin Laden a “martyr”. He has obsessed on Joe Biden’s failure to call him after entering the White House. “He’s someone that is imbued with this incredibly strong sense of grievance,” says Michael Kugelman, the deputy director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Key Points
Following his ouster in a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April 2022, Khan has mobilized his diehard support base in a “jihad,” as he puts it, to demand snap elections, claiming he was unfairly toppled by a US-sponsored plot. (The State Department has denied the allegations.)
Sharif’s cabinet declared on March 20 that the PTI was “a gang of militants” whose “enmity against the state” could not be tolerated, police arrested hundreds of Khan supporters in raids.
Sympathy is slim in a West put off by Khan’s years of anti-American bluster and cozying up to autocrats and extremists, including the Taliban. He calls autocratic Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “my brother” and visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on the eve of the Ukraine invasion, remarking on “so much excitement.”
Khan can both repeatedly declare Osama bin Laden a “martyr” and praise Beijing’s confinement of China’s Uighur Muslim minority. He has obsessed on Joe Biden’s failure to call him after entering the White House. “He’s someone that is imbued with this incredibly strong sense of grievance,” says Michael Kugelman, the deputy director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Khan spent 22 years in the political wilderness before his 2018 election triumph. But once in power, the self-styled bold reformer turned unnervingly divisive.
According to a 1997 California court ruling, Khan also has one child, a daughter, born out of wedlock, and he’s struggled to quash gossip of several more.
His youth was spent carousing with supermodels in London’s trendiest nightspots. But his politics has hardened as his handsome features have lined and leathered.
He provoked outrage when in August 2021 he said the Taliban had “broken the shackles of slavery” by taking back power (he insists to TIME he was “taken out of context”) and has made various comments criticized as misogynistic.
When asked about the drivers of sexual violence in Pakistan, he said, “If a woman is wearing very few clothes, it will have an impact on the men, unless they’re robots.”
Khan has refused to condemn Putin’s invasion, insisting, like China, on remaining “neutral” and deflecting uncomfortable questions onto supposed double standards regarding India’s inroads into disputed Kashmir.
Khan’s fleeting political success was owed to a Faustian pact with the nation’s military and extremist groups that shepherded his election victory and he is now reaping the whirlwind.
If Pakistan’s economic woes are reaching a new nadir, the trajectory was established during Khan’s term. A revolving door of Finance Ministers was compounded by bowing to hardliners.
In 2018, Khan pledged not to follow previous administrations’ “begging bowl” tactics of foreign borrowing, in order to end Pakistan’s cycle of debt. But less than a year later, he struck a deal with the IMF to cut social and development spending while raising taxes in exchange for a $6 billion loan. Mismanagement exacerbated global headwinds from the pandemic and soaring oil prices.
Pakistan recorded the second-largest increase in terrorism-related deaths worldwide in 2022, up 120% year-over-year. “It was Khan who was pushing for talks with [the Taliban] at all costs,” says Kugelman, of the Woodrow Wilson Center. “That embrace is now experiencing significant levels of blowback.”
