Did the U.S. Really Oust Pakistan’s Imran Khan?
Reality is much more prosaic. Mr. Khan and Gen.
Bajwa famously clashed in 2021 when Mr. Khan failed in an attempt to overrule Gen. Bajwa over the appointment of a new head of the army’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
By March last year, it was common knowledge in Pakistan that the army had decided to get rid of Mr. Khan through a no-confidence vote, George Mason University political scientist Ahsan Butt points out in a phone interview. The idea that Gen.
Bajwa needed a green light from Washington to defeat Mr. Khan makes no sense. “That’s just not how Pakistani politics works," Mr.
Butt said. Khan supporters may find it hard to accept, but over the past decade U.S. interest in Pakistan has declined precipitously, spurred by alleged Pakistani perfidy in the war on terror, the continuing U.S.
pivot to India, and the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In 2010, a year after the passage of the ambitious Kerry-Lugar aid bill focused on Pakistan, America gave Islamabad nearly $4.5 billion in economic and military aid.
The New York Times mentioned the country nearly 2,100 times that year, according to the Dow Jones Factiva database. By 2021 American aid had shrunk to a paltry $87 million and mentions of Pakistan in the Times were down more than 50%. The U.S.
may have had reason to smile at the ejection of Mr. Khan, the subcontinent’s most openly anti-American major politician. But disliking someone isn’t the same as deposing him.
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