Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, who survived an assassination attempt in November 2022, condemned the attempt to kill former United States president Donald Trump and wished him a “full recovery” on Sunday.
“I strongly condemn the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally. Political violence is a tool of cowards and has no place in a democracy,” Khan said on Twitter.
Khan was shot in the leg while on a barnstorming campaign tour across Pakistan in November 2022. He was in the process of mounting a political comeback after being ejected from the prime minister’s office with a parliamentary vote of no confidence in April of that year.
Khan has since blamed his ouster on “foreign interference,” meaning the Biden administration, and has reinvented himself as a populist firebrand and hardcore Islamist, running against Pakistan’s corrupt establishment. He is arguably the most popular politician in the country.
Unfortunately for his political ambitions, he is also in jail. Khan was dogged by over a hundred different allegations of corruption after he left office. Crowds of supporters massed around his home in Lahore for months to prevent the authorities from taking him into custody. When he was finally arrested in May 2023, dangerous riots broke out across the country.
The riots enraged Pakistan’s powerful military establishment, as some of its property was damaged in the chaos. Khan and the leaders of military and intelligence agencies waged an increasingly ugly public feud, with Khan working at a considerable disadvantage because he was in prison. His PTI party came up with the novel solution of using an A.I.-generated duplicate of Khan to convey authorized messages from the jailed politician to his supporters.
Khan would almost certainly have won his way back into the prime minister’s office in the February 2024 election, but he was not allowed to run and his party was effectively banned from appearing on ballots. PTI performed very well in the election anyway, triggering a leadership crisis that persists to this day.
Pakistan’s ruling coalition is trying to resolve that leadership crisis by formally banning PTI completely, preparing a Supreme Court case that paints the party as seditious, extreme, and violent. PTI sneeringly dismissed the threat as a “sign of panic,” while even some observers who are not fond of PTI’s platform worry that banning one of the most popular parties in Pakistan will make the country even more unstable than it usually is.
Khan is still in jail, even though almost all of the rulings that put him there have been overturned on appeal. Most recently, his conviction for violating Islamist laws by marrying his wife Bushra Bibi too quickly after her divorce was overturned on Saturday.
A U.N. human rights panel on July 1 denounced Khan’s ongoing detention as “arbitrary and in violation of international law.” The panel demanded his immediate release, and even suggested compensating him for his unjust imprisonment.
Khan met with Trump at the White House in July 2019 when they were both in office. They seemed to get along very well. Trump praised Khan as a “great athlete” – he was a cricket star before he went into politics – and the “very popular prime minister of Pakistan.”
“We were blown away. When we met President Trump, the straightforward, charming way he treated us was wonderful,” Khan later said of their first meeting.
The two met again on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2020. Trump greeted Khan as “a very good friend of mine” and said, “We’re getting along very well.”
“I would say we’ve never been closer with Pakistan than we are right now,” Trump proclaimed.
Khan reciprocated by saying his and Trump’s administrations were “on the same page” regarding Afghanistan, where they both wanted “peace and an orderly transition.”
Trump was working on a plan to withdraw American forces at the time – a withdrawal his successor President Joe Biden would bungle, with deadly consequences, in August 2021. Among the many dire consequences of Biden’s failure was the Taliban gaining control of billions of dollars in U.S. military hardware. Pakistan complains the Taliban has been providing this equipment to militants who seek to overthrow the Pakistani government.
Trump was so chummy with Khan that some Indian analysts feared Washington could moderate its support of India’s claims in the disputed Jammu-Kashmir region. Trump mused during his first meeting with Khan that he might be able to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the 30-year-old territorial dispute. Khan heartily endorsed the idea, saying Trump could “play a big part” in bringing India to the table.
This angered India, which has long felt that no foreign power should intervene in Kashmir in any way. Trump claimed India also wanted him to mediate, which made the Indians even angrier.
“It is impossible to believe that two incredible countries who are very, very smart with very smart leadership can’t solve a problem like that. If you would want me to mediate or arbitrate, I would be willing to do it,” Trump said.
“It has been India’s consistent position that all outstanding issues with Pakistan are discussed only bilaterally. I would further underline that any engagement with Pakistan would require an end to cross-border terrorism,” Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar reassured outraged members of parliament the day after Trump and Khan met at the White House.
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