Last month, Pakistan summoned the US ambassador in Islamabad for a dressing down after President Joe Biden described the south Asian country as “one of the most dangerous nations in the world”. Biden was apparently referring to Pakistan’s combination of nuclear weapons and apparent instability. He might have been talking about the threat faced by the country’s own politicians instead.
On Thursday, the former prime minister Imran Khan was shot when his anti-government protest convoy came under attack in the east of the country, in what his aides said was a clear assassination attempt. The 70-year-old did not appear to be seriously injured but the incident underlines once again how politics in Pakistan is inseparable from violence.
“Every day in Pakistan you can open a newspaper and see reports of people who have been killed for political, financial, tribal, or religious motives … as well as just common criminality, and that goes from top to bottom of society,” said Owen Bennett-Jones, a former BBC Islamabad correspondent and expert on Pakistan.
This has always been the case. Four years after Pakistan was created as an independent country in the aftermath of British rule on the subcontinent, Liaquat Ali Khan, the first prime minister, was shot dead at a public meeting in the northern city of Rawalpindi.
One form of violence influencing politics has been war, particularly with neighbouring India. In 1971, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto took power after Pakistan’s defeat in a new round of fighting with its regional rival. A flamboyant populist leftist, Bhutto was ousted in a military coup. Gen Zia-ul Haq hanged him two years later. Zia’s authoritarian Islamist rule was bolstered by the war in neighbouring Afghanistan. In 1988, Zia died in a plane crash, which some believe was caused by political enemies.
But other forms of conflict have also influenced Pakistani politics. Local powerbrokers have long used coercion and intimidation. Over the decades, separatists battled to win recognition, autonomy and resources from central government with peaceful protest – but also guns and bombs. Struggles between landowners and workers were settled with clubs and knives, with the former usually winning.
Growing sectarian tensions during the 1980s and 1990s led to waves of violence in which armed gangs killed tens of thousands, including many local politicians working in cities such as Karachi or Peshawar. State violence too soared, with soldiers and security forces turning their weapons on citizens in the name of protecting the country from subversion. Some irregular armed militia were used as proxies by security services to prosecute their own agendas, at home and abroad.
Inevitably, the waves of violence surged ever higher. In the years after the 9/11 attacks in the US, plotted by al-Qaida in neighbouring Afghanistan, there were battles, bombings and assassinations across much of Pakistan as security forces fought those Islamist extremist factions whose activities were deemed to threaten the country, or at least its elites. As ever, most victims were ordinary civilians or soldiers caught in the crossfire, but one was Benazir Bhutto, the charismatic daughter of ZA Bhutto.
A two-term prime minister who was one of the most famous politicians in the world, Bhutto survived a massive suicide bombing in Karachi while campaigning for re-election 2007 but died after being shot at a rally in Rawalpindi. Her death sent shock waves around the world and led to fierce criticism of Pakistani authorities, which had failed to provide adequate security. Her killer or killers remain unidentified.
The man in charge at the time of Bhutto’s death – Gen Pervez Musharraf – also faced repeated assassination attempts. One involved a bomb exploding under a bridge as his car drove over it. Musharraf survived but was forced to step down in 2008.
The killings have not stopped in recent years. In 2011, Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian who was the minister for minority affairs, was assassinated in Islamabad. A coalition of hardline Islamist groups claimed responsibility. The same year Salman Taseer, a liberal businessman who was governor of the province of Punjab, was shot dead by a bodyguard. Taseer and Bhatti had both been critical of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which are often used to target religious minorities, and supporters of a vision of a pluralist Pakistan where all faiths and communities could coexist peaceably.
“One reason for the political violence is that the killers have impunity,” said Bennett-Jones, the author of a book on the Bhutto dynasty. “Assassins know that they will not go to prison if they have sufficient political backing.”
Though homicide statistics show a consistent decline, few are convinced that the violence that has marked politics and society in Pakistan for so long is falling. Analysts warn that “a period of relative peace has yielded to a new era of sectarian conflict” while regional tensions have been stoked by the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. There are reports of a new “epidemic of gender-based violence” and polarised politics has left the country a “tinderbox”. Pakistan may well be one of the most dangerous nations in the world, but more for its own citizens than any foreign observer thousands of miles away.
