Center for Middle East Policy

[Shehbaz Sharif] is seen as someone who gets things done. [Whether Sharif will choose to be in power for a year and then hold elections, or call early elections is] a big question. We don’t know yet. [Sharif is known to have a good relationship with military leaders, and he’s not a figure likely to antagonize them but] he’s never held national office before, other than being a leader of the opposition for the last three years, so this is going to be a test for him.

[After Imran Khan veered from military leaders’ foreign policy priorities and clashed with them over major military appointments, they helped orchestrate his fall]. This fits into the larger historical arc of a civilian government losing favor with the establishment, that is Pakistan’s military, and that leads to their ouster from office. Just the mechanisms through which things are happening now are different because of constitutional changes made over the years to guard against the establishment.

[More recently, the relationship between the military and Khan has worsened, and that gave the political opposition an opening to act against him.] This is part of a larger history of instability in Pakistan in which prime ministers are ousted from power, because they lose the support of Pakistan’s military. [President Joe Biden did not phone Khan in his initial days in office, though he did call the leader of India, Pakistan’s chief rival.] The Biden administration’s cold shoulder to Imran Khan rubbed him the wrong way. Pakistan has just fallen off a little bit of the radar in terms of high-level engagement.