LEAKED: The United States Government Helped Orchestrate Coup Against Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan
Jose Nino
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According to a recently published diplomatic cable by The Intercept, the United States government was responsible for removing former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan from office in April 2022. Khan himself produced a document during a public rally last year making these allegations of the US conducting a secret campaign to remove him from power.
Khan was ousted from office via a no confidence vote by the National Assembly in April 2022. Moreover, the most revealing information that came out of this document was the fact that Khan’s relatively neutral position on the Ukraine war was the main factor prompting the US to remove him from office
“The US State Department encouraged the Pakistani government in a March 7, 2022, meeting to remove Imran Khan as prime minister over his neutrality on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to a classified Pakistani government document obtained by The Intercept,” per the August 9, 2023 report.
The secret diplomatic cable also discussed the critical meeting with the US delegation that occurred in the lead-up to Khan’s removal from power. The Intercept highlighted the following:
The meeting, between the Pakistani ambassador to the United States and two State Department officials, has been the subject of intense scrutiny, controversy, and speculation in Pakistan over the past year and a half, as supporters of Khan and his military and civilian opponents jockeyed for power. The political struggle escalated on August 5 when Khan was sentenced to three years in prison on corruption charges and taken into custody for the second time since his ouster. Khan’s defenders dismiss the charges as baseless. The sentence also blocks Khan, Pakistan’s most popular politician, from contesting elections expected in Pakistan later this year.
One month after the meeting with U.S. officials documented in the leaked Pakistani government document, a no-confidence vote was held in Parliament, leading to Khan’s removal from power. The vote is believed to have been organized with the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military. Since that time, Khan and his supporters have been engaged in a struggle with the military and its civilian allies, whom Khan claims engineered his removal from power at the request of the U.S.
The exact timing of this important meeting had major implications owing to how it occurred less than two weeks following then-PM Khan’s visit to Moscow on February 24, the very day that Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine kicked off.
The March 7th meeting featured Pakistan’s then-ambassador to the US, Asad Majeed, and Donald Lu, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. Per the diplomatic cable, during these discussions Lu claimed that the US and European allies were “quite concerned” about Khan’s visit to Moscow and Pakistan having taken an “aggressively neutral position” on the Russo-Ukrainian conflict under the helm of Khan.
“People here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine), if such a position is even possible. It does not seem such a neutral stand to us,” Lu stated in the meeting. He continued: “it seems quite clear that this is the Prime Minister’s policy,” per the cable The Intercept alluded to.
The secret cable had the following shocking information:
“I think if a no-confidence vote against the prime minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the prime minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead,” Lu is alleged to have told Majeed, who sent the details of the conversation in the “cypher” to Islamabad.
The Intercept subsequently detailed, “One month after the meeting with US officials documented in the leaked Pakistani government document, a no-confidence vote was held in Parliament, leading to Khan’s removal from power.”
Thus far, the Biden regime has described Khan’s recent arrest as an “internal matter” and has labeled allegations that the US government launched a coup against Khan as “false.” In a daily press briefing on August 9, the State Department proclaimed that the Us government wasn’t involved in any conspiracy to oust Khan, despite the leaked cable’s revelations.
The revelations from this cable have gone viral across the Pakistani and Indian media ecosystem. These leaks will likely spur additional pro-Khan protests as he was recently taken into custody and is now facing jail time.
Indeed, the US Deep State is a chaos agent. There’s no part of the globe that it doesn’t see as a potential zone for foreign policy interventionism. Any country that dares deviate from Washington’s foreign policy strictures will simply be subjected to regime change.
That’s how foreign policy operates in a universalist polity such as the US. Unfortunately, such behavior will only continue with the neocon/neoliberal cabal still in power. Only a nationalist coup against this foreign policy class will bring back a sense of normalcy to American foreign policy.
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