Pakistan’s security establishment often claims it has moved beyond the excesses of its past. Yet the campaign unfolding against Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) points in the opposite direction. A familiar playbook—updated, quieter, and more calibrated—is once again being used to discipline a mass political movement that refuses to fall in line.
This assessment does not rest on conspiracy theories or a single dramatic episode. It draws instead from Pakistan’s own record of intelligence-led political manipulation, most clearly seen in the dismantling of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) in Karachi, and now increasingly mirrored in the treatment of PTI at the national level.
Breaking Parties Without Banning Them
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The fragmentation of MQM was never declared official policy. Still, journalists, human-rights groups, and former officials have long described it as a classic case of political engineering: a popular urban party weakened not through electoral defeat, but through engineered splits, selective coercion, and the promotion of compliant alternatives.
Operation Clean-up in June 1992 established the template. MQM’s leadership was pursued, its organizational structure dismantled, and its street power neutralised. At the same time, a breakaway faction was permitted to function with visible state tolerance. Human-rights reporting from that period noted the asymmetry clearly—one faction faced relentless force, the other effective protection.
The signal was unmistakable. Defiance would be punished; compliance would be rewarded. Electoral democracy remained formally intact, but real political choice was narrowed under military supervision.
That same logic resurfaced in August 2016 after Altaf Hussain’s controversial speech. The MQM was swiftly reconfigured through media blackouts, selective policing, and official recognition of a new, “acceptable” leadership. The party endured in name, but its independence did not.
At no stage did the ISI publicly acknowledge involvement. It rarely does. In Pakistan, political engineering is rarely admitted; it is inferred from outcomes.
PTI and the Normalization of Repression
What PTI is now facing follows this pattern, expanded nationwide.
Since Imran Khan’s removal from office and subsequent imprisonment, the party has been subjected to mass arrests, prolonged legal pressure, media exclusion, and sustained efforts to fracture its leadership. While these actions are formally attributed to civilian authorities, their coordination, timing, and political selectivity point to a more organized design.
The military trial of former ISI chief Lt Gen Faiz Hamid has also been widely read as part of this broader recalibration—weakening PTI’s autonomous leadership while creating space for figures deemed more manageable within the existing order.
Most telling is the encouragement of internal division.
Senior PTI leaders calling for “dialogue” and accommodation with the military-backed political framework are allowed room to operate. Grassroots leaders, especially in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, who continue to push for protest and resistance face sharper repression. Some voices are quietly rehabilitated; others vanish from television screens, party tickets, and electoral contests.
Political relevance, once again, appears conditional.
As with MQM, the aim is not outright elimination but containment, to mold PTI into a party that can participate in elections without challenging the military’s primacy in civilian politics.
Why This Should Alarm World
Supporters of the establishment argue that PTI’s confrontational politics justify extraordinary measures. Similar claims were once made about MQM. The outcome was not stability, but institutional erosion, political alienation, and prolonged urban unrest.
If democratic stability were the objective, manipulation would not be the chosen tool. If the rule of law were the priority, enforcement would not hinge on political alignment. What emerges instead is a system designed to discipline voters as much as politicians.
Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state of more than 240 million people. A political order in which the country’s most popular party can be weakened through coercion rather than defeated at the ballot box is not resilient, it is fragile.
Karachi lived with the consequences for decades. Pakistan as a whole now risks repeating that experience.
Until the military and the ISI withdraw from civilian politics in practice rather than rhetoric, MQM will remain a warning—and PTI will not be the last casualty. Democracy will remain incomplete, and the country will continue to oscillate between hybrid rule and overt military dominance.
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