As the command of the Pakistan Army changes, so do the PTI’s expectations of the military establishment.
ISLAMABAD: As the command of the Pakistan Army changes, so do the PTI’s expectations of the military establishment.
Senior PTI leader Fawad Chaudhry said we are not asking the new establishment to bring us early elections. Still, we expect them to remain politically neutral, not take sides and not block the polls.
Asked whether the PTI and its chairman Imran Khan would also expect new army chief General Asim Munir to use his influence for early elections, Fawad Chaudhry said: “No, we don’t. Instead, Chaudhry hopes the establishment will not stand in the way of early elections.
He said that politically, the military establishment should not take sides. He insisted that the PTI would handle the early elections, for which it had decided to dissolve the Punjab and KPK assemblies and withdraw from all other bodies.
Fawad Chaudhry also referred to Asad Umar’s tweet in which the latter said that the top priority of Gen. Asim Munira should be the restoration of the relationship of love and respect between the people and the military high command. Asad Umar added that such a relationship could neither be one-sided nor be maintained through force or coercive means. In his tweet, Asad Umar said that the decisions of the last eight months have severely damaged the bond between the people and the army’s high command. The PTI leader concluded that the armed forces that defend the country continue to be the nation’s pride.
Fawad Chaudhry, when asked about the PTI’s position on the amendments to the Armed Forces Act 2020, which allow for the extension to the Chief of Defense Forces, said that the PTI was in favor of repealing the legislation. He guaranteed that his party would support any such move started by anybody. Since the retirement of General Qamar Javed Bajwa and the overthrow of the Imran Khan government, the PTI has consistently pressured the military establishment under General Bajwa to remove the present government and cover the way for early elections. During Imran Khan’s rule, Bajwa, PTI’s darling and highly praised army chief, was made the villain for not defeating the no-confidence motion against Khan’s government in April this year.
In repeated interviews during his premiership, Khan praised Gen Bajwa, who allegedly facilitated Imran Khan’s victory in the 2018 elections through political engineering. Gen Bajwa, who was appointed as army chief by Nawaz Sharif in 2016, was given a three-year term by Imran Khan in 2019 extension. Later, after the Supreme Court’s controversial intervention, Parliament, with the support of PTI, PMLN, PPP, and other parties, except JUI-F and Jamaat-i-Islami, introduced legislative provisions to expand the functions of service chiefs.
Across the political spectrum, there is growing recognition that a law allowing service chief tenure extensions is doing more harm than good. Many in the ruling coalition also want to repeal the law and set a non-renewable three-year term for defense chiefs. A PMLN leader recently told this correspondent that the 2020 Act would be abolished at the right time.
