America Looks Away as Pakistan’s Imran Khan Goes Blind Behind Bars

The Islamabad High Court ordered prison authorities on September 1 to let a former prime minister, Imran Khan, meet his jailed wife, speak by phone with his two sons in Britain, and gain access to exercise, television, and books. It was a small mercy for a 73-year-old former cricket star who, his party says, has been held in near-total isolation since 2023.It is a matter on which the White House has had little to say, despite a reportedly warm meeting with President Trump at the White House in July 2019 in which Khan offered to help America wind down its war in Afghanistan.Where the Biden administration waved away Mr. Khan’s subsequent claims of American meddling in Indian politics, the current administration has spent the past year courting the men who jailed him by hosting Field Marshal Asim Munir for a private White House lunch; striking rare-earth mineral deals; and welcoming Field Marshal Munir back to the Oval Office months later.As Washington inches closer to Islamabad, Khan’s imprisonment, and the health decline that has come with it, is no longer a story it can hold at a distance.For more than three years, Khan has insisted from behind bars that his ouster as prime minister in April 2022 was not simply a defeat in Pakistan’s parliament but a foreign-engineered coup, carried out with American blessing.Washington, at the time under President Biden, dismissed the claim as a conspiracy theory, and Pakistan’s own National Security Committee found no evidence to support it. A classified cable at the center of the dispute has since surfaced in full, and a spokesman close to Khan says it aligns more with his version of events than with Washington’s denials.“Mr. Khan has endured prolonged imprisonment, isolation, legal pressure, and serious concern over his eyesight — yet the military state has not broken his will, his voice, or his connection to the Pakistani people and the diaspora. That is the essential truth,” a spokesman for Khan, Salman Ahmad, tells The New York Sun.Can a White House that is courting Pakistan’s generals still claim to have no stake in what happens to the man they are holding?A Cable That Settles LittleThe document, known as Cable I-0678, was published in full in May by the investigative outlet Drop Site News, which said it obtained the unredacted original after portions first leaked to The Intercept in 2023. It records a March 7, 2022, meeting at Washington between Pakistan’s then-ambassador, Asad Majeed Khan, and Donald Lu, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs. Mr. Lu is said to have told the ambassador that Washington’s grievances with Pakistan would disappear if Khan were removed through a no-confidence vote in the parliament. Pakistan, he added, risked isolation from the United States and Europe if the vote failed. Ambassador Khan cabled home his own assessment: Mr. Lu, he wrote, could not have delivered such a forceful message without approval from the White House.The State Department has not disputed the cable’s authenticity but has declined to engage, insisting it is “a matter for the Pakistani people to decide.”That ambiguity is not, in itself, telling, according to a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani. “The U.S. does not, as a rule, comment on any leaked documents about communications between its diplomats and diplomats of other countries,” Mr. Haqqani, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, tells the Sun. “This exchange of views does not represent an announcement of a conspiracy or a coup.”The skepticism goes further.“The cable never demonstrated much of anything, other than that Washington was irritated by Pakistan’s stance on Russia, and that was no secret,” a senior fellow in the South Asia program at the Stimson Center, Daniel Markey, tells the Sun. “The cable certainly doesn’t show that Washington pushed IK out the door.”He doubts Washington will revisit the matter.“A lot of water has flowed under the bridge,” Mr. Markey continues. “I don’t see any reason that Washington would be likely to take up the IK issue now.”The rupture in United States-Pakistan relations, in any case, did not begin with the cable. In June 2021, the then-director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns, sought the use of Pakistani territory for American drone operations against Afghanistan; Khan’s office said he would speak only with President Biden directly, Mr. Biden declined, and Mr. Burns left without the basing rights he sought.Eight months later, on the day Russian forces crossed into Ukraine, Khan was in Moscow meeting President Vladimir Putin, and Pakistan soon abstained from a United Nations resolution condemning the invasion. Khan was removed by a no-confidence vote on April 9, 2022, by 174 votes to zero.The government that succeeded him reversed nearly every position that Khan had taken, supplying artillery shells to Ukraine through American contractors and securing Washington’s backing for a $3 billion International Monetary Fund arrangement in July 2023.A Body Failing Behind BarsKhan was repeatedly convicted on controversial corruption charges over the next 18 months while his wife, Bushra Bibi, received a seven-year sentence in one of the cases. Each was later handed an additional 17-year sentence over the alleged sale of state gifts. She is jailed alongside him at Adiala, and both maintain the prosecutions were political retribution for his refusal to bend to Islamabad’s and Washington’s will.Khan’s eyesight has become a symbol of that imprisonment. Court filings say the former prime minister has lost most of the vision in his right eye due to a blood clot behind the retina, a condition his lawyers say went untreated for months. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Alice Edwards, has characterized his solitary confinement as inhumane, and said it may amount to torture.Human rights groups have taken up his case in growing numbers. Two outside bodies have now weighed in on his case. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded in 2024 that Khan’s imprisonment breaks international law. Last month, timed to the third anniversary of his detention, Amnesty International called on Islamabad to end Khan’s solitary confinement and let his family see him. By the group’s count, he had gone eight months without a visit and, since December, without reliable access to a lawyer.Khan’s party and relatives describe conditions that have grown increasingly harsh. His son Kasim says his father is confined to a cell for more than 23 hours a day and went six weeks this year with no contact from his family at all, a stretch he called a “death cell.”Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered Khan to be moved to a private Islamabad hospital on August 18 for treatment through mid-September, with a medical board of eye, heart, and internal-medicine specialists. Instead, Mr. Ahmad tells the Sun, he was taken before dawn on August 21 to a government-run facility, examined overnight, declared medically fit, and returned to Adiala Jail.“That was not compliance; it was a gross violation of the Supreme Court’s order,” he says.Kasim Khan has separately told Sky Sports’s Mike Atherton that Pakistani authorities “want to kill my father.” Twenty-one former international cricket captains — Khan captained Pakistan to its only World Cup title in 1992 — have written to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif appealing for his dignified treatment.Geopolitics, Not GrievanceTo Mr. Haqqani, the human cost isn’t in question.“Imran Khan’s imprisonment and health crisis are morally wrong and reflect an injustice,” he insists, arguing that Washington rarely lets morality drive its choices about which foreign prisoners to support.“There are several opposition figures in prison around the world, and the U.S. has supported or ignored them based on its geopolitical interests, not the morality of the issue,” Mr. Haqqani says.If anything, the diplomatic wind has shifted further from Khan since he left office.“U.S.-Pakistan relations seem to have become stronger under President Trump, who seems to like Pakistan’s current strongman,” Mr. Haqqani says, referring to Field Marshal Munir.He expects Khan’s followers to keep believing that Washington engineered his downfall regardless.“Belief in conspiracy theories in Pakistan is long-standing and rampant,” he says. “It has often not affected the relations between the governments of the two countries.”Khan, meanwhile, has reportedly told his sister he holds the former army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, responsible for his removal, and that Field Marshal Munir wants him dead, according to Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper. Mr. Ahmad puts it in personal terms.“Asim Munir’s ‘God complex’ has made this into a battle between two men. There is one grave and two bodies. Who will blink first? No one knows,” he tells the Sun.Mr. Khan has told his family exactly where he stands, Mr. Ahmad says, paraphrasing his message as, “Give my people freedom, or give me death.”

America Looks Away as Pakistan’s Imran Khan Goes Blind Behind Bars

America Looks Away as Pakistan’s Imran Khan Goes Blind Behind Bars

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