Once he criticised war — now Imran’s silence condones it

At the turn of the millennium, a younger Imran Khan protested against Russia’s brutal second war on Chechnya.

As supporters of his three-year-old Tehreek-e-Insaf political party chanted “death to Russia” in 1999, the former cricketer and playboy delivered a letter to the United Nations office in Islamabad, saying the Pakistani people condemned “the complete apathy and indifference towards the plight of the innocent Chechens who are being systematically annihilated by the Russians”.

Vladimir Putin, then Boris Yeltsin’s prime minister, oversaw the destruction of the Chechen capital, Grozny. The extreme violence then meted out to civilians in the rebellious republic is now being replicated across Ukraine as frustrated Russian forces pound cities such as Kharkiv and Mariupol.

This time Khan is on the other side. Amid rising tensions on February 23, hours before President Putin launched his bloody invasion, Khan landed in Moscow, the first Pakistani prime minister to visit in more than two decades. “What a time I have come,” he exclaimed as he walked along the red carpet leading to the airport terminal, a brass band in the background. “So much excitement!”

Russian state media broadcast images of Khan and Putin shaking hands the following day, shortly after Putin gave a televised address announcing his “special military operation” in Ukraine. A few days later Khan unveiled bilateral trade deals under which Pakistan will buy natural gas and wheat from Russia, saying he and Putin had “great discussions”.

Critics saw it as the latest confused and reactionary gambit by a man who once posed for a tabloid newspaper in satin briefs and now rails against the evils of the West. Last year, as Kabul fell to the Taliban after the shambolic withdrawal of American and British troops from Afghanistan, Khan saluted the Islamists for breaking “the shackles of slavery”. Some commentators suggested his Putin visit was an attempt to play on anti-western sentiment as he faces a no-confidence movement less than 18 months before the next Pakistani general election.

Others pointed out the entente was part of a broader shift. Pakistan, aligned with the US against the Soviet Union for much of the Cold War, has drifted from its old sponsor since 9/11. Mistrust has grown on both sides. The US has suspected that Pakistan has had it both ways — receiving western support money while providing shelter to the Taliban — while Pakistan has become bitter about the price it has paid in America’s war on terror, including through CIA drone strikes in the northeast of the country.

A journalist who knows Khan said: “They gave Pakistan a civil war for ten years — it was represented as terrorism, but it was a civil war. Then, having done all that, they ditched Pakistan. It’s kind of heartbreaking. America and Britain just dumped on them and walked away and backed India. Pakistan has no choice but to go to Russia and China, strategically.”

The USSR invested in Pakistan in the 1960s and 1970s, helping set up the Oil and Gas Development Company and Pakistan Steel Mills. But it supported India in the India-Pakistan war over what is now Bangladesh in 1971 and, having signed a “peace and friendship” treaty with Delhi, proceeded to supply India with billions of dollars’ worth of arms. The USSR voted against UN resolutions tabled by Pakistan on the Bangladesh situation; Pakistan sided with the US during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Relations thawed in 2003 when the Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf made a trip to Moscow. In 2007 the Russian prime minister Mikhail Fradkov visited Pakistan and in 2011 Putin endorsed Pakistan’s bid to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, an alliance formed by five original members including China and Russia in 1996. The centrepiece of Russian-Pakistani collaboration, announced in 2014, is the proposed Pakistan Stream Gas Pipeline, a Russian-built conduit that will transport liquefied natural gas from the southern port of Karachi to Punjab in the north.

The pivot to Russia and China fits Khan’s world view. In his 2011 book Pakistan — part autobiography, part manifesto — the aspiring prime minister said the “greatest damage done to the people of the Indian subcontinent was in the humiliation of slavery and the consequent loss of self-esteem” inflicted by colonialism.

He described the war on terror as “insane” and said he was “dismayed by the West’s refusal to try and understand the root causes of the religious fanaticism that had been growing for years in the Muslim world, fuelled by injustices against Muslims in Kashmir, Chechnya, Bosnia, Palestine and other places”.

He has increasingly presented himself as ascetic and patriotic since his divorce from Jemima Khan, with whom he has two sons, in 2004. In the run-up to the 2018 Pakistani election, Khan told this newspaper that English-speaking “liberals” who supported Nato’s war on the Taliban were “thirsty for blood”.

 “They have absolutely no idea,” he said. “They sit in the drawing room. They read the English-language newspapers, which bear very little resemblance to what is real Pakistan. I promise you, they would be lost in our villages.”

It is difficult to reconcile this Khan with the tousle-haired heartthrob who dated a string of beautiful women in 1980s and 1990s London. A Vanity Fair article in May 2000 said his “lady friends” had included Goldie Hawn, the artist Emma Sergeant, the actress Stephanie Beacham, the fashion guru Susannah Constantine, Lady Liza Campbell and the German MTV presenter Kristiane Backer. “Women flung themselves at him like lemmings going off a cliff,” his friend Jonathan Mermagen told the magazine.

Khan was educated at Lahore’s Aitchison College and the Royal Grammar School in Worcester, where he finished his studies while playing for Worcestershire county cricket club. He became known as a socialite at Oxford, then returned to Pakistan, where he secured a place in the national cricket team. His skill as a fast bowler bagged him the captaincy of the Pakistan team in 1982 and 362 Test wickets in total.

The Vanity Fair portrait, published two years before his election to Pakistan’s National Assembly, captured his turn towards seriousness. It depicted him and a shalwar kameez-clad Jemima living in squalid conditions while Khan declared he would not compromise on his political “vision”. The press mocked his ambition, dubbing him “Im the Dim”. But in 2018, amid allegations of vote-rigging, he finally got there. Now aged 69, he faces a battle for re-election.

Pakistan and India’s stances on Russia have unsettled the West. Both abstained from a non-binding resolution at the UN General Assembly that demanded Russia withdraw troops from Ukraine. Both have avoided criticising Putin. But Khan has come under more pressure than the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi.

This month, the ambassadors of 22 EU countries, plus Britain, Canada, Japan, Norway and Switzerland, issued an open statement urging Pakistan to condemn Russia’s actions.

Khan’s response at a rally in Punjab last week showed he is not for turning. Pakistan’s relationship with Ukraine may be more complicated than headlines portray: last year, it awarded the country an $85 million (£65 million) contract to modernise T-80UD tanks bought from Kyiv in the 1990s. But Khan was not going to be told what to do by the West. “What do you think of us?” he shouted. “Are we your slaves, that whatever you say, we will do?”