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Hello, you're very welcome to Long Reads, a Jacopan podcast where we look in

depth at political topics and thinkers. My name is Daniel Finn and the features editor here at

Jacopan and I'll be presenting the show. Since the late 1990s, Pakistan has experienced

several rounds of intense political turbulence. But the crisis unfolding today may be the most

dramatic episode to date. The ousted Prime Minister Imran Khan has refused to go quietly and

his supporters are challenging the powerful military establishment. Khan himself survived an

assassination attempt last November. I guess today for a conversation about Pakistani politics is

Ayaz Malik. He's a lecturer in human geography at the University of Liverpool.

What was the political situation in Pakistan at the beginning of this century when the US launched

its so-called war on terror after the 9-11 attacks? Okay, so I think we can kind of disaggregate

this situation into three aspects. One is the political itself, the second is the economic,

and the third is the ideological. So I'll go through each of these very briefly. At the political

level, at the start of the century, we have the military dictatorship of General Musharraf,

which comes into power through a coup in 1999 on the back of a decade of seesaw between

civilian governments, between different civilian parties and in the background with the military

acting in the background. Now this dictatorship of General Musharraf doesn't really have a lot

of legitimacy neither nationally or from the usual imperial patrons which have patronized

...