Welcome to the President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States.

I'm Jim Lindsay, Director's Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This week's topic is crises in Pakistan.

With me to discuss the political economic and climate crises roiling Pakistan is Sadanun Duma. Sadan is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

with a focus on South Asian political economy, foreign policy, business, and society.

For more than a decade, he has been a South Asia columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

His most recent column is titled Imran Khan's Arrest, the Army, and Pakistan's perennial crisis.

Sadanan, thank you for joining me.

Great to join you.

I want to start by acknowledging that Pakistan is in the midst of multiple crises,

and I'd like to begin with the most visible and immediate one,

which is the showdown between former Prime Minister Imran Khan and the Pakistani military. This is a fluid and possibly

volatile situation. As we are sitting down to talk, Pakistani police are about to begin

searching Imran Khan's home with his permission in the search for potential suspects wanted in recent anti-government violence.

And I was just wondering if, just to start, you could help us understand why it is that the former

Prime Minister is squaring off against the government he led until a little over a year ago.

Yeah. So I described this in another recent column as a clash between Pakistan's most popular leader

and its most powerful institution.

The army, as many of your listeners would know, has dominated Pakistani politics since the creation

of Pakistan in 1947.

It's ruled the country directly for about 33 years and indirectly for most of the rest. And what's ironic about this

confrontation is that when Imran Khan came to power in 2018, he was widely seen as the army's

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