Imran Khan, the leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and a former prime minister of Pakistan, said on Tuesday that General Qamar Javed Bajwa should not stay in office until the next round of elections.
The leader of the PTI said that his only idea was to put off naming the army chief until after new elections. Geo News says that he suggested that the newly elected government choose the army chief based only on their qualifications.
In a speech to a private TV channel the day before, the former prime minister had asked that the next military head not be chosen until the new government is in place. The new government would then choose the next military head.
In a meeting with the media, Khan is said to have said, “I never talked about extending the army chief’s term. I just suggested waiting to name the army chief until after the upcoming elections.”
During the meeting, the former prime minister said that the newly elected government should pick the army chief based on how good he or she is. He also said that he had never said who should lead the military.
Khan also said that the heads of the armed forces should never be chosen by the Sharif and Zardari families. Khan said, “I didn’t say anything to get Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) to say something.”
Geo News says that Khan decided in September to tell the country to fight against the government.
He was fired in April because of how often he talked about the army leader. Since then, he has been in the news.
Earlier this month, the PTI leader spoke out against the government at a public rally in Faisalabad. He said that the government was delaying the elections so that it could choose its own army chief and that if a “patriotic chief of army staff comes in, he will not spare the current rulers.”
The former prime minister complained about how the floods in Pakistan have hurt the country. He said that the floods in 2010 and the floods happening now have caused a lot of damage, especially in Sindh.
He said that the floods would hurt the economy during the winter. Tell me, please, if they have an answer. Your ability to lend money is going down because exports are going down, loans are going up, and remittances are going down.
Khan said, “The economy is shrinking, and unemployment is rising.” He also said that inflation of 27.3% in August was the highest it had ever been in Pakistan’s history, and that this had never happened before.
