In 2023 the army looked outgunned online by Imran Khan’s digital army. A war with India, two constitutional amendments and a jailed leader later, the battlefield has changed, but the rift has not closed
In May 2023, days after supporters of Imran Khan attacked military installations following his arrest, the analyst Arif Rafiq argued that Pakistan’s political crisis had “gone viral”. Khan’s ouster in a parliamentary vote in April 2022 had, he wrote, carried the country’s oldest power struggle onto TikTok, YouTube and X, into the corridors of the US Congress and onto the streets of London’s Mayfair. The army, long dominant over both politics and the information space, was on the defensive in a way it had not been for more than a decade. His prediction was blunt: the army would win the battle but lose the war.
Three and a half years later, it is worth asking how that judgement has held up. The short answer is that the army has won far more than a battle. Whether it has also secured the peace is a different question, and one that Pakistan cannot afford to get wrong.
The state’s counteroffensive
Rafiq was right that a crackdown was coming. Khan has been in prison since August 2023. Some convictions have since been suspended or overturned, including the cipher case in 2024, but others have accumulated: in December 2025 he and his wife were sentenced to 17 years in the second Toshakhana case, and he was handed 14 years in the Al-Qadir Trust case. He faces scores of other cases. His health has become a running dispute, with his lawyers reporting severe loss of vision in one eye earlier this year and the Supreme Court ordering hospital evaluations in August.
The February 2024 general election did not break the deadlock. Candidates backed by Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), forced to run as independents after losing their party symbol, won the largest bloc of seats, but a coalition led by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz formed the government. PTI says the vote was rigged; the government and election commission reject that.
Then came the constitutional architecture. The 26th Amendment in 2024 reshaped the judiciary’s top tier. Service chiefs’ terms were extended to five years. In November 2025 the 27th Amendment created the post of Chief of Defence Forces, to which Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir was appointed in December while remaining army chief, a consolidation of authority that supporters call necessary for modern warfare and critics call unprecedented in a civilian-led system. The Lahore Times has examined how Munir has consolidated his role amid praise and criticism.
The information domain was regulated too. X was blocked for more than a year from February 2024. In January 2025, amendments to the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act created new offences for spreading “false” information and a social media regulatory authority, which rights groups such as Amnesty International warned could be used against dissent and the government defended as necessary to curb disinformation.
The war that changed the conversation
The single biggest change Rafiq could not have foreseen came in May 2025, when India launched strikes on Pakistan after an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir that Islamabad denied any role in. In four days of fighting, the information war turned outward. The army, and especially the air force, became heroes online. X was quietly restored as hostilities flared, and the military openly thanked its “cyber and information warriors”. Young Pakistanis who had spent two years mocking the establishment in memes were suddenly sharing clips celebrating it.
That moment matters for a Pakistani reading of this story. The 2023 essay described ISPR’s claims of “fifth-generation warfare” from India as largely a cover for battles at home. After May 2025, few in Pakistan doubt that a real narrative war with India exists; Indian channels’ coverage of that conflict, and Pakistan’s own efforts to counter Indian narratives, have made that plain. The weakness is that Pakistan still too often asserts rather than documents its case, a point this newspaper has argued in calling on the state to prove its allegations of Indian-sponsored terrorism with evidence the world can test.
The national mood after the conflict gave the army a reservoir of public goodwill it had not enjoyed since before 2022. Munir’s elevation to field marshal and the government’s warmer ties with Washington, Riyadh and Gulf capitals all drew on it.
The rift that remains
Yet the polarisation Rafiq described has not gone away. It has gone quiet, or underground. PTI’s street power has repeatedly fizzled, most recently this month, when the federal government imposed an emergency and governor’s rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on October 11, citing the provincial government’s disengagement from counter-terrorism. Chief Minister Sohail Afridi and other leaders were detained, mobile services were cut in Swabi, and the planned march on Islamabad stalled before it began. PTI called it “a coup disguised as emergency”; the government says it acted to protect security in a province facing the worst militant violence in a decade. Even Punjab’s PML-N housing minister, Bilal Yasin, called the emergency unfortunate and no cause for celebration, though he blamed the former provincial leadership for the rise in militancy.
Online, Khan remains the most-followed Pakistani politician, and his supporters remain loud on platforms that the state can slow but not switch off. The YouTube channels of journalists who left mainstream television, and of retired officers critical of the establishment, still draw large audiences, many of them viewers in their teens and twenties who have never known a Pakistan without smartphones.
The diaspora test
Rafiq’s most striking prediction was that Pakistan’s diaspora would come to resemble Iranian émigrés lobbying against the Islamic Republic. Parts of that came true. Diaspora lobbying helped secure a US congressional hearing on Pakistani democracy in March 2024, and more than 60 Democratic lawmakers urged the Biden administration to press for Khan’s release.
But the diaspora’s money tells a different story. When Khan urged overseas Pakistanis to stop sending remittances, they sent more: workers’ remittances reached a record $41.6 billion in the 2025-26 fiscal year, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE leading. The government courted expatriates directly with an Overseas Pakistanis Convention in April 2025, and Washington’s relationship with Islamabad warmed under President Donald Trump. Emigration, meanwhile, has continued at a high pace, with about three million Pakistanis leaving in five years, which the army chief described as “brain gain” and critics as brain drain.
Winning the battle, and the peace
So was Rafiq wrong? On the battle, he underestimated how decisively the state could reassert control, and he could not have predicted a war that rallied the public behind the military. On the war, the verdict is still open.
From a Pakistani perspective, the case for stability is strong. The country faces more than 200 militant attacks a month, an economy that only recently pulled back from default, and a youth bulge that needs jobs far more than hashtags. A state consumed by an internal information war cannot fight terrorism or reform the economy effectively.
But stability built mainly on detentions, internet shutdowns and constitutional engineering is brittle. The questions this newspaper has raised about a justice system that moves at different speeds for the powerful and the powerless apply to politics too. Millions of young Pakistanis who voted for Khan in 2024 have not changed their minds because their candidate is in prison. They have simply learned to be quieter.
The lesson of the past three years is not that the army lost the war, nor that it has definitively won it. It is that neither side can eliminate the other. A negotiated political settlement, one that brings PTI back into parliamentary politics, guarantees due process for its leader and accepts the military’s legitimate security role while keeping it out of electoral politics, remains the only route to the kind of stability Pakistan needs.
Pakistan has been through versions of this cycle before. The viral phase of its political crisis may have passed. The crisis itself has not.
This article revisits and updates arguments first made by analyst Arif Rafiq in his May 2023 titled: “Pakistan’s Political Crisis Goes Viral”. Arif Rafiq (@arifcrafiq) is president of Vizier Consulting, LLC, a political risk advisory company focused on the Middle East and South Asia, and a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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