ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Defense Khawaja Asif said on Wednesday a “sense of anxiety” created by months of political turmoil and anti-government protests would be eliminated when a new army chief was announced later this week.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif is poised to appoint a new army chief as Pakistan is in the grips of an intense political crisis, with the party of ex-PM Imran Khan leading a protest march to the capital that started from the eastern city of Lahore on Oct. 28.
The country was plunged into fresh turmoil earlier this month when Khan, who is calling on Sharif to immediately resign and call fresh elections, survived an assassination attempt during firing at his protest march.
Khan is sitting out the protests while he recovers but is expected to again join the march on Islamabad on Nov. 26, according to his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party. Even before launching his protest march last month, Khan has been holding anti-government rallies across Pakistan since his ouster in a parliamentary vote on no-confidence in April.
“I don't want to speculate but the sense of anxiety that has been there for the last few months, not even weeks but months, when this issue [of the appointment] is settled in a day or two … because of this the sense of anxiety will be eliminated,” Asif told reporters when asked if the march might be called off after the new chief’s appointment.
He added that PM Sharif was traveling to Turkey on Friday evening and would make his selection before that.
The current chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, has been the head of the army since 2016 and received an extension in service in 2019. He will retire on November 29.
Amid widespread speculation in Pakistani media and public over who would be appointed the new army chief, the Prime Minister’s Office on Wednesday received from the ministry of defense the names of the top contenders for the post, as the government moves to vet nominations for arguably the most powerful office in the country.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif will pick a chief from among the six names suggested by the army, and will subsequently advice the president to appoint him as army chief. As per the rules, the president has to approve the PM’s advise on the appointment on the same day.
When asked by reporters if President Dr Arif Alvi, a close Khan ally, would cooperate with the PM on the appointment, Asif said:
“The duties of the president or the prime minister, they should take decisions in the best interest of the nation … there should be no political consideration in this.”
Asif said that the government would take its coalition partners as the federal cabinet into confidence before announcing the name of the new army chief.
Among the main contenders for the army chief’s post are Lieutenants-Generals Asim Munir, the army’s quartermaster general, Azhar Abbas, the chief of general staff, Nauman Mahmood, president of the National Defense University, and Faiz Hameed, the former chief of Pakistan’s premier Inter-Services Intelligence agency and currently the commander of the army’s Bahawalpur Corps.
The appointment of a new army chief will have a crucial bearing on the future of the South Asian nation’s burgeoning democracy and set the tone for relations with India, Afghanistan, China, and the United States.
