Pakistan Chief of Army Staff General Syed Asim Munir is unhappy with Inter-Services Intelligence director-general Lieutenant General Nadeem Ahmed Anjum, who is under a lot of performance pressure and might be asked to step down by April.
According to top sources, the army chief is not happy about the D-G ISI’s political engineering. Gen Munir felt that Lt Gen Anjum was not up to the mark and had lost control, and that he might be asked to step down close to April.
Sources said the D-G ISI was tasked to stop the confidence vote of Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi by issuing threats to members of the provincial assembly belonging to the Imran Khan-led Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. The D-G completed the task, but PTI chief Imran Khan did something out of the box and used free-elected MPAs.
This was not noticed till the voting concluded and even Lt Gen Anjum did not have a clue about it. Due to the success of the confidence vote, Elahi successfully dissolved the Punjab assembly following which Khan dissolved the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assembly.
Sources further said now every country and institution, which had promised to lend money to Pakistan, was backing out saying there was political instability in the country. They said the Pakistan Democratic Movement-led government has been trying to get Khan arrested since his ouster in April last year.
The Pakistani government had a plan to announce general elections as soon as Khan was arrested and disqualified for elections, sources said. But for the past 75 years, no government has been able to achieve such a big task without the support of intelligence agencies, they added.
Sources said there was constant pressure on Lt Gen Anjum to devise a plan to arrest Khan, but he had not been successful so far. Since Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif appointed the current COAS despite a disagreement with previous army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa over it, Gen Munir is now obliging and putting pressure on the D-G ISI, they added.
Hence, the COAS now feels that due to these unsuccessful endeavours, Lt Gen Anjum has not been up to the mark. Sources also said the government was in the process of looking for a new D-G, who can engineer the next general elections and had given a timeline of April.
Gen Munir’s worry is that if a resource could not handle such minor issues, how could he win the elections for the government, sources said. They added that if Lt Gen Anjum could somehow win their trust and do the same engineering as it was done in 2018, he might continue on the post.
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