'Imran Khan is soft on Afghan Taliban'

"Imran Khan is exciting because he is enervating the –denervating, actually, the Pakistani polity, particularly the youth," said South Asia expert Professor C Christine Fair, at the Brookings Institution conference on The Future of Pakistan, on Monday.

"He is taking Pakistan to a very bizarre notion of Islam," she added.

Fair recalled, "He had this period as a rakish gentleman, sowing his seeds throughout the West, and now of course, he excoriating the West as he turns to embrace Islam, and he's doing this as a way of recuperating Pakistan sovereignty."

"In the course of doing this, of course, he's got the blessings of GHQ," she said. "So, we should not be mistaken that this, ex-lothario cricket player is going to be anything other than business as usual."

"Khan is very soft on the Afghan Taliban; and by 'soft' I mean, he doesn't really think they're a problem," she added.

"If you kind of looked at how Pakistan is dealing with both Islamist violence on the one hand, then you also have to look at the debates that are taking place in Pakistan about who the state is for," she said.

Fair continued to push for a US policy vis-à-vis Pakistan that she's been writing and talking about of late.

She said, "In the last 10 years of trying to assuage Pakistan to behave differently with allurements, most financial allurements and weapons systems, should have disabused us that these are adequate to change Pakistan's strategic calculus in a way it makes its decisions in terms of its actions in the region."

Joshua White, a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, who's done extensive field research in Pakistan with Islamists, argued that if a center-right government or an Imran Khan government or an Imran Khan-like government emerges in Pakistan, "it wouldn't do anything dramatic to the US-Pakistan relationship."

But he acknowledged, "It would allow some of the military centers of power and others to deflect even more of their problems with the United States on to the Parliament rendering them moot and we would all expect facilitate a much wider outcry against the United States."

Marvin Weinbaum, scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute and an expert on Afghanistan, said, "Some of the conspiracy theories that were once kind of fringe expressions, these have now become a consensus."

He said that what he's really concerned about is that the fabric of society "which has been a strong element of continuity, is it being torn apart by the kinds of rhetoric we are hearing consistently with this Jihadi narrative—not just anti-Americanism, but it's enemies that Islam is challenged."