There are political prisoners whom regimes fear because they are alive. There are martyrs whom regimes fear because they are dead. Imran Khan has become something far more dangerous to Pakistan’s ruling order: a man whose existence humiliates it, and whose death could indict it. That is the trap now tightening around Field Marshal Asim Munir and the two dynastic houses that shelter beneath the military canopy — the Sharifs and the Bhutto-Zardaris. Pakistan’s Supreme Court has ordered the seventy-three-year-old former prime minister transferred to Shifa International Hospital for medical treatment, with his own physician included on a medical board and regular family contact restored. In a normal constitutional order, none of this would qualify as “relief.” It would qualify as Tuesday. Yet Pakistan’s rulers have spent so long converting elementary rights into privileges that a prisoner seeing a doctor now arrives with the pomp of a constitutional breakthrough. The government’s attempt to challenge part of the ruling completes the farce. Apparently, the republic can survive managed elections, political engineering, mass prosecutions and institutional deformation — but a former prime minister being examined in a private hospital is where constitutional order must finally draw the line. Even satire would struggle to improve on the absurdity. But beneath the absurdity lies panic. Khan’s imprisonment was supposed to shrink him. Remove him from rallies, television screens and political life; drown him in cases; exhaust his party; let isolation accomplish what political competition could not. Instead, the state achieved the opposite. It imprisoned the man and enlarged the symbol. Every denied meeting became evidence. Every medical controversy became an accusation. Every attempt to make him invisible made him more politically present. The prison cell became a broadcasting tower. This is the strategic nightmare confronting Munir. A healthy captive can be contained. A visibly deteriorating captive becomes an indictment. A dead captive becomes history. And history is far less obedient than parliament. Trump’s “favorite field marshal” may be celebrated abroad as a useful interlocutor, photographed with presidents, praised in diplomatic rooms and treated as the indispensable manager of a troublesome nuclear state. But the theatrical grandeur abroad only sharpens the weakness at home. Power that must incarcerate its principal political rival for years is not demonstrating confidence. It is confessing fear. The medals get grander as the political imagination gets smaller. Release Khan, and he emerges not as the politician who entered prison but as the politician prison manufactured: older, wounded, mythologized, and equipped with the most devastating argument available in mass politics — that the entire coercive........

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