More than two years into his imprisonment, Imran Khan still refuses to recede into the background of Pakistan's political memory. The rallies have vanished, the slogans have dimmed, the party infrastructure has been battered into a loose network of whispers and legal notices. Yet the confrontation endures, reshaped rather than extinguished. What once surged through container tops and packed grounds became words smuggled out by visitors and amplified online, before sinking into a deeper silence where even the unspoken carries its own gravity.

The state has now affixed to him the most consequential label in its political vocabulary: a national security risk. In Pakistan's long history of power struggles, such framing has almost always signalled a hardening of positions. Once a political adversary is reclassified as a security liability, the space for accommodation narrows dramatically. Compromise becomes institutionally perilous.

For Khan, prison has performed an unintended function. It has stripped away all intermediate options. The layered manoeuvres of everyday politics are no longer available to him. What remains is a stark zero-sum equation. Survival now requires choosing between outcomes that all carry irreversible consequences.

One path is capitulation. It would demand public retreat and private submission. It would require the careful dismantling of the defiant persona that carried him to power and sustained him through confrontation. Pakistan's history provides many examples of such endings. Former leaders who chose safety over relevance, longevity over legacy. The system has always known how to absorb its........

© The Express Tribune