The 14-year jail sentence pronounced by a military court on Pakistan’s former ISI chief Lt Gen Faiz Hamid shuts the door on a man seen as close to ousted former prime minister Imran Khan and therefore a potential challenger to current Chief of Defence Force Gen Asim Munir.

It marks the rare instance when the army has turned on its own. Recall the army stood by Gen Parvez Musharraf despite everything: the humiliation when he had to withdraw his forces from the Kargil heights, even the nationwide lawyers’ agitation from 2007 to 2009, that ultimately forced his resignation.

But as Pakistan scholar Suba Chandran notes, “Munir may have had no option; he had to send a message down the khaki line since the ouster of Imran Khan, an ethnic Pashtun, has generated fissures within the 600,000-man

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