Leaked documents reveal that the United States threatened Pakistan with severe consequences unless former Prime Minister Imran Khan was removed from office. The threat came after Khan refused to allow the CIA to establish a drone base on Pakistani territory, exposing Washington’s direct role in the coup that ousted him after years of official denials.
The document, identified as cable I-0678 and marked Secret and No Circulation, captures a meeting that took place on March 7, 2022, between Pakistan’s then-ambassador to Washington, Asad Majeed Khan, and US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Donald Lu. Its distribution was limited to only a handful of Pakistan’s most senior officials, including the Secretary to the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the Chief of Army Staff, the Director General of the ISI, and the Director of the SSP section.
At the centre of the controversy lies one explosive sentence recorded in the cable: if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington. According to the document, Lu also warned that without a change in leadership, Imran Khan’s isolation would become very strong from Europe and the United States.
In the assessment section of the cable, Pakistan’s own ambassador noted that Lu could not have conveyed such a strong message without the express approval of the White House, and concluded that the American diplomat had spoken out of turn on Pakistan’s internal political process. Exactly six weeks after that meeting, on April 9, 2022, Imran Khan was removed from office following a successful no-confidence vote, becoming the first Pakistani prime minister to be removed through that parliamentary process.
The tensions between Washington and Khan’s government had been building for years before the meeting. In 2021, CIA Director William J. Burns travelled to Pakistan seeking a meeting with Khan. Khan’s office reportedly told Burns that the prime minister would only speak directly with US President Joe Biden, who had declined repeated requests for a phone call with Khan since taking office. Burns waited an entire day in Islamabad and the meeting never took place. Khan also publicly declined US requests for regional military bases following the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and drew further American displeasure by visiting Moscow on the exact day Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, ignoring direct requests from US officials to cancel the trip. Washington criticised Pakistan’s aggressively neutral position on the Ukraine war, and Pakistan subsequently abstained from a UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s invasion.
The leaked cypher does not conclusively prove a coordinated foreign conspiracy, and no released document directly establishes operational US involvement in Khan’s removal. However, the cable reveals that powerful international actors viewed Khan as a growing strategic problem and openly discussed the consequences of his political survival. The Biden administration consistently denied any interference in Pakistan’s internal affairs, with then-State Department spokesperson Ned Price stating flatly that there was no truth to Khan’s claims of American involvement.
Khan’s political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, was subsequently stripped of its election symbol ahead of the 2024 polls and effectively prevented from contesting as a unified force. Khan himself has remained imprisoned on charges he describes as politically motivated. The release of the full cable text has restarted a fierce political debate inside Pakistan, with Khan’s supporters describing it as the strongest proof yet of foreign pressure, while Washington and Pakistan’s military establishment continue to reject those claims.
