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Imran Khan on Jemima, fatherhood and the war on terror
By Elizabeth Grice
Imran Khan is a body linguists dream. Talking about the painfulness of divorce causes him to vanish into the depths of his chair, pulling both sides of his jacket across his chest and pinning them there as if hes on a chilly outfield. His voice is low and weary. But get him on the subject of the £12 million cancer hospital he has built in Lahore, or trekking and shooting partridge in the foothills of the Himalayas a sport he has loved from boyhood and which he has introduced to his two young sons and he leans forward, a vibrant storyteller, mapping the wilderness with long, bony hands.
But the thing that propels the cricketer-turned-politician to the edge of his seat, arms flailing and eyes blazing, is the American and Pakistan army bombing of the tribal areas of the North West Frontier of his homeland, Pakistan, with the misguided aim, as he sees it, of flushing out al-Qaeda terrorists.
This is a civil war in the making, he says. One million refugees have been created. Innocent people are being killed; children left without arms and legs. All under the magic mantra of fighting Islamic extremism. If people understood what is really happening they would not countenance it. It is time to change tactics on the so-called war on terror. There is hope in President-elect Barack Obama.
Lean and deeply creased, but still recognisable as the handsome cricketer of old, Khan is a believable figure of authority. Then, captaining his team to victory over England in the 1992 World Cup, he was known as the Lion of Lahore.
No less leonine now, he is convinced he will one day deliver his country from the stranglehold of a decadent ruling elite. No small mission.
As with cricket, as with the hospital, I never had any doubt that I would succeed, he says. Cricket showed me that if one fights right up to the last ball, one can win in impossible situations. That helped me in the hospital project, and the hospital helped me in politics. One loses only when one gives up. If I dont succeed, at least I will have tried my best.
Khan is in London this week is to take his sons, Sulaiman, 12, and Kasim, nine, back to Pakistan for a pre-Christmas holiday and to fulfil his commitments as chancellor of Bradford University. As always, he is staying in Richmond Park, at the home of his ex-mother-in-law, Lady Annabel Goldsmith. The boys live with their mother, Jemima Khan, in London where they go to school, but spend most holidays with their father, including half of each Christmas and summer. Its a familiar enough arrangement in their case, one that ensures they embrace both cultures but Imran Khan has no illusions about the penalties of such a compromise. He misses them.
The annexe of Lady Annabels Georgian mansion has many photos of the boys, along with sporting paraphernalia like dumb-bells, outdoor gear and an exercise mat.
When we parted ways, we settled all the issues, he says quietly. Full marks to Jemima. She has been really very co-operative in this whole thing. But divorce is a disaster for children. The easier you can make it for them, the less the long-term traumatic effect will be but it still affects them. It was especially difficult early on. It is important for them to be bi-cultural but that is not easy if they live in one country.
Imran, 56, and Jemima Khan divorced in 2004 after nine years of marriage. He says he understands how, despite making every effort to integrate (she learned Urdu and became a Muslim) she could not, finally, bear to live in Pakistan permanently, isolated from her own close family any more than he could contemplate not living there.
I love Pakistan, the wilderness, the mountains. Half my youth was spent in England, but Pakistan was always home for me. His passion for politics, he admits, took him over. It was not compatible with married life. It cant have helped that, by marrying the daughter of a Jewish multi-millionaire, the late Sir James Goldsmith, his credentials were questioned: he was accused of being part of a Jewish lobby.
The boys are being brought up as Muslims. When it is his turn to have them, he reads to them the moral tales from his own childhood. Seeing their sudden interest in the game since the Ashes, he has laid them a cricket pitch at his 35-acre hilltop farm outside Islamabad. There they are free, but he admits he has some way to go before they share his enthusiasm for trekking and partridge shooting in the mountains. He is lyrical about the countryside, the crystal-clear days, the cold nights, the sound of jackals. His favourite place is the Salt Range in the Punjab where, as a nine year old, his uncle took him on his first shoot and he was given an abandoned leopard cub by villagers.
Would he like his sons ultimately to live in Pakistan? Khan says he has no ambition for them, except that they should follow their passions, as he did, despite his fathers hopes that he would follow him into engineering. It was the last thing I wanted to do.
Just before Khan retired from international cricket, his adored mother died of cancer. A few weeks before her death, he met a poor villager who worked all day to buy medicine for his brother, who was also dying of cancer.
Suddenly, I was confronted with the injustice of Pakistani society: the rich could travel abroad for treatment but ordinary people had no access to quality care. It impelled him to build the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Hospital and now he is planning another.
In a final fund-raising blitz, he toured 29 cities in six weeks in an open Jeep and the experience opened his privileged eyes to the poverty and inequality. People were deprived of the necessities that a proper government should have given them: health, clean drinking water, justice.
Despite his playboy reputation, Khan claims he was shy and introspective as a cricketer, with a small circle of friends and little appetite for socialising in pubs after the game.
I liked solitude and privacy. This is not the life of my choice, he says. But I feel that Pakistanis are alarmed that, unless we change, we are doomed. If someone like me doesnt try to force change, who will? The privileged classes are too soft, too timid, too cowardly to do anything.
He founded the Movement for Justice (the Tehreek-e-Insaf party) to build a genuine democracy and independent judiciary. Twice he refused to become part of a ruling coalition. The second time, the former president Pervez Musharraf offered him the prime ministership.
How could I join a decadent elite? he asks. He did not even stand at the general election in February, claiming there could be no free and fair democracy if judges were appointed and controlled by the ruling party.
Even in such a volatile political arena, Khan refuses to have security guards. My enemies could have me bumped off, with or without security guards. Fear is always an impediment. Fear stops you from chasing your dreams.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks and those on July 7, and now the bombings in Mumbai, he is appalled at the way terrorism has been given a religious identity. No religion allows terrorism, he says. The phrase 'Islamic terrorist is a smokescreen that diverts attention from the political reasons why people are blowing themselves up. Terrorism is an illness. All terrorism is political.
Once the Pakistan army, at the behest of the US, started bombing a few hundred al-Qaeda supporters in the tribal areas into submission, and killed countless tribesmen, he says it created a million armed men opposed to America.
The war on terror, which many Pakistanis see as a war on Islam, he argues, is why there is no shortage of people willing to lay down their lives for religion. It is a war of attrition and it will just go on and on unless there is a political solutio
