Pakistan was already on edge. Then came the assassination attempt on former prime minister Imran Khan.

He’s one of the most popular and polarizing figures in one of the most strategically important countries in Asia. On Thursday someone tried to kill him.

Pakistan’s former prime minister, Imran Khan, was riding in the eastern city of Wazirabad. Bullets strafed his vehicle, and Khan suffered wounds to his leg. One person was killed and at least five others were injured.

Khan, who is 70, had been leading a protest march across Pakistan, the second such cross-country rally he has held this year, in each case calling for new elections. The march was to have ended in the capital, Islamabad.

Multiple reports said Khan was in stable condition. The BBC reported that Pakistani police had released a video of a man who confessed to attempting an assassination. In the video the man is asked why he opened fire. “He was misguiding the people,” he replied. “I wanted to kill him. I tried to kill him.”

As Grid Special Contributor Hassan Abbas reported in May, Khan launched his first protest march after he was ousted from power after a three-and-a-half-year term as prime minister. He is a former cricket champion, one of the most revered athletes in the country, and for some, still a revered political figure.

When the news broke of the attack on Khan on Thursday, Grid turned once more to Abbas, who is the distinguished professor of international relations at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., and author of the forthcoming book, “The Return of the Taliban.” Abbas said the attack will make an already volatile situation in Pakistan that much more so.

“In terms of the economy, it’s a serious crisis,” Abbas told Grid. “In terms of political stability, it is a huge crisis. People don’t know — if Imran Khan will come to Islamabad, will there be a clash between parties, will there be a civil war-like situation?”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Grid: Tell us what you understand about what exactly happened at the rally on Thursday.

Hassan Abbas: I hate to say this, but this was in some ways predictable. I mean, Imran Khan has been in huge crowds, open crowds, with hundreds of thousands of people in some places, at least tens of thousands at other points. This is what his march is like. He wants to take over the government or force the military to intervene to hold elections.

Imran Khan of course knows well that he’s just one year away, at the most, from elections. But he wants to push out the government, and he has been leading these processions, stopping at every spot, making speeches — somebody said yesterday that in the last three months he’d made about 60 political speeches in major gatherings. And what we are hearing is that in one of the spots along his way to Islamabad, he was fired upon.

It could have been anyone, honestly, but certainly it’s someone who wants total disruption in Pakistan. My worry is, what if Imran Khan will start saying in a few days or in a few hours that his political opponents did this? Or this was the work of the United States, or this is somebody from the outside who tried to kill him?

Grid: You said that to some extent this was predictable, what happened on Thursday. Do you just mean, because he’s been so out in the open? Or because he’s such a controversial figure?

HA: It was predictable, first, because there’s a history of political assassination in Pakistan. From the first elected Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, who was killed in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, close to where Imran Khan was [on Thursday]. The same place where [then-Pakistani] prime minister Benazir Bhutto was killed 60 years later. So anyone who is going out there, openly, in front of the people on a daily basis, where people can locate, whether they are organized criminal groups, political opponents, other people who want to disrupt Pakistan — anyone who wants to target him, he’s like a sitting duck.

And the police in Pakistan, we know, I myself being a former police officer, I can tell you that based on their skills, their equipment and their intelligence, it’s not an advanced, modern police force. So even if they are big in numbers around him, they can’t secure him in all these big open spaces.

And there are so many enemies of Imran Khan — he being controversial, saying terrible things about his political opponents. And there are many political opponents. And then there are organized criminal groups which can thrive in such opportunities. That’s why in a sense he was, maybe not a sitting duck, but close to it.

Grid: Give us a bit of the context of the moment in Pakistan. The comeback Imran Khan is trying. And what has brought us to this day and this moment.

HA: Imran Khan really emerged as a major political player in the last 10 years or so. For a long time, his political party used to have just one seat in the National Assembly which was his own. And he being a cricket superstar in Pakistan, it was easy for him to win his seat. But he came into the limelight with what was seen as support from the Pakistani military and intelligence. And he had his own support base, which expanded. His case always was, “My political opponents, they are corrupt to the core.” Right or wrong, that view was held by many, many Pakistanis. Imran Khan was able to build upon that to make his political career.

In 2018, he came into power with the majority — a very slim majority — and the military intelligence was able to choreograph a scene for him where they pushed some of the smaller parties, the independent candidates, to join Imran Khan.

He had 3 1/2 years in government as prime minister. He made many promises. He created a new hope among the young, because he was the anti-political establishment. All the major political parties were on the other side. He was a new kid on the block. He was a new political leader, very famous.

But then he started doing things — on the economy. Covid played a role of course, but the economy was not doing much better. His promise of creating employment never reached anywhere. He built a new foreign policy model for the country reaching out to Turkey, reaching out to Malaysia against the Gulf and the Saudis and others. And then he jumped onto the bandwagon, if I may call it that, of anti-U.S. issues and positions. He was with [then-President Donald Trump], he visited the White House, had a great reception and all that, but afterwards things started going in a different direction with his anti-U.S. statements.

And then this year he was pushed out of the government, and he blamed it all on the United States, saying there was this one meeting where one of the assistant secretaries of state had apparently said something which convinced him that there was a conspiracy, that the U.S. was behind his ouster.

In fact, he was ousted because the Pakistani military decided that they had no more patience for him. There were various reasons — for one, Imran Khan was doing things which the military never liked. For the military, he became a Frankenstein monster. They had built him up thinking he will be an extension of the military’s policy, and Imran Khan followed that model. But then he started doing things which the military thought were purely their domain. He became too big for his shoes. He started, for example, saying things about the U.S. which were detrimental to Pakistan’s national security from the military’s point of view.

So they tried to control him, and Imran Khan was uncontrollable. They took the carpet from under his feet. All those small political parties that were part of Imran Khan’s coalition — at that moment they said, most likely the military said to them, thank you very much, there’s no need for you to support Imran Khan, come to the other side. So Imran Khan is a very angry man, because he thinks his biggest supporters were part and parcel of the conspiracy game that took him out. He blamed it on the U.S.

Grid: So how dangerous or unstable is the situation in the country generally? And does what happened Thursday make it more so?

HA: I think Pakistan is in a really volatile situation. It is quite unstable. And the big evidence of that is the collapse of the Pakistani currency. And in a country which is under a debt of tens of billions of dollars, their currency going down just means more debt. That’s why Shehbaz Sharif, the Pakistani Prime Minister, just returned from China on Wednesday. He was in the Gulf previously. They’re asking for money. They’re talking to the [International Monetary Fund (IMF)]. The Pakistani Finance Minister and his team were in Washington, D.C., recently for IMF meetings.

So in terms of the economy, it’s a serious crisis. In terms of political stability, it is a huge crisis. People don’t know — if Imran Khan will come to Islamabad, will there be a clash between parties, will there be a civil war-like situation?

Imran Khan is on a head-on collision, a collision course with the military and intelligence. The Pakistani intelligence chief came out for a press conference, the first time Pakistani intelligence chief came on live television, and actually he blasted Imran Khan without naming him. He tried to discredit him. And the next day Imran Khan challenged him. The civil-military relationship is on the decline. The economy is in a bad situation. Political stability is on the rocks in a very critical way. So this is a really dangerous moment for Pakistan, without a doubt.

Grid: And does Thursday’s attack change anything? Or is tomorrow the same as it was yesterday?

HA: I think Imran Khan is going to use this attack for political ends. That is the nature of politics. He must be strategizing. I mean, we wish him the best of luck, and I’m glad really and we all should be, that Imran is safe. We don’t want this to happen to anyone. But Imran Khan most likely will use this attack as something that has been choreographed by his political and military opponents.

Tomorrow is a different day. Imran Khan will have more security, his rhetoric will rise. People will be more emotional. His supporters are already very, very emotional — even raising slogans against the army chief. So they might come out in bigger numbers. Or it’s also possible that some of them will be scared. But Imran Khan will try to make the best use of this. By blasting his opponents. And he may try to say this was an international conspiracy.

The longer this crisis and confusion continues, the more problematic, more complicated and more dangerous it becomes for Pakistan.

Thanks to Alicia Benjamin for copy editing this article.