US set up a chessboard with Munir as a pawn years ago. It's playing out now

Key points

• Pakistan is where anything can happen.
• It's also a place where everything happens for a reason.
• Nothing happens in isolation.
• Governments fall, generals rise, prime ministers turn into prisoners and prisoners into symbols of resistance.
• Pakistan PM Imran Khan's rise to power, his anti-American posturing, his "absolutely not" doctrine, his Moscow visit on the very day Russia invaded Ukraine, the all-out war between him and the military establishment, his fall from grace, imprisonment, and now the rise of Field Marshal Asim Munir as arguably the most powerful man Pakistan has seen are all connected.