"The Guardian has chosen to publish serious allegations against our honourable Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, Chief of Army Staff and Chief of Defence Forces (COAS & CDF) of Pakistan, providing Kasim and Sulaiman with a platform for these baseless allegations.They are also a distortion of how the Pakistani state is structured, how Imran Khan came to be in prison, and what the office of the Chief of Army Staff and Chief of Defence Forces actually does.Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir is the professional head of Pakistans armed forces and, as Chief of Defence Forces, he is incharge of the defence, and security of the country. That is a constitutional and institutional responsibility. It is not a licence to run the courts, rewrite criminal judgments, or administer Adiala Jail. To collapse the entire legal process against a former prime minister to a personal vendetta by one officer is to abandon fact for propagandaImran Khan is not in prison because a General officer wished it so. He is in prison because Pakistani courts convicted him. The sentence most clearly keeping him incarcerated is the fourteen-year term in the Al-Qadir Trust case, also known as the 190 million reference: a corruption prosecution arising from the alleged misuse of a settlement involving funds returned to Pakistan by the United Kingdoms National Crime Agency and the subsequent transfer of land and benefits connected with a trust chaired by Khan and his wife. That conviction was recorded by an accountability court. Appeals have been, and remain, a matter for the judiciary. Other cases have been suspended or overturned on appeal; that fact cuts both ways. It shows that the courts have not been a rubber stamp in every instance, and it also shows that the remaining conviction is not a rumour discovered for a London interview.Prison conditions, family access, medical treatment and compliance with court directions are likewise questions for the civilian authorities and the courts, not for the army chief to order as if he were a jail superintendent. The Guardian itself notes that Pakistans Supreme Court has been seized of complaints about hospital treatment and restricted communication. That is the proper forum. If the state has failed to honour a court order, the remedy is judicial enforcement, not an accusation that Field Marshal Munir is attempting to slowly kill a seventy-three-year-old man. Language of that kind is not evidence. It is an accusation of homicide by neglect, made without proof, from abroad, by sons who by their own account have not spoken to their father for months and have not been in Pakistan to see the cell they describe.Natural filial anxiety does not convert speculation into fact. Kasim and Sulaiman Khan are entitled to worry about their fathers health. They are not entitled to present second-hand descriptions, party talking points and a theory of personal grudge as if they were a completed criminal case against the countrys senior-most military officer. The claim that harsh treatment increased notably after General Munir became army chief, and that this proves motive, is chronology dressed up as causation. Khans legal troubles began after he lost office in 2022, long before any later command arrangements. Multiple references, not one officers temperament, produced the convictions that now stand.Nor is it honest to treat the army chief as the hidden author of every judicial outcome simply because Pakistans civil-military balance is contested. That argument is a political weapon, not a finding of fact. Field Marshal Syed Asim Munirs duty is the safety and security of Pakistan. The imprisonment of a convicted former prime minister is a matter for the courts. If those courts have erred, the appeal process exists for that purpose. If prison authorities have acted unlawfully, that too can be tested before a judge.1/2"