Pakistan ready to host international cricket again with Bangladesh tour

in their despair at a resolutely stagnant economy and disenchantment with a terminally corrupt political culture, Pakistanis are turning to their great sporting hero, former national cricket captain Imran Khan for salvation.

Recent polls show that Pakistanis have convinced themselves that Khan, who founded his political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf 15 years ago, is the country's only honest public figure.

With elections due next year, Khan's years of being considered a political dilettante and long record of electoral failures seem to be coming to an end.

Suddenly tens of thousands of people tramp for hours through the summer heat to attend his rallies.

Heavy-hitter political opportunists, such as Shah Memood Qureshi, the former foreign minister in the Pakistan People's Party government, and Javed Hashmi, former minister of health in the Muslim League government of Nawaz Sharif, are rushing to Khan's side.

For Khan, the white heat of public attention has presented problems.

For years he has stumbled around in the political wilderness as the only elected member of his party. What he said on issues of the day usually attracted attention because of his sporting hero status, but his remarks seldom warranted intense scrutiny.

Now that has changed and Khan is struggling to evolve a convincing political persona.

It's not that easy because his upper-class background naturally allies him to the cosmopolitan urban liberals of Kara-chi and Lahore. But to appeal to a government-winning swath of Pakistani voters in this staunchly Muslim country Khan needs to establish himself as a devout and honourable man.

In the last few years Khan has been burnishing his public Islamic credentials.

This has mystified some of his supporters who remember his days as an international playboy in the night clubs of Europe in the 1980s and his celebrity marriage, now ended, to Jemima Goldsmith, the famous partly Jewish, British socialite.

Some call this new more puritan man "Taliban Khan," not least for his insistence that there can be no peace in Pakistan or Afghanistan without the involvement of the Taliban. The Taliban are mostly from the Pashtun tribes, as is Khan.

The Taliban, on the other hand, continue to see Khan as a hated "liberal."

One of the insurgents' leaders recently announced Khan will be killed if he attempts to stage a planned political rally next month in the Taliban strong-hold province of Waziristan.

This feeling that Khan is the coming man was documented clearly in a recent poll by the international Pew Research Centre in its Global Attitudes project.

It found Khan has a 70-per-cent approval rating among Pakistanis, up 18 percentage points from two years ago.

This is well ahead of main opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, who was prime minister from 1990 until mid-1993 and again from 1998 until ousted by a military coup in 1999. Support for Nawaz has dropped from 79 per cent in 2009 to 62 per cent now.

Support for Khan is so far ahead of the public's regard for President Asif Ali Zard-ari at 14 per cent that it is an embarrassment.

However, Pakistanis are less convinced by the attractions of Khan's PTI party than they are by the man himself.

A recent survey by the Inter-national Republican Institute found support for the PTI is ahead of all other parties, but still only 31 per cent.

Nawaz's Muslim League is second with 27 per cent and the PPP of Zardari and his cur-rent prime minister Raja Per-vez Ashraf has only 16 per cent support.

Pakistanis' turning to Khan, whose captaincy of the team that won the Cricket World Cup in 1992 made him a national and international star, comes as the country's key institutions seem mired beyond immediate repair.