oedad Khan, a bureaucrat whose career spanned several decades has passed away at the age of 100. The death occurred on Sunday (April 21), his family said.

Khan was born in Mardan September 23, 1923. “He lived a full life of service to Pakistan during some of the most tumultuous periods in its history. Post-retirement, he pioneered environmental protection for Islamabad; authored several books; and became a staunch activist for democracy and human rights. His was a truly unique, multifaceted personality of our times. He will be greatly missed by his countless admirers,” Mushahid Hussain Sayed remarked in a tribute on X.

Khan is survived by five sons and a daughter. The funeral rites were performed at the H-11 graveyard, with many notable figures besides friends and family in attendance. They included Afrasiab Khattak, Wasim Sajjad, Raja Zafar-ul Haq, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, Riaz Muhammad Khan and Faisal Javed.

Roedad Khan, an alumnus of Lahore’s Forman Christian College and the Aligarh Muslim University, joined the Pakistan Administrative Service in 1949. It was then known as the District Management Group of the Central Superior Services. In 1951, he started his distinguished career as secretary to the Sindh chief minister of Sindh. The highlight of his professional career was being in charge of internal security under Gen Zia-ul Haq, the then president and chief martial law administrator, during a period marked by Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.

Khan had a significant role in Gen Zia’s strategy to bolster Pakistan’s secret establishment. He held various significant portfolios, including that of interior secretary before rising to the prestigious position of secretary general.

After the Cold War ended, Khan transitioned into a political analyst and authored three books.

During his long career, Khan served under five presidents —Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Fazle Elahi Chaudhry, Zia-ul Haq and Ghulam Ishaq Khan—and three prime ministers.

Roedad Khan’s legacy as a civil servant and a participant in civil discourse will be long remembered by those who knew him and by many more who were influenced by it.

What does this mean? Did he not serve under the remaining presidents and prime ministers between 1951 and 1991?

Once his civil service career ended, Roedad Khan remained vigorously engaged with the civil society. As Mushahid Hussain noted, Khan had a brief stint with the Awami National Partty, around the time when his brother, Abdul Khaliq Khan, had a prominent figure in the party. In 1988, both of them attended the funeral of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, popularly known as Bacha Khan, in Jalalabad.

In recent years, Roedad Khan had joined Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf. He also participated in civil activism, including successful litigation before Supreme Court against a proposed tunnel through the Margalla Hills. He was also instrumental in the 2007 movement for the restoration of the superior judiciary.

Mushahid Hussain also remembers the Saturday Club, a regular gathering of retired generals, judges, bureaucrats, diplomats and other prominent persons at Khan’s residence, where they discussed various topics. These meetings were described by Aurangzaib Khan in The Herald in 2015 as insightful and influential. Sometimes these helped shape public discourse as reporters picked up the themes and wrote bout them.

Roedad Khan’s legacy as a civil servant and a contributor to its civil discourse will be long remembered by those who knew him and by many more who were influenced by his work and his writings.

The writer is an investigative journalist based in Lahore. He reports on politics, economy and militancy. He can be reached on X @HassanNaqvi5