The stunning political success he now enjoys was harder-won—this despite the fact that Khan was courted for office even before he ended his cricket career. More recently, Musharraf offered to install him as prime minister, Khan has claimed. But he had always wanted more than a title. “Going into politics and starting a movement for reform are two different things,” Khan told the British newspaper The Guardian in 1996. That year, he launched the Pakistan Movement for Justice, a political party determined to create, as its founding charter stated, an “Islamic welfare state.” He had by then fashioned a second incarnation as a philanthropist, traveling the country collecting money out of the back of a truck to build a hospital offering free care to poor cancer patients. But while his welfare-minded party repeatedly entered elections, it never won more than one seat in the Pakistani parliament. “Im the dim,” as some in Pakistan called him, was dismissed as politically inept and unelectable. To the liberals worried about his anti-American rhetoric, he was “Taliban without a beard”; religious conservatives abhorred his playboy past and maligned his British wife, whom he divorced in 2004.

But lately, everything has changed. Caught for years in a whirl of guerrilla war and dysfunctional government, huge numbers of Pakistanis are now seizing on Khan’s populist brand of political Islam and his demands for an independent judiciary. In advance of elections expected later this year, he’s suddenly drawing historic crowds. One rally held in Lahore last October brought out more than 100,000 people, shocking Khan’s rivals and helping him convert a slew of new political allies.

Khan’s sudden popularity also owes something to his biting criticism of the United States. As a virulent campaigner against the war in Afghanistan, Khan earned an anti-American badge he now wears with pride, while relations strain over everything from the raid that dispatched Osama bin Laden to November’s errant American air strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers and sent riotous crowds into the streets. At one point during his massive rally in Lahore, Khan said he had a message for Washington: “We may be your friends, but we will never be your slaves.” The crowd was exhilarated.

But despite the image he enjoys as an anti-American Islamist, Washington doesn’t view Khan as unreasonable. “We know that he opposes some American policies,” an official at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad told me, but “he’s been balanced, and expressed where he would like to see changes.”

Indeed, Khan might be able to offer the U.S. something no one else in Pakistan has: a path out of Afghanistan. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently suggested that Pakistan should take a lead in talking with the Taliban. Khan agrees, and as a tribal Pashtun with ancestral roots in South Waziristan, he could be particularly helpful in this sort of dialogue. “It should be the politicians in Pakistan who now should be moving in,” he told me, “not only to deal with our own tribal areas but to help America with a political settlement and exit strategy.”