The vote for all 266 seats in Pakistan’s national assembly has thrown the country into political chaos. Followers of the jailed former prime minister and cricket star, Imran Khan, have shocked the military-dominated system by winning slightly more seats than those of the military-backed ruling party in early vote counting.

Mr. Khan, in jail on multiple charges mostly to do with alleged corruption, has essentially no chance of returning to power, at least right away. The results, though, are clearly an embarrassment to the country’s military masterminds, pulling the strings for another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif.

Mr. Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League Party was so pumped and primed to win an overwhelming victory that he was poised to deliver his victory speech in full expectation of the assembly electing him prime minister for the fourth time. In three previous turns as prime minister, he’s been tossed out by the army, convicted of corruption and other offenses, and then let off by the courts and freed to run again — this time with full military backing.

In the crazy milieu of politics in Pakistan, a country writhing in poverty, bitter dissent, and widespread distrust of often opaque governing forces, Mr. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf can no longer function legally as a party and Mr. Khan himself was off the ballot. Former PTI members running as independents promised to form a bloc in the assembly, but the courts could still rule the party is illegal while many of its leaders are also in jail.

Imran Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, both serving 14-year terms for corruption, can only gloat at results that may eventually force the army, through the courts, to go easy on them, and maybe grant them a reprieve. That kind of wheeling and dealing is almost routine in a country seething with rivalries and hatred from the national to the local level.

At the least, the election results are sure to be challenged by losing candidates of the three major parties and dozens of lesser groupings. More incidents of deadly violence are feared. Before the first votes were counted, more than 30 people died in bomb blasts outside the offices of candidates in poverty-stricken Baluchistan. That’s the country’s biggest province in size and smallest in population, covering mostly desert in the southwest bordering Iran.

Mr. Sharif still claimed victory, confident that the final tally would show he had won more seats than either the independents or the party of the third major figure in the race, the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari. At 35, Mr. Bhutto-Zardari, son of an assassinated former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, is less than half the age of Mr. Sharif, 74, and Mr. Khan, 71, and commands a significant following among young people in a country of 245 million, nearly two-thirds below the age of 30.

The topsy-turvy results seem certain to force Mr. Sharif to agree on a coalition. That is something he earlier said, while exuding confidence over his ability to win a flat majority of seats, he would never do. It looks like he might have to eat his words. 

Amazingly, the voting in the latest elections had little if anything to do with Pakistan’s peculiar position as a one-time strong American ally. Most candidates seem to agree on the need to play Washington against Beijing, now the country’s biggest arms supplier and mastermind of a road across the Himalayas, down through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. The engineering marvel is a showpiece of China’s Belt and Road initiative.