It looks like the political crisis in Pakistan has come to an end (or at least a low-ebb), as former Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry will be reinstated as once-again Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. In addition, the Pakistan People’s Party has indicated that it will revisit the ruling from last month that barred PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif and his brother from running for office. Thus, Sharif has called off his protest march and all is back to normal. On the narrow merits of the issue, it not only seems like a good thing to see this crisis brought to an end, but re-instating the justice seems like the correct thing to do. The judge got fired by military dictator Pervez Musharraf for the “crime” of standing up for the rule of law, and it was Chaudhry’s firing that launched the wave of protests that brought civilian rule back to Pakistan. My understanding, however, is that the protests were never really about the Justice Chaudhry as such. Rather, there was a hope on the part of Sharif to ride this issue back into power, which he seems to have given up on for now.

The larger background situation, I would say, is that the same economic problems that pose severe political problems for incumbents in well-established democracies (ask Gordon Brown) pose much more severe problems for incumbents in regimes that lack that kind of entrenched consensus. It was Pakistan over the weekend, but I imagine this won’t be the last transitional country to be wracked by protests over the course of 2009.

Cracking down on protesters only works if the cops take the incumbent government’s side:

In what analysts here called an unprecedented reversal by security forces, phalanxes of riot policemen here in Lahore melted away rather than continue to confront protesters who had rallied around the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, when he defied a house arrest order early Sunday.

By early evening, the sight of exuberant anti-government crowds in Lahore — a mix of Mr. Sharif’s loyalists, supporters of smaller opposition parties and ordinary people with their young children — encouraged people in other cities in the Punjab Province to come out on the streets

Mr. Sharif headed toward Islamabad in a long convoy of cars, with supporters lining up to greet him along the 200 mile route, said Ahsan Iqbal, the information secretary for Mr. Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N. He added that party workers armed with cranes were removing shipping containers placed as roadblocks by the police at junctions along the route to the capital.

Interesting times. The US is trying to broker some kind of accommodation between the contending parties.

I have no particular brief for Pakistani politician Nawaz Sharif, but the time has come once again to observe how bizarre the treatment he receives at the hands of the American establishment is. To recap, once upon a time Benazir Bhutto was running Pakistan. Then her party lost power in an election to Nawaz Sharif and his party. Subsequently, Pervez Musharraf took power in a coup and established a dictatorship. The United States quickly accommodated itself to this state of affairs, though Sharif obviously wasn’t happy. Then, when Bhutto decided after a period of years that it was time for democracy to return to Pakistan, suddenly the U.S. government became more interested in Pakistani democracy and in the American media Bhutto—rather than the democratically elected leader Musharraf had deposed—became the face of the Pakistani opposition. Then, once it was clear that Musharraf was going down, it became really important to try to manipulate the situation to bring Bhutto, rather than Sharif, to power. Then after Bhutto’s murder, her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, became the standard-bearer. Meanwhile, the crisis that precipitated Musharraf’s fall from power was his decision to illegally fire some judges who tried to hold his regime to account. Remarkably, upon coming to power Zardari didn’t reinstate the chief judge who Musharraf sacked.

So that’s the backdrop for this:

U.S. and other Western diplomats were trying to defuse the crisis pitting President Asif Ali Zardari — a Western ally whose popularity has plummeted amid Taliban gains and the declining economy — against former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who doesn’t hold elected office but is one of Pakistan’s most popular politicians. Mr. Sharif is viewed warily by Washington, which doesn’t consider him committed enough to battling Islamic extremists.

Mr. Sharif is pushing for the country’s chief justice, who was sacked in 2007 by a previous president, to be restored to that job. Mr. Sharif also is fighting for control of the provincial government in Punjab, where Mr. Zardari has imposed federal rule. The eastern province, Pakistan’s most populous, is Mr. Sharif’s home turf. Fearing violence, hospitals canceled leave for doctors in Punjab’s capital, Lahore. [...]

Hundreds of opposition leaders and supporters have been arrested since Wednesday, when Mr. Zardari’s government began a crackdown on the opposition. On Tuesday, the government also imposed a two-week ban on rallies ahead of days of protests expected in the run-up to a planned sit-in Monday in Islamabad in front of parliament.

Obviously, insofar as Washington continually tilts toward one Pakistani party and against the other one, the leader of one party will become “a Western ally” and we’ll develop doubts about the priorities of the other guy. But I think Americans really ought to be asking ourselves about cause and effect here. As best I can tell, we’re substantially basing our Pakistan policy on the fact that Benazir Bhutto went to Harvard and befriended many important Americans while there. But that makes no sense. We have interests in Pakistan. Interests that we’ll want to press on any Pakistani government—a Zardari government, a Sharif government, a military government, whatever. Interests that no Pakistani government is going to fully share. No matter what happens, there’ll be tensions that need to be resolved. We should be prepared to work with whoever’s in power, and clear on the fact that arresting opposition party figures is never the route to stable democracy.

At any rate, read this from Najam Sethi if you want to hear what someone who knows what he’s talking about (i.e., not me) thinks.

In a widely anticipated development, Nawaz Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League (N) have decided to leave the coalition government that they’d formed with the Pakistan People’s Party. This was anticipated because the PML-N and the PPP are the two main rival political parties in Pakistan. Their coalition has been driven by a shared opposition to Pervez Musharraf’s continued period of quasi-rule by the military, but with him resigning and new presidential elections scheduled that will return the country to full civilian rule it’s natural that the two major civilian political parties would work as government and opposition rather than as a nonsensical coalition.

For reasons that have always seemed to me to have more to do with Benazir Bhutto’s large number of college chums holding influential jobs in the United States than any policy reason, the U.S. has long seemed more comfortable with the PPP than with the PML-N. So in the event that the PPP loses the power — which will surely happen at some point — it’ll be interesting to see the American reaction. Indeed, the fact that the civilian government Musharraf overthrew was a PML-N one seems to me to have had something do with with the American elite’s relative comfort with his dictatorship until Bhutto decided to step-up her level of democracy activism.