By JANE PERLEZ
Published: August 22, 2008
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan Now that Washingtons close friend, President Pervez Musharraf, is gone, the question is this: who among the array of characters in the political firmament here will America turn to in the messy fight against an emboldened Taliban?
Musharraf, president and army chief for almost all of his nine-year tenure before he resigned Monday under threat of impeachment, served as a convenient one-stop shopping window.
The Bush administration relied on him for military support to suppress the Taliban in the tribal regions, and for intelligence in rounding up people suspected of belonging to Al Qaeda. In the end, it did not reap much of what it wanted. But Mr. Musharraf, the seemingly amenable autocrat, offered Washington a sense of leverage.
With Mr. Musharraf out of power, recent visitors to the United States Embassy here say American officials have been at a loss one used the word struggling to figure out who America should throw its weight behind.
On Friday, the countrys biggest party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, said it was nominating its leader, Asif Ali Zardari, for president, a post he may end up winning in an electoral college vote scheduled for Sept. 6.
That could make Mr. Zardari Americas default ally, though the next presidents full range of powers, and his commitment and ability to fight the Taliban insurgency, as Washington would like, are far from clear.
In its first four months, the civilian government that Mr. Zardari effectively leads has been immobilized by infighting over whether and how to remove Mr. Musharraf and now over who should replace him.
So consuming has that battle been, the coalition has paid almost no attention to governing, even as the economy has tumbled and the Taliban have shown mounting grit in their goal of taking over the nuclear-armed state.
Then there are the fights over the Musharraf legacy, the most bitter being whether to restore some 60 judges he dismissed last year.
Nawaz Sharif, chairman of the junior member of the coalition, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, on Friday gave Mr. Zardari until next week to reinstate the judges, including the Supreme Court chief justice.
A resolution would be drafted over the weekend, Mr. Sharif said at a news briefing, and introduced in Parliament on Monday. After debate, he said, it should be passed on Wednesday and judges should be restored. If not, he threatened to pull out of the government.
The political sniping has heightened jitters among American officials that no one is actually in charge as the Taliban insurgency gains steam. The death toll from the worst of the Talibans suicide bombings, outside a munitions factory on Thursday, rose to 78, officials said, with 103 wounded.
What is more, doubts are growing among American officials over the level of cooperation they can expect from the new army chief, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, a former head of intelligence who took over the post from Mr. Musharraf last November.
After glowing initial reviews by the Americans, General Kayani has appeared less interested in how to deal with the Taliban than with the sagging morale of his undertrained, underequipped troops.
In my view they wont do aggressive counterinsurgency because they cant, said Christine Fair, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, of the Pakistani Army.
In the post-Musharraf era, she said, the army wants to concentrate on rehabilitating its morale and reputation, which were sullied by Mr. Musharrafs unpopular political decisions. This means they are less likely to cooperate, not more, she added. Right now, they care about whats in their own institutions interests.
That does not include getting their noses bloodied in a fight with the Taliban. But more important, perhaps, over the longer term, the Taliban remain an important tool for Pakistan to influence events over the border if the Americans leave Afghanistan, as they did after the departure of the Soviets, she said.
Meanwhile, the trio of civilian leaders Mr. Zardari; Mr. Sharif, and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani are all less than ideal to become the go-to figure for the United States in Pakistan.
Mr. Gilani, a novice front man plucked out of obscurity by Mr. Zardari to be prime minister, made a poor public impression on his first visit to Washington last month, and was not much better behind the scenes, officials said.
At a gathering of the Council on Foreign Relations, he stumbled through basic questions about the Pakistan-United States relationship from a knowledgeable crowd of experts.
In private meetings with the Bush administration, according to an official who attended, Mr. Gilani could offer only a simple mantra for defeating the Taliban: Lets work together.
Mr. Sharif enjoyed a good relationship with President Clinton when he was prime minister in the 1990s, but the former prime minister is regarded warily by Washington policy makers as being too close to conservative Islamic forces in Pakistan.
The fact that Mr. Sharif is riding a tide of popularity because of his staunch anti-Musharraf stance does not impress the Bush administration, said Daniel Markey, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
To the surprise of many here, the civilian with the trump card, then, may be Mr. Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, who took up the mantle of her party after she was assassinated in December.
Mr. Zardari did not run for election, and lacks ample experience in government, but he manages the largest bloc in Parliament from behind the scenes. He is the power behind Mr. Gilani, making day-to-day decisions over government policy and appointments to senior positions that have included friends who have spent time in jail on corruption charges.
Mr. Zardari spent more than eight years in jail on corruption charges, but he was never convicted and says they amounted to a vendetta by his political enemies.
The charges were dropped, finally, as part of an amnesty accord with Mr. Musharraf when he and Ms. Bhutto returned to Pakistan.
That background makes Mr. Zardari a divisive figure in Pakistani politics, even as he moves steadily toward sewing up the presidency. But after Mr. Gilanis weak performance in Washington, Bush administration officials may be tilting toward Mr. Zardari as their likely alternative ally.
As president, he could end up being one of the most powerful figures Pakistan has ever seen. He would no doubt continue to effectively control the prime minister.
The big question is whether as president he would hold the ultimate power that Mr. Musharraf enjoyed: the ability under a constitutional amendment to dissolve the Parliament. The coalition has pledged to abolish that provision.
But if Mr. Zardari manages to keep that power, the United States could be back to its one-stop shopping window, though with a different character behind the counter.
