When these lines appear, Asif Zardari may have reached home. The Pakistan People’s Party co-chairman has turned taking a flight to foreign shores whenever there is trouble brewing at home into some sort of an art form.
In the beginning when his party needed to keep its coalition partner, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz firmly in the flock, he would pay close attention to the concerns of his self-proclaimed ‘elder brother’.
To look politically correct, Zardari wanted to be seen having public sympathy for the deposed judges and with the number game not quite up to the mark where alternatives were concerned, the PPP leader continued to play ball.
However, once the coalition numbers with back-up were available (so that PML-N could be replaced if need be), Zardari began to take what are now familiar flights abroad at the slightest hitch.
He flew out just as the first deadline for the restoration of judges approached, leaving everyone in a daze over his cool attitude. Sharif chased him to Dubai, burnt the midnight oil and induced a new promise. Even as Sharif was announcing the fresh date for the restoration of deposed judges after inducing a pledge from Zardari, skeptics were shaking their heads in disbelief.
Thereafter, Sharif took off for London, Zardari returned the compliment —in hindsight, little more than a PR exercise — more futile rounds were enacted before skeptics had the last laugh.
Then came the Long March. Zardari disappeared into the cushy confines of Dubai — reportedly, to see his children once again — before he returned home when it turned out that the march was not much of a threat, after all. The decision to facilitate rather than confront the marchers was so smart that the PPP co-chairman couldn’t help taking potshots at the insipid fare.
Zardari said only his party had a handle on taking the long route and the suggestion between the lines was that it requires numbers, confrontation and casualties jiyala style to make a statement.
In short, the Long March, many feel was the first real test of nerve for Zardari and given the cataclysmic shift post-March 9 last year, the theory has its merit.
However, since that Friday the 13th show ended in a fiasco — the organizational drift in not staging the promised sit-in to state the obvious — the PPP-led government was home and dry without batting an eyelid.
However, with the mercury rising from Washington over the new scheme of things devised by a new government in Islamabad to fight the war-on-terror, Zardari took off for cooler climes to bunk the beckoning U-turn back home.
The PPP co-chairman may be meeting the ‘viceroy’ in Islamabad every time she needs to fill his ears, but that does not mean he loves to hear one-sided music.
And with the looming presence of arm-twisting Richard Boucher, the US Deputy Secretary of State, who regularly invites himself to Pakistan whenever the Bush Administration feels the frontline ally is getting knottier (read in Washington as naughtier) in the terror war, Zardari  probably, feels going abroad is like coming home so that he is spared the heavy metal!
The PPP leader can proclaim innocence till kingdom come but then you don’t venture out to a decidedly tourist haven like Greece and dine in and out with the panache of a globe-trotter in Turkey just when news headlines scream that Peshawar is in the sights of bad guys up north.
Honestly, the abdication of responsibility is brazen. Few, if any, have a serious view of the Yousaf Raza Gilani government — his decision-making powers as suspect as those of his predecessor, the imported private banker, who appeared suddenly on the Pakistani map nine years ago and disappeared just as fleetingly a few months ago. In between, he served then-General Pervez Musharraf well. Never mind Pakistan!
To be fair to him, Gilani has a more rounded background of course, but having chosen to become the prime minister on the back of Zardari’s blessings, he is fated to remain in the background until and unless he develops a spine. But then, developing a spine in the face of Zardari could potentially, lead him to the back of beyond.
And so we have the spectacle of the PPP-led government finally, prostrating before the Bush Administration and wanting to engineer a shift back to combat mode against what are battle-hardened militants rather than going through with seeking peace as they were relatively successfully doing.
But in an astonishing display of abandonment, the PPP government does not want to take responsibility. It has conveniently, “gifted” the headache to Army Chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani to decide how the fight will be taken to the militants.
But more stunning than the government’s inability to run the show has been the unwillingness of the army to own up to the change. The military spokesperson has categorically stated that the army would only be implementing the policy of the civilian regime in any action they take. Obviously, the army feels that it cannot be made the scapegoat in the event of a failure to uproot a well entrenched combo of militant outfits.
Be that as it may, it is a spectacular indictment of a state, that is failing to perform its obligatory function — regardless of which arm of the executive or military one is talking about.
As it is, we have a government, which is not yet fully functional (after the PML-N withdrew its ministers from the Centre over failure to restore deposed judges), we have an army, which is stretched and tired of waging a war palpably not its own but forced at the behest of the US and few will buy the ruse that we have a genuinely functioning independent judiciary.
But nothing quite matches the predicament of a nation living on the edge following the death of hope after a brief but misplaced euphoria resulting from the February 18 polls.
If for some reason — and there are plenty of negative vibes to suggest so — the current experiment in governance goes awry, Pakistan may be facing a doomsday scenario but Zardari would likely still have the luxury to fly out, again.