It is becoming increasingly clear that both Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif suffer from the same syndrome: inability to learn from the past, and a false sense of security. However, in a role reversal of sorts, this time round, Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party is counting on support from the army and friendly Western governments; Sharif is being taken in by his genuine support — for the first time — among the public. Both are new to the flipped tables: People’s Party was traditionally popular with the masses and Sharif’s Muslim League with the civil-military establishment.

In the face of the wholesale arrests of opposition leaders to thwart a long march on Islamabad under the notorious Section 144 of the penal code, which is reminiscent of the colonial-time highhandedness, what Sharif is forgetting is that a soaring public support for a politician is not enough in Pakistan. The country is not all politically above board; it never has been. Often the hidden hands working behind the scenes exercise real power, and not those who seem to be in charge. Public support alone could not save Zulfikar Ali and Benazir Bhutto from meeting their tragic fates. Sharif has never been half as popular.

What Zardari is forgetting is that it’s only a matter of time when the civil-military establishment and the United States will come to sense his own unpopularity with the people and even with many in his own party, and let matters take their own course. This happened in the case of Musharraf less than a year ago. What’s to stop it from happening again to a man that neither the US nor the army has invested in for as long as they had in Musharraf? Zardari fails to realise that the Pakistan army, given its choices, never wants to be seen as acting against the will of the people, but rather as their guardian and saviour who intervenes when politicians have failed to provide stability. The US under Barack Obama is a different country from the one known to Pakistanis under George W. Bush. Washington, too, is least likely to bank on a leader who is being seen as ruling by the stick, negating his party’s democratic credentials and acting like a worse autocrat than his predecessor. During his eight years of virtual one-man rule, Musharraf had never once banned public protest against his policies, much less arrest politicians for opposing his government.

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