IT was a new Zardari who greeted me late on Tuesday night at the Zardari House in Islamabad. He seemed to have shed at least about five years since I last saw him around this time last year outside an anti-terrorist court in Rawalpindi. He had a collarbone support then and walked with the help of crutches. On Tuesday he seemed more than fit for a polo match up in Shindor. The few weeks that he had spent with his family in Dubai seemed to have done him a lot of good, healthwise.

But in terms of personality I didn’t see much change in him. He is the same old Asif whom I had met a number of times in the PM House in the 1990s, or the one I saw undergoing the ordeal of a long imprisonment. Full of over-confidence, a Mr Know-all, quick-witted and always ready with a repartee. No ifs or buts in his words.

“You people started taking notice of my ordeal only after Nawaz Sharif had left for Jeddah,” he said with a twinkle in his eyes. He, however, did not sound bitter about his eight-year-long incarceration.

When someone asked what was the guarantee that after coming to power he would not do to his political opponents what the present regime is doing to him and his party workers, without batting an eyelid and sounding as if he had already won the election and was about to step into the PM House, he said: “Only an independent judiciary manned by persons known for their honesty and integrity and appointed by a parliamentary committee made up of members from both the treasury and the opposition, can ensure that and I know we can do it”.

If one went by what he is saying, he seems to have been sent home by Benazir Bhutto to test the domestic limits of President Musharraf’s ‘enlightened moderation’. But in the first flush his arrival caused a number of side-effects — some good and some not so good. It forced the Chaudhry brothers to press the panic button the PML(N) to threaten to leave the ARD and many PPP-P leaders to feel alienated by his quick-fire conciliatory remarks.

In Asif’s opinion Gen Musharraf would reach the limits of his enlightened moderation in 90 days after which, he said, the government would either have his bail cancelled or it would level some new charges against him and throw him back into jail. He wants to keep the pressure mounting on the Punjab government. He expects active assistance from civil society in building this pressure. He went even to the extent of hoping that mediapersons would also join in and court arrest in support of the PPP-led movement for the restoration of democracy. Asif seemingly believes that in due course of time enough political pressure would be built on the general from the streets to force him to negotiate with the PPP the terms of transfer of power.

He says there is no dialogue going on between the establishment and the PPP, but hastens to add that his party is all for a dialogue with the powers that be because, in his opinion, it is only through such a dialogue that the needed political space could be created for the army to go back to barracks. To him an early, fair and free election conducted by a reconstituted (independent?) Election Commission was a prerequisite for a smooth transition from military to civilian rule.

The seemingly panicky response of the Punjab government to Asif’s arrival and his decision to do his politics from Lahore has certainly boosted the political fortunes of the PPP immensely. Its workers seem to have been galvanized on a countrywide basis. This perhaps will help the PPP to an extent in the forthcoming local bodies elections. But it would be totally wrong to interpret this positive but seemingly fleeting change in PPP’s fortunes to mean that the party is now in a position to pose a serious challenge to Gen Musharraf’s political fortunes. Unless there was an effort to create the impression that there was no deal, the Chaudhry brothers, by being so harsh on Asif and his workers, were perhaps only trying to prove to the president that the PPP was no more a popular party and, therefore, he did not need to woo its leadership for taking his concept of enlightened moderation to the people at large.

If one read correctly the political moves of President Musharraf, it appears as if he is trying to acquire, before or soon after the next general elections, a position for himself similar, if not identical, to that of the French president, of course without the uniform. In other words, he seems to want to get elected to the office of the president directly by the people without having to be beholden to any of the political parties. He would perhaps welcome competition in this election from a candidate put up by the MMA, but would like very much to have on his side all liberal political parties, including the PML(Q), PML(N) and the PPP.

The trade-off, which president Musharraf is offering to Benazir is: first join the other ‘secular’ political parties to get him elected to the office of the president by direct vote and then you would be allowed to come back home and participate in electoral politics, even contest for the office of the prime minister. Benazir has so far not taken the bait. She wants the general to first remove the hurdles in the way of her return and repeal the laws that bar her from becoming the prime minister for the third time. Then alone would she offer her vote bank to Gen Musharraf to become an all-powerful directly elected president without the uniform. It appears to be a chicken-and-egg proposition and only time will tell who blinks first.

WASHINGTON: From the redoubt of his retirement, former secretary of state Colin Powell is beginning to exact revenge. His sterling reputation was soiled, having lost most of the important battles within the administration during the first term. While he lamented that he had been “deceived” into presenting false information before the United Nations to justify the Iraq war, he acted as the good soldier to the end, giving every sign of desiring to fade away.

But now he has re-emerged to conduct a campaign to defeat President Bush’s nomination of conservative hardliner and former undersecretary of state John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN.

In seeking to prevent the bullying and duplicitous ideologue from representing the US before the international organization, Powell is engaging in hand-to-hand combat with his successor. Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s first true test has not arrived from abroad. Caught by Powell’s flanking movement, she is trapped in a crisis of credibility, which she herself is deepening.

Powell’s closest associate, his former deputy Richard Armitage, is orchestrating much of the action. Wavering senators are directed to call Powell, who briefs them on Bolton’s demerits. Powell’s former chief of staff, Lawrence B Wilkerson, has surfaced to give an interview to the New York Times, declaring that Bolton would be “an abysmal ambassador”.

Other former foreign-service officers have queued up to provide ever uglier details of Bolton’s career as a “serial abuser” and “a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy”, as Carl W Ford Jr, the former director of intelligence at the state department, described him before the Senate foreign relations committee.

Rice’s response to the seemingly endless stream of witnesses has been to order state department senior staff to stanch the flow of adverse stories.

“This whole building knows how Bolton dealt with people,” a dismayed senior state department official told me. “If she is sending a different signal than Powell sent that will be difficult. The muzzle is being put on, the damage is being done. To the extent it’s buttoned up here, it’s dangerous for the secretary. Powell and Armitage created an environment of accountability about treatment of the staff. Any kind of allegation that you did things like Bolton did was death in the foreign service. Persons were removed. Now she’s trying to be a team player, trying to support someone Powell ostracised.”

Indeed, last year Powell and Rice had a confrontation over an allegation that a national security council officer close to Rice, Robert Blackwill, had physically assaulted a female foreign-service officer. Initially, Rice tried to protect him, but Powell and Armitage presented the evidence to her and told her that if she didn’t discipline Blackwill the matter would be made public. Blackwill was forced to resign.

And after Bolton attempted to coerce a state department intelligence officer to agree to an unfounded report about nonexistent Cuban WMD, Powell personally assembled the entire intelligence staff to instruct them to ignore Bolton. When the British foreign secretary Jack Straw complained to Powell that Bolton was obstructing negotiations with Iran on the development of nuclear weapons, Powell ordered Bolton to be cut out of the process, telling an aide: “Get a different view.” The British also objected to Bolton’s interference in talks with Libya, and again Powell removed Bolton. But as much as he may have wanted to, Powell could not dismiss him because of his powerful patron: Vice-President Cheney.

The Bolton confirmation hearings have revealed his constant efforts to undermine Powell on Iran and Iraq, Syria and North Korea. They have also exposed a most curious incident that has triggered the administration’s stonewall reflex. The foreign relations committee has discovered that Bolton made a highly unusual request and gained access to 10 intercepts by the National Security Agency, which monitors worldwide communications, of conversations involving past and present government officials. Whose conversations did Bolton secretly secure and why?

Staff members on the committee believe that Bolton was probably spying on Powell, his senior advisers and other officials reporting to him on diplomatic initiatives that Bolton opposed. If so, it is also possible that Bolton was sharing this top-secret information with his neoconservative allies within the Pentagon and the vice-president’s office, with whom he was in daily contact and who were known to be working in league against Powell.

If the intercepts are released they may disclose whether Bolton was a key figure in a counter-intelligence operation run inside the Bush administration against the secretary of state, who would resemble the hunted character played by Will Smith in Enemy of the State. Both Republican and Democratic senators have demanded that the state department, which holds the NSA intercepts, turn them over to the committee. But Rice so far has refused. What is she hiding by her cover-up? Rice’s rise has been dependent on her unwavering devotion to the president; in the Bolton case, she is again elevating loyalty to her leader above all else. Will Powell lose once more? But this episode points beyond the general’s revenge, Rice’s fealty, Bolton’s contempt or even presidential prerogative, to a gathering storm over constitutional government.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service