President Zardari cuts a sorry Kafkaesque figure. Here’s a top political leader from the Sindh province who, quite like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (another Sindhi), has done all he can to please the military-establishment and Punjab’s political royalty, and yet he wakes up every day to find arrows, daggers and projected visions of the hangman’s noose circulating threateningly in his immediate orbit.

Just like Bhutto, and even more than Zardari’s late wife, Benazir Bhutto, he, as head of state and of his party, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), is perhaps the most overt addressee of the military-establishment’s dogmatic postures and arrogant whims.

Simply because he finally wants to put to rest the establishment’s long-held perception of the PPP being a parasitic anti-establishment party always out to destabilise the nice little picture of ‘stability’, ‘strategic balance’ and ideological robustness the establishment has build for us ignorant, anarchic civilians.

Nevertheless, as can be seen by the fast eroding pragmatic partnership between the military and Zardari’s almost four-year-old government, and the way both the new and old scions of Punjab’s power politics have been buzzing around a rather media-conscious judiciary that seems to be only eating, sleeping and breathing Zardari, one can safely suggest the attempts of yet another Sindhi leader to please the establishment has come to a naught.

But if one can’t give Zardari and his regime a lot of marks on competency, then certainly, he should at least be applauded for making a Herculean attempt to water down the Punjab-dominated establishment’s rather haughty dismissal of Sindhi politicians and post-1971 paranoia of being put on the sidelines of politics by elected civilian politicos.

Nevertheless, all this might have helped Zardari to pull off the impossible task of leading a fragmented and diverse coalition of a variety of parties for well over three years, but this still hasn’t stopped Punjab’s prominent political circles and the military-establishment to get what they are always looking for.

That something is not only about an unconditional submission by the civilian government in front of the establishment’s self-claimed mightiness (that somehow has always been more apparent well within the country’s tense borders than on or beyond it).

What the military-establishment and Punjab’s socio-political elite is also looking for is a ‘civilian’ set-up that can run the economy in such a manner that will guarantee the safety and continuity of the kind of perks and pomposity they have been enjoying, especially ever since General Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship in the 1980s.

So then, shouldn’t Zardari’s gradual fall from grace in the eyes of the establishment (and thus that of the populist conservative media?) be great news for ‘Sher-i-Punjab’  Nawaz Sharif?

Well, if Zardari has become a melancholic Kafkaesque figure, then Sharif has become the character Lennie Small from John Steinbeck’s brilliant novella ‘Of Mice and Men.’

Lennie Small is a mountainous man of big muscles and a bigger heart but a challenged mental disposition who unwittingly ends up killing a fragile little someone whom he just wanted to love and play with.

Nawaz, ever since his dramatic metamorphosis from being the light of Ziaul Haq’s life, to a deluded civilian commander of the faithful (ameer-ul-mominee), to finally becoming a bold democrat who is unafraid to challenge the military’s traditional role of interference in civilian politics, might just have become the Lennie Small character when he convinced the Supreme Court to order an inquiry into the Memogate affair.

Most probably pulled off as a stunt by Nawaz, the media-conscious superior judiciary however, gave him a lot more than he had bargained for.

Without going into the details of the controversial ruling of the court, the deal now is that the honorable court has basically approved the bypassing of the parliament’s attempt to hold an inquiry of the matter (a given in a democratic set-up) and even put an accused (still not convicted by any means) i.e. Husain Haqqani on the Exit Control List without fully hearing the argument of Haqqani’s lawyer and without waving any evidence against him.

Well, that’s that with the courts these days. They’ve been throwing out cases against known extremists and sectarian figures for ‘lack of evidence’ but were quick to stonewall Haqqani.

But, all this has ironically put Nawaz on the back foot. He might not be exhibiting the awkwardness of his self-generated dilemma, but many of his party’s leaders who began being called by the always-hyperventilating TV news channels were at pains to explain as to how a man, who had been the loudest about upholding true democratic values and the supremacy of the parliament, could suddenly be pleading the courts to undermine both?

Worse is the perceived danger that a self-claimed champ of true democracy might just have unwittingly unbolted those forces that would not only like to see the vanishing of the Zardari regime, but would also dearly like Sharif and his party to be sidelined – at least for as long as the establishment is able to neatly prepare the ground for a remote – controlled ‘tsunami’, if you know what I mean.

So yes, Nawaz may just have strangulated something he said he dearly loves. And guess who has gained from Zardari’s failing ambition of submitting to the establishment’s whims or Nawaz’s silly show of backfiring bravado and the judiciary’s selective trigger-happiness?

The answer my friend is blowing (maybe even frozen) in this winter’s chilliest of winds.

They are the rain-makers and their favorite weathermen who till the recent Nato attack in the tribal areas were being denounced as nothing more than medals and perks-loving mannequins.

Not anymore, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks to the populist media which, though rightly mourned the death of the unfortunate soldiers in the attack, somehow found these tragic deaths to be more condemnable than the deaths of those thousands of soldiers, civilians and politicians bombed, maimed and at times beheaded by religious fanatics, some of whom many believe to be the rain-makers' ‘strategic assets.’

Ah, but if many of these also include Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Afghans, et al, well, at least Muslims and not Western crusaders, right?

Yes sir, the fallen angels (especially after the embarrassing OBL incident) have (thanks to Nato and the media) once again begun feeling like Zeus and the Olympians. And some believe that the time has now come to put in place the ‘Bangladesh model’, when in reality, all we can expect is a new North Korea, or worse, a new isolated Iran (minus the oil, of course).

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.