IT is uncanny how generals in charge of the Pakistan military start to resemble each other. Despite the contrast between the verbose, blunt and arrogant Musharraf and his laconic and publicity-shy successor, the two men seemed remarkably similar on Thursday night when Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani announced the extension in the tenure of Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

It was difficult during that short speech to remember that there is a difference in a general-president signing his own extension orders and an elected prime minister pretending to decide that he gave a chief of army three more years. The well-known professional soldier — who only had the welfare of his men and the reputation of the institution he led at heart — could hardly be distinguished from the man who went so far as to declare an emergency in Pakistan in his capacity as chief of army staff — the constitution allows only the president to impose an emergency.

But then that is what happens when individuals develop the saviour complex. The less gracious would even call it a delusion that one man in a khaki uniform (rather than just any khaki-clad man) is indispensable for this nation. And both the (similar) stories of Kayani and Musharraf do prove that this sense or delusion follows close on the heels of the military man's politicisation. Indeed, Musharraf may have dived straight into the dirty pool of politics after carrying out a coup in full public view but Kayani has also not been able to resist the temptation. The only difference, to carry the analogy through, has been that the current chief has waded in towards the deep end slowly and unobtrusively.

Yet he is there now — swimming past all the political players and to deny it is to deny the role of the military in Pakistani politics. Kayani's intervention which defused the crisis on the night of the long march in 2009, his constant interaction with politicians, late-night sessions with journalists, calling the federal ministers to the GHQ for meetings, all of this is no different to what his predecessor did. The only difference between the quiet professional and his voluble predecessor is that the former has managed to bring the political class to heel far more effectively than the bumbling Musharraf. And this was brought home when Gilani gave his speech about Kayani's future.

The announcement by the prime minister did not address a trivial matter about which general would lead the Pakistan Army for the next three years. It was, in fact, an acknowledgment of the politicians' defeat. They have now publicly accepted the real masters, who continue to parade as friends so many years on.

This was not always the case. Just take the last interlude of democracy — from 1988 to 1999, the two main leaders (and one of them had been brought in politics by one general, Ziaul Haq, and then turned into a political leader by another, Gen Aslam Beg) spent each short term of theirs fighting a turf war with the military. Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in their first terms took on the army chief, Beg, and paid for it with their prime ministerships. But this did not stop them from meddling; Sharif went so far in his efforts eventually that he lost a major battle and had to go into self-exile.

In doing so, they were only following the time-honoured tradition set by their democratic predecessor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who also tried to exercise his powers — by changing the chief of staff not once but twice and ordering the Hamoodur Rehman Commission Report, which looked into the military's role in East Pakistan.

That past now does seem another country; the democratic dispensation that has evolved over the past two years has, with Gilani's announcement, announced a new political contract — in which the political forces have accepted that their place is on constitution avenue and not beyond. They do not even dare to see if their reach extends to the GHQ.

The initial attempts by the PPP government such as the effort to bring the ISI under its ambit were checkmated with such ease and ruthlessness by the khakis that the political class has learnt that its survival, for the present at least, lies in complete surrender. Hence when GHQ raised an eyebrow over the wording of the Kerry Lugar Bill, the party's foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, hot-footed it to Washington to get a clarification.

Rhetoric aside, the PML-N is no brave heart either. The news of Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif trotting off to get his knuckles rapped by the army chief after he made a silly plea to the Taliban to spare Punjab makes one yearn, a little, for the power-drunk party that believed in its democratic right to send not just Jehangir Karamat but also Musharraf home. And if more proof is needed of the League's subservience, just listen to the silence that emanated from the party over Kayani's extension; the PML-N is not even willing to comment on the issue according to a report in Dawn.

It is too soon to tell if the politicians have been tamed and domesticated for good or is it just that they have decided that the times do not make a face-off with the military feasible as it perhaps was in the last phase. It will take time to pass a judgment on that but for the moment the military is now accepted as the master, presiding over this little world of its making (with some help from Washington of course).

A 'troika' (or a quartet as the prime minister put it the other day) is no longer an adequate word for the political system; at best the politicians, the judiciary and perhaps the media form the three players all of whom have now accepted the supreme adjudicator. It is the end of politics in Pakistan the way Francis Fukuyama once predicted the end of history in the world — it is the end because there are now no two sides confronting each other.