What is happening now is something that Benazir Bhutto wanted right from the start: an understanding with General Musharraf when he seized power three years ago. Welcoming the October coup Bhutto let out feelers suggesting that she was not averse to cooperating with the newly-installed military government. But in the first flush of success Musharraf was riding not just a high horse but the wind itself.

Arriving on the national scene on an agenda of politician-bashing, he attributed all the country's ills to the political class. In the past, he famously declared, Pakistan had had only 'sham' democracy. He, the man of the moment, would give it 'real' democracy in which there would be no room for Benazir Bhutto. And of course none for Nawaz Sharif, whom he had ousted from power and imprisoned.

This was then. A different tune is playing now. With reality knocking at the gates of the military government, the very politicians earlier lambasted and even demonized are now being wooed and courted. Nawaz Sharif and his party, the PML-N, of course remain off-limits because there is no making any peace with them. Besides, in the recent elections the PML-N was cut down to size. (No point in asking how.) In the game of government formation its dozen and a half members do not really matter.

But behind the smokescreen of confusion laid out in Islamabad - and even experts will acknowledge it is a thick one - a mighty effort is on to settle matters with the PPP and bring it in from the cold. The key to the solution of the stalemate in the capital lies not with the clerics of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal. They have too much working against them. Will Musharraf's American patrons accept a cleric of the MMA as prime minister of their most valued ally, Pakistan? The sun will have to rise from the west before they are ready to do so.

No, the key to the puzzle lies with the PPP whose leader, the jack-in-the box Ms Bhutto, has gone laughing all the way to the United States. Pay tribute to her sense of geography. While the rest of Pakistan's political hopefuls are holed up in Islamabad or Lahore, she has placed herself where it matters the most: the forward trenches in Washington.

We have to get one thing straight. Unlike Musharraf and Sharif who are sworn enemies, there is no basic quarrel between Musharraf and Bhutto. There never was. Only prejudice and misplaced arrogance turned Musharraf against the PPP leader. Apart from having done nothing to offend him, Bhutto reasoned from the sensible premise that she and Musharraf had a common enemy in Nawaz Sharif. Only when her overtures were spurned and she was treated with contempt did she train her guns on the military government.

But Musharraf has had to come down to earth. With his Q Leaguers in no position to form a government on their own after the elections, it is he who now stands in need of a deal.

What can be the outline of such a deal, if indeed one is being brokered? Obviously a share of the loaves and fishes, including the prime ministership for the PPP. Sacrificing the Q League frontrunner, Jamali, at the altar of necessity is no big deal. Who is Jamali in any case? Someone who should be grateful for all the free publicity he is getting.

As for Shujaat and Pervez Elahi, isn't it enough that they get, or Pervez gets, the mansabdari of Punjab? What more can they want? What more do they deserve? Provincial-level fixers raised to the level of national mahatmas. They should be satisfied with this. No, the Chaudhrys of Gujrat can never be an obstacle to military planning. Supreme pragmatists, there is not an ounce of rebellion in their backbones. They suffered petty humiliation at the hands of Shahbaz Sharif when he was chief minister of Punjab but kept their anger in check. Their style is to bide their time, not jump the gun. I write at some length about them because I admire their style.

Naturally enough, a deal will also have to include some sort of amnesty for the erstwhile Prince of Darkness now thoroughly rehabilitated in the public eye because of the stoic, even heroic, manner in which he has faced his almost six years in jail: Asif Ali Zardari. Two evenings ago I heard on the nine o'clock TV news that Mr Zardari was to appear in court the next day and that except in the so-called BMW case he had got bail in all other cases. My, my, I said to myself, since when was Pakistan Television so interested in the progress of Mr Zardari's bail applications?

Will relief for Zardari be surprising in any way? It shouldn't be. Accountability under Musharraf began as a hamhanded exercise. Soon enough it was transformed into a totally selective exercise, politicos willing to play ball or join the Q League being spared its rigours. In any event, the day the Chaudhrys of Gujrat were dry-cleaned and given a clean chit by the military government all the high-flowing talk surrounding accountability went out of the window. After that, pardon in corruption cases fell within the political not the moral domain.

Zardari has seen the wheel coming full circle before. After the overthrow of his wife's first government in 1990 he was put behind bars on corruption charges. Three years later as his tormentors in government fell on their own swords, bringing the government down with them, he was released and straightaway made a federal minister. From the scaffold to the side of his beloved: if in recent years this verse of Faiz has fitted anyone it is Asif Zardari.

But for any deal to be clinched will require flexibility and some vision on the part of our military rulers. So far Musharraf has shared power with only his American patrons, sovereignty in the Islamic Republic as far as strategic matters are concerned lying divided between Islamabad and Washington. But at home and while dealing with domestic issues - that is, those issues not related to America's great war on terrorism - he has been very much his own master, with only an occasional glance cast in the direction of his corps commanders.

All the mess with which the domestic arena is littered - the birth of the Q League, the holding of the glorious referendum, the arbitrary ingenuity sewn into the fabric of the Legal Framework Order, the conduct of the recent elections - is Musharraf's own handiwork, its proprietorship belonging solely to him. Now for the first time he is facing the necessity of sharing the reins of domestic sovereignty with someone else.

In order to conquer he never had to stoop before. Washington is another matter but we are not talking of Washington. On the home front there was no necessity of stooping. But if he is to salvage something from the wreck of all his political engineering, he must make peace with some of his former enemies.

The Q League is his and will do his bidding. With the MMA he can settle very little because for that he needs an NOC from Washington which in the circumstances won't be forthcoming. It is with Bhutto and Zardari that he must fashion his grand compromise. Luckily for him this will involve no loss of face because he had no real dispute with either of them.

But what the French call cohabitation, can it work in our circumstances? It came to grief in the eighties and nineties when presidential and prime ministerial ambitions clashed with each other. But all this lies in the future. For the present what matters is resolving the stalemate born of the recent elections.

The bottom line is that Musharraf can't impose his own solution. He can't have his cake and eat it too. He has to meet the newly-elected National Assembly half-way if he is to save his rickety enterprise. (That it is rickety even the gods will testify.) Will he have the sense to do what none of his military predecessors ever did before him? This is the most important question facing Pakistan today.