U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson met with Aitzaz Ahsan today. She lobbied him to accept Pervez Musharraf’s latest offer to his opponents: abandon moves to restore Iftikhar Chaudhry to the Supreme Court and I’ll give up my power to dissolve the parliament.

In a February Senate Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Sen. Russ Feingold asked Assistant Secretary of State John Negroponte, “Does the administration have a policy regarding the reinstatement of those [deposed] judges?”

Negroponte’s reply was characteristically murky, but intended to give the impression of being in the negative: “We have not..we have been silent on this subject…to the best of my knowledge.”

It should also be noted that in November, Lahore Consul General Bryan D. Hunt reportedly went around the city telling its elite that the Supreme Court had made some wrong decisions and needed to be stopped. And in December, Negroponte reportedly pressured Benazir Bhutto to stop speaking out in favor of restoring the judges.

Is the Bush administration neutral on the judges issue? I think not.