As I have written on Twitter, the present political turmoil in Pakistan is part of:1) A genuine push for the rule of law and 2) A complex power struggle involving at least half a dozen major actors, each of which is pursuing multiple, contradictory strategies at the same time.

One of these actors is Nawaz Sharif, who has learned the power of saying no.  In doing so, he presents a challenge to the status quo, which another actor, Washington, wants to preserve.  As a result, the administration has had to make a marked shift in its policy toward the PML-N.  It’s now more conciliatory.

This is not to the liking of some hawks in the PPP, whose political fortunes are tied to Asif Ali Zardari.  Zardari loses as Sharif gains.

Sharif has had to overcome negative reputation of him in Washington that emerged during the Bush administration. Those challenges remain.  To further them and stifle any compromise by Washington in Sharif’s favor, a Pakistani insider informed me that elements in the PPP are working to present Sharif as a religious fundamentalist, in order to discredit him among the DC Beltway crowd.

We see the fruits of this aggressive tactic of the PPP hawks in Mort Kondracke’s column today in Roll Call.

Kondracke writes:

Sharif, often identified as a “religious nationalist,” was a protege of Islamist military dictator Zia Ul Haq. He accused former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of being a “Zionist-Hindu traitor” and, as prime minister, pushed a law to establish Sharia.

The irony is that the unelected PPP figure who fed this story to Kondracke was himself an adviser to Sharif during this phase of his career.  He is now a self-described liberal.

The reality is that Sharif, like the preponderance of Pakistan’s politicians, is a pragmatist.  He is a center-right politician.  He often makes coalitions with the hard right and Islamists and panders to them.  But he is as pragmatic/opportunistic as Zardari and the former Sharif adviser now affiliated with the PPP.

Politicians are politicians.  They remake themselves according to changing contexts and Sharif has done that since 2006.  If political actors were static, then the individual who fed this story to Kondracke would remain a violent Islamist as he was during his student days.

Some characteristics, however, do not change.  This unelected PPP official likely fed the story on the alleged George Clooney-Fatima Bhutto relationship to the National Enquirer.  He’s the only PPP official with that much of an awareness of the broad U.S. media scene.  In an example of continuity, this man is believed to have fed ‘scandalous’ photos of the late Benazir Bhutto and her mother, Nusrat, during an election campaign.  He was a Sharif adviser at the time and would, several defections later, become a Bhutto adviser.  As progressive as he claims to be, he seems to routinely use sexuality to defame female politicians.

PS: The end result of all this political turmoil is that Chief of Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani is involved in the political process now more than ever.