It is hard to identify the one issue which defined 2017.

Was it the year of Panama or, more accurately, the year Nawaz Sharif got disqualified?

Or should it be seen as the year in which Maryam Nawaz entered the PML-N scene officially by leading her mother’s election campaign and then becoming a member of the party’s CEC?

Or was 2017 the year the friction between Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif and their offspring became quite public?

And, then, amid all this Sharif stuff, was it the year Imran Khan made political headway?

Or was it the year when he came close to watching his PTI derailed but got away with a Supreme Court verdict that raised a few eyebrows?

In truth, all these issues get pushed to the second position; in retrospect, 2017 will be seen as the year the tension between Nawaz Sharif and the military turned into a full-fledged war.

The news story leak affair and the fracas over the tweet by the DG ISPR, which was finally withdrawn, is when the lines were drawn, so to speak.

The military may have had to retreat then, but there is no doubt that it had decided to fight another day.

And the day came sooner rather than later.

The Supreme Court included military officials in the JIT formed to look into Nawaz Sharif’s family fortune.

The JIT report provided incriminating evidence on the basis of which Nawaz Sharif was finally disqualified.

And while many spoke of conspiracies and powers that be, for once these ‘powers’ were legally and publicly made part of the investigation team probing and interrogating the first family.

If there were still any doubts about the war taking place, the PML-N itself provided the rest of the evidence by its talk about invisible forces and namaloom afraad who allegedly made WhatsApp calls.

And once the prime minister was disqualified, the ruling party’s attacks on unknown and invisible forces only intensified.

Civil-military tensions continued to hog the limelight almost always all through the year.

Indeed, it was this civil-military chasm which led to a variety of cracks within the PML-N – between the senior Sharif and Nisar Ali Khan; between the elder brother and Shahbaz (who, like Nisar, feels that the party should refrain from exacerbating relations with the military) and between Nawaz Sharif and his parliamentarians – who, like Sharif junior, would like to keep their heads low and make it to the general elections instead of launching verbal attacks on ‘unknown enemies’ which are said to serve little purpose apart from riling up the military rank and file.

That most of the party’s senior leadership (at least the elected lot) sides not with Nawaz Sharif (even if it cannot state this publicly) is evident.

The elected lot wants to lie low, cause no crisis and reach the next elections as unscathed as possible.

That their chief is the main reason they may not escape unhurt is what they would rather not speak of.

As a federal minister, who had been part of Nawaz Sharif’s cabinet and is now also in the current one, said, “It is essential for parliament to complete its terms and ensure a second democratic transition”.

Nothing should be allowed to interfere with this second seminal moment, he added.

And this from a man, who, in public, has fumed about the namaloom afraad more than once.

Indeed, it is this civil-military friction that dominated 2017.

But for this, Panama, and even Nawaz Sharif’s disqualification, may not have led to such heated debates about his survival or elimination.

Regardless of whether one is predicting Nawaz Sharif’s survival or departure, the point of departure is his relationship with the military establishment and not his disqualification or his alleged corruption or the troubles within the family.

In other words, the soothsayers predict Nawaz Sharif’s future based on whether or not they think the military has the ability to influence politics, completely or partially.

With its dominance of Punjab – at the national and provincial level – most find it hard not to believe that the PML-N would lose so badly that it would reduce its two-third majority to a minority in the Punjab and National Assembly.

Neither is the PTI so organised that it could sweep a province it scraped a handful of seats from in 2013.

But add the civil-military tensions to the electoral mix and the fear is that the establishment may work over time to prevent the PML-N from winning Punjab – a fear that seemed more tangible when the so called ‘electables’ of southern Punjab (who are less dependent on the party ticket for a win than their colleagues from upper and central Punjab) lashed out at their own government and even staged a walkout or two from parliament.

The sudden emergence of the Barelvi clerics in NA-120 and NA-4 as well as their onslaught on Islamabad was seen as part of the same ‘plan’.

This is the main reason some of the major questions that were asked all the year round continue to remain unanswered.

Would Nawaz Sharif be able to return to politics; will Maryam Nawaz take over the party; what would happen to Shahbaz Sharif and Hamza Shahbaz; what the rhetoric of the father and daughter will mean for the party’s performance in the coming election?

In fact, the fear of the namaloom afraad has also led to considerable speculation that the elections may never be held and the arrival of a technocratic government.

And aiding such rumours was the deadlock over the bill for holding the elections under provisional census results.

Only in the farcical politics of Pakistan could the census results (one step forward) be seen as a hurdle to democracy (two steps backwards).

The census was finally held this year but its results came too late for the government to finalise them and carry out new delimitation, while the Constitution says that once the census has been carried out, an election cannot be held on the basis of the previous census.

Hence, the government drafted a bill to hold the election on the basis of the provisional results without changing the total number of seats in parliament.

However, this bill, which was passed by the National Assembly, got stuck in the Senate thanks to the opposition of the PPP.

Those who feared (or welcomed) a delay in election pointed to this legal hurdle – according to them, this legal loophole would have allowed the Supreme Court to delay elections, putting in place a technocratic setup (the Court’s stomach for such an intervention is of course irrelevant).

The murmurings about this were circulating in the capital for a few months.

Fortunately, the parties finally reached an agreement and passed the bill on December 19.

However, this does not mean that the rumours about a non-democratic setup have died down.

Many continue to parrot the technocratic setup line, arguing that even Imran Khan is not doing much to curb such rumours.

While the paths to this setup may vary, most agree that D-day will come before March 2018.

This is not just because Islamabad is a capital that lurches from rumour to rumour, but also because the civil-military fault-line remains in place.

And it is this fault-line that has led to the fault-lines and uncertainty within the PML-N and also to the uncertainty about the longevity of the political system.

The season of uncertainty is not about to end soon.