PERHAPS the most worrisome aspect of any crisis in Pakistan is the fact that the government does not inspire enough public confidence or even that much positive expectation. Yet, it would almost certainly survive a vote of confidence in the House unless President Zardari signalled otherwise.

The prime minister and the cabinet take their line from him and so do PPP-linked coalition governments in the provinces. It is unfortunate that despite the NRO Mr Zardari did not feel secure enough to settle for anything less than the constitutional safeguards-accorded presidential incumbency. He indirectly wields the prime minister's powers from the presidential office and advances party interest likewise. This is a complete distortion of the democratic vision of 2008 that helped propel him to office, and is bound to have consequences.

The PPP is secure at the level of central government control. It has enough coalitional elements to play with to get its way; especially if the overriding interest with parliamentarians remains personal. National consensus is the avowed and quite appropriate conventional wisdom. But if the PPP is making no distinction between party and national politics interests and readings, attaining consensus may become a totalitarian rather than pluralistic achievement.

Consequently, the PML-N as a substantial oppositional element is popularly reassuring. Whether it can hang on to the new-found maturity of judgment in its approach to national politics and also stay at the top officially in provincial Punjab politics is another matter. And so political question marks continue to surround Pakistan's most developed province. The PML-N has virtually no parliamentary presence in the other provinces, yet no one can deny its standing as a national mainstream party equivalent to the PPP.

This is yet another anomaly in Pakistan's current democratic configurations. It may well derive from the fact that the 2008 elections were conceived in the matrix of a Musharraf-Benazir deal but conducted in the traumatised aftermath of Benazir's monstrous assassination.

Despite its awesome provincial parliamentary strength, the PPP does not dominate Sindh as of yore because it woos the MQM in the National Assembly. It cannot be seen as trampling on the MQM's urban power. Nonetheless, everyone has a stake in cosmopolitan Karachi. Mutual containment is now garbed in Pakhtun-Mohajir ethnic tensions, competing mafias and gang warfare for territorial space and rights to provide 'protection'. April has shown how conflicted the administration in Karachi is and how ugly the city's face can turn within moments.

In the national perspective the challenge to law and order is being perceived almost entirely in terrorist and Taliban garb. Street tensions simmering and boiling over in Pakistan's premier city and port dramatically remind us that violent Muslim fundamentalism is not the only threat to the government's writ. To be carrying on about the Talibanisation of Karachi is as much of a misleading simplification as to be muttering on about Jinnahpur. Civil law-enforcement efforts seem inadequate whatever the problem; and people doubt honesty of purpose and will when the crisis of the moment is addressed in terms of political points to be gained or lost.

If at one level the government fails to command confidence because it appears helpless, at another it raises doubts because it does not take the people into confidence.

Uncertainties obscure the general understanding of the government's actual preferences when it comes to the country's defining relations with America and India — which are vitally linked to what both those countries consider to be Pakistan's defining crisis with Talibanism. Is Pakistan handling its Islamic substance in parameters defined by what has been its arch enemy? Without being hawks and fanatics every citizen needs to know.

Parliament's significant foreign policy session held months ago was largely and justifiably in camera. But the official statement at the conclusion was waffle. The ship of state is being steered and that is all people know. Perhaps Gen Kayani is captain and President Zardari helmsman or vice versa. Perhaps they have the same views, perhaps they don't. How are mystified common citizens supposed to be 'fully on board backing up the government' as they are constantly urged to be? The prime minister's address to the nation on action in Swat was received with much the same public reservations as his pronouncement on the restoration of the deposed judiciary.

We are used to thinking of the civil/military factor in politics as either/or alternatives. In the post-Zia democratic government the civil and military had a known content. Mindsets were clear and distinct. Today (as Gen Aslam Beg initially did post Zia) Gen Kayani recognises that Musharraf's overkill rendered the army face in civil politics untenable. Yet, when India was coming down heavy on Pakistan's army after the Mumbai Taj terrorist attack in November last year, Pakistanis were relieved when the military showed spine.

In March 2009 the lawyers' long march was setting out for Islamabad and gaining a political backing and popular momentum that isolated a government determined to frustrate the campaign. Things seemed headed for an intolerable use of force. If the army had been called out could it have refused? Events never came to a head for an answer. Whether the pressures attributed to the US secretary of state and the COAS were latent or applied or merely supposed, despite their weariness with military and American interventionism, people were pleased the situation was defused. But the fundamental questions it encapsulated remain unanswered.

The government shirks the issues that it came to office riding on. Article 58-2(b) and Balochistan are examples. Why is there no progress in constitutional provincial autonomy and redress? How, when, why, and by whom is the army to be deployed within Pakistan on its citizens? Official statements remain inadequate.

At present we have a failed government not a failed state. Rather than assume that we have exhausted our democratic political alternatives or permit civil/military fascism to become our execrable lot we need recourse to fresh elections. They are an expensive business. But the cost of civil disarray is higher.