ISLAMABAD, Oct 23: President Asif Ali Zardari will face an early appraisal beginning on Friday when the Senate meets to debate his first address to parliament last month, on the heels of a signal government success to bring all parties around its view on combating terrorism.

Though the debate on Mr Zardari’s Sept 20 address to a joint sitting of the two houses of parliament will be a customary affair, parliamentary sources said his conduct in office for only one a half months so far, some controversial powers he continues to enjoy and the performance of the PPP-led coalition government he controls are likely to come under opposition criticism.

The ruling coalition could face a hard time against an opposition that is in majority in the 100-seat upper house, so soon after celebrating a unanimous resolution passed by both houses of parliament at the end of a prolonged secret session on Wednesday that largely endorsed the government’s line of action in fighting militancy mainly in tribal areas bordering Afghanistan and some adjoining settled districts of the North West Frontier Province.

The presidential address will be taken up at the start of the Senate session, due to begin at 10am, according to Law and Parliamentary Affairs Ministry adviser Izhar Amrohvi, and is likely to continue for several days.

There was no official information yet about any government plan for legislative business in the current session, which is likely to continue until the end of October.

There is not much left for the opposition to say about Pakistan’s role in the so-called war on terrorism after an exhaustive debate in the in-camera session of the two houses that ended on Wednesday night with a unanimous resolution that made only an ambiguous call for an “urgent review of our national security strategy” and for civilian armed forces to replace the military deployed in the troubled tribal areas “as early as possible”.

The rest was practically the approval of the government policy to have dialogue with those ready to lay down arms, seek economic and social development of the tribal regions and use selective force against those who still challenge the writ of the state.

Government negotiators succeeded in persuading the main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, to refrain from bringing a threatened parallel resolution and even allies like the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam party to fall in line after the religious party’s leadership seemed to speak for the so-called Taliban during the debate rather than for the government in which it has a share.

AUTOCRATIC POWERS: But opposition members are likely to question the government about how and when it plans to move to implement President Zardari’s own call to curtail the autocratic powers he inherited from the country’s fourth military president Pervez Musharraf but which most major political parties of the country seek to do away with.

Mr Zardari had asked parliament in his Sept 20 speech to form an all-parties committee to “revisit” the controversial clauses inserted in the constitution by General Musharraf by decree and legitimised by a compliant majority of parliament, such as those empowering the president to dissolve the National Assembly, sack a prime minister, and appoint armed forces chiefs, provincial governors and the Chief Election Commissioner.

But nothing has been done so far to form such a committee, creating fears the government might be trying to delay the issue until March when half of the Senate will be up for re-election that will likely give the ruling coalition a big majority in the upper house as well and seekers of constitutional amendments a guaranteed two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament.

JUDGES ISSUE: The highly emotive issue of superior court judges sacked by General Musharraf under his controversial Nov 3, 2007 emergency proclamation is also likely to come up in the debate along with some of the broken promises on the issue by Mr Zardari in his capacity as Pakistan People’s Party co-chairman that he keeps even after being elected as the head of state.

It would be worth hearing how legal czars like Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Farooq H. Naek and Atttorney-General Latif Khan Khosa will try to wash the blame slapped on them by a protesting legal community for their controversial roles in the affair and tell the house why Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani’s government failed to fulfil its own commitment to reinstate all these judges before deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry discloses “many things” he says he knows on his sacking’s first anniversary on Nov 3.