In a widely anticipated development, Nawaz Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League (N) have decided to leave the coalition government that they’d formed with the Pakistan People’s Party. This was anticipated because the PML-N and the PPP are the two main rival political parties in Pakistan. Their coalition has been driven by a shared opposition to Pervez Musharraf’s continued period of quasi-rule by the military, but with him resigning and new presidential elections scheduled that will return the country to full civilian rule it’s natural that the two major civilian political parties would work as government and opposition rather than as a nonsensical coalition.

For reasons that have always seemed to me to have more to do with Benazir Bhutto’s large number of college chums holding influential jobs in the United States than any policy reason, the U.S. has long seemed more comfortable with the PPP than with the PML-N. So in the event that the PPP loses the power — which will surely happen at some point — it’ll be interesting to see the American reaction. Indeed, the fact that the civilian government Musharraf overthrew was a PML-N one seems to me to have had something do with with the American elite’s relative comfort with his dictatorship until Bhutto decided to step-up her level of democracy activism.