Conducted between March 7 and 30, it’s a grim one from an American perspective. More Pakistanis believe the United States was behind last year’s Mumbai terrorist attacks (20 percent) than believe the Pakistani anti-Indian terrorist group Lashkar e-Toiba — whom India accuses of culpability in the mass murder — was responsible (seven percent). As Holbrooke stated, there’s a strong base of support for the Swat deal that left the Taliban effectively in charge of the Swat Valley, with 80 percent backing it and 74 percent believing it will bring peace to the region, which it manifestly didn’t. Over half of Pakistani respondents, 56 percent, support similar accomodations with the Taliban “in areas such as Karachi, Multan, Quetta or Lahore.”

Support for President Asif Ali Zardari is a dismal 19 percent, which is unchanged since IRI’s previous poll from last October. His opposition, Nawaz Sharif, has skyrocketed from a 15 percent favorability rating to  75 percent. I suppose it’s fair to say that the Pakistanis are looking for a civilian savior after disillusionment with Zardari — and it’s worth noting that this poll was conducted amidst Sharif’s “Long March” standoff with the president — since 77 percent of Pakistanis prefer an unprosperous democracy to a military dictatorship that provides peace, land and bread. Perhaps that’s why Holbrooke talked more this morning about supporting a generic Pakistani democracy than about supporting the Zardari government. (Did I mention that government has a 79 percent disapproval rating?)

From a counterinsurgency perspective, this might be the most important finding in the poll:

When asked if they felt that their economic well being would improve or worsen during the upcoming year, the number saying that they thought it would improve increased 15 points to 29 percent, while the number saying that they thought their economic situation would worsen dropped 23 points to 36 percent, as compared to the October 2008 poll.  Although the majority of Pakistanis’ still felt pessimistic about their economic future, this gap has closed considerably.

Hope is a funny thing in counterinsurgency. It raises expectations and introduces an element of impatience with the gap between desire and reality. Counterinsurgents have to move expeditiously to match them, and that can explain Holbrooke’s fervent endorsement of the Kerry-Lugar Senate aid bill for Pakistan. That said, these are still dismal numbers the prospects for material improvement, and the refugee flows coming from the Pakistani counteroffensive against the Taliban can only provide more grist for perceptions of economic deterioration.

“Look at [Secretary of State Hilary Clinton]‘s comments over the  last week to the effect that the Zardari government has abdicated and that the Taliban move toward Islamabad is a ‘mortal threat’ to the  U.S. and the world,” a former U.S. intelligence official told The Cable on condition of anonymity. “This sets the stage for a nod to [Pakistani Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Pervez] Kiyani, if it  becomes necessary.  The administration will have to deal with a Congress that just loves elections, but has never learned that though the Pakistanis are pretty good at elections, they are pretty sorry at running a democracy.  Watch the SecState’s comments, and those of the president.”

But a military coup is a difficult thing for the United States to accept, especially after the former secretary of state and the vice president spent the past several years inveighing against Pervez Musharraf’s military dictatorship and issuing calls for the renewal of Pakistani democracy. (Or maybe they just meant they liked Benazir Bhutto personally.) Why bother pressuring Musharraf out of power in the first place if his replacement is to be another military strongman who’s probably not even as strong? Musharraf, I understand, really did have great support from the officer corps; I don’t have any idea about Kiyani.

The Times reports there’s another option — one the United States hasn’t often wanted to accept:

As American confidence in the Pakistani government wanes, the Obama administration is reaching out more directly than before to Nawaz Sharif, the chief rival of Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani president, administration officials said Friday.

For the life of me, I haven’t ever understood why the United States under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush kept Sharif at arm’s length. The rap that the United States and British papers always have on him but rarely explain is that he’s “too close” to the “Islamists.” Well, compared to what? He’s not the MMA, an Islamist political coalition, and he’s certainly not the Taliban. He also did an excellent job of making himself the champion of Pakistani democratic aspirations through the Long March against Zardari to get Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry reinstated. And the Obama administration apparently thinks Sharif’s closeness to the Islamist currents in Pakistan is a net benefit:

The official said the administration wanted to broker an agreement not so much to buoy Mr. Zardari personally, but to accomplish what the administration believes Pakistan must do. “The idea here is to tie Sharif’s popularity to things we think need to be done, like dealing with the militancy,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity to speak more candidly about American differences with Pakistan’s government.

Still, who has any confidence in America’s ability to manipulate the shape and then the function of the Pakistani government, even presuming it’s a necessary thing to attempt?

By calling Sharif last weekend, a senior Pakistani official close to Zardari said, Clinton further weakened the government.

The administration’s intervention, the official said, “has lasting implications for how much the Zardari government is going to go out on a limb for the U.S., for how much we will trust them.”

This is more significant for what it reveals about Zardari than anything else. For three weeks, Zardari was on the receiving end of popular anger over breaking his promise to reinstate Iftikhar Chaudhry as chief justice, and Sharif was on the precipice of leading a popular movement to Zardari’s front door. Zardari’s political allies were using words like “endgame” to describe his government. Today, he’s still president. The “Long March” has dispersed. Sharif has no obvious issue to raise against him, at least in the near term. For Zardari to be looking for ways to spite Clinton says a fair amount about his ability to see a bigger picture, and that in turn says quite a bit about his reliability as an ally.

Meet re-Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. His reinstatement meets the basic demand of Nawaz Sharif’s Long March to Islamabad. What’s more, Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani announced that the government will petition for the reversal of a ruling from last month forbidding both Sharif and his brother for running for office. As a result, Sharif just now called off the Long March. Crisis apparently averted. (h/t Juan Cole.)

This is pretty much exactly what the Obama administration doesn’t want: widespread political instability in Pakistan on the eve of its revamped Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy.

There’s a base of support in the United States for Zardari owing to how beloved his deceased wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, was in the west, despite his longstanding reputation for corruption. But some in his party are urging him to resign in order to spare Pakistan the confrontation in Islamabad with Sharif, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

What began four days ago as a political standoff between Mr. Zardari and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is now “beginning to look like an endgame” for the deeply unpopular president with cabinet ministers quitting and popular discontent growing, said Safdar Abbasi, a senior member of Mr. Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party. Analysts and politicians cautioned that it could play out over months rather than days, however.

The State Department insists that it wants to bring the standoff to an end and is agnostic about how Zardari and Sharif resolve the dispute.