Pakistan's Supreme Court on May 26 overturned an earlier ruling that barred two-term former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from running for public office. Sharif is currently the most popular politician in the country, especially because of the vanguard role his party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), played in the struggle for the reinstatement of Pakistan's judiciary. Since former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in December 2007, Sharif has been seen as peerless in Pakistan's political circles, especially because Bhutto's successor, President Asif Ali Zardari, has dismal approval ratings. Though Sharif's party has not ruled out the possibility of early elections, it insists it wants to see the current government, headed by Zardari's Pakistan People's Party (PPP), complete its five-year term (though it is unclear whether that will happen). Sharif will have to wait before he can sit in the prime minister's chair again, but he is very likely to make it into parliament through a by-election in a few months. Sharif's political origins lie in the Zia regime's military dictatorship. Yet Sharif has reinvented himself — particularly since his last government was ousted by former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in 1999 — and taken up the anti-establishment mantle. This, along with Sharif's history of having clashed with three different military chiefs, has many within Pakistan's powerful military establishment viewing Sharif as someone who will be tough to deal with. This is not to say that the army prefers Zardari and his PPP. But since the PPP has moved in a more pragmatic direction and is not as popular as it once was, and given the current dire circumstances within the country, central command is very much in favor of maintaining the status quo. More importantly, in the ongoing war against the jihadists, the army prefers to deal with the more secular PPP than the PML-N, which has a more conservative and right-of-center worldview and has close ties with Islamist political parties. Because of the PML-N's view and Islamist ties, for the longest time Washington was not in favor of Sharif. It feared that a popular nationalist party with strong socially and religiously conservative credentials could undermine regional efforts in the war against the jihadists. However, the Obama administration has begun warming up to Sharif in case the current political dispensation in Islamabad collapses under the weight of the growing list of problems facing the an unpopular PPP government. But there is more to cozying up to Sharif's PML-N than Washington's concerns about weak governance. There is a developing view that the former prime minister's right-wing party may be better placed to undermine the insurgency, especially now that Sharif and the PML-N leaders have come out strongly against the Pakistani Taliban and have supported the current government's moves to launch a major offensive in the greater Swat region. This idea is akin to the one that calls for working with moderate Islamists (as opposed to secularists) as a more effective means of combating the jihadists and other radical Islamist forces. Virtually all moderate Islamist groups in Pakistan are only moderate to the extent that they use democratic politics instead of extraconstitutional means to try to achieve power; otherwise, they harbor extremely radical agendas. In fact, Pakistani Islamist parties are far more radical than their Muslim Brotherhood counterparts in the Arab world. Thus, if the PPP government should falter, Washington's next-best option is to work with the PML-N in hopes that its ties to Islamist groups will allow it to better undercut the jihadists. Similarly, while the United States has had a strong historical relationship with the Pakistani military, in recent years that relationship has soured over the disconnect between Washington and Pakistani general headquarters regarding the jihadist war. Furthermore, the army's grip over the state is not what it used to be. Though struggles among civilian authorities and between the civilians and the military can, more often than not, bog down the system rather than meaningfully advance policy, a strong civilian government could serve as a good lever with which Washington can influence the military. While Sharif would be willing to work with Washington to enhance the power of the civilians over the military, he has his redlines. The PML-N chief is staunchly opposed to the unilateral airstrikes conducted by U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles in Pakistan's tribal belt. He also wants all national security and foreign policy issues to be channeled through parliament, which would complicate Washington's dealings with Islamabad on the jihadist war. Sharif, given his own ideological inclinations and populist stance, would be reluctant to make the tough decisions in the fight against jihadism and would be more inclined to negotiate settlements with what in his view are reconcilable Islamist forces. In other words, Sharif is not the Pakistani equivalent of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the PML-N is not the Justice and Development Party. Turkey's ruling party and its apex leadership, despite their Islamist roots, are nowhere near as conservative as Sharif and his PML-N, which has never been Islamist. Because of the PML-N's strong right-of-center orientation, it is extremely unlikely that the idea of using moderate political groups to counter radical tendencies in Pakistan will bear much fruit, at least not in the foreseeable future. Between the liberal but weak PPP and the popular but staunchly conservative PML-N, the United States does not have any good choices in Pakistan.