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A serious standoff between Pakistan’s two major political parties has just ended, resulting in a victory for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of the Muslim League. Demonstrations in the capital Islamabad turned violent over the weekend, as lawyers and their supporters rallied for the reinstatement of chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, first sacked by former President Pervez Musharraf in 2007. Nawaz Sharif had run for office on a platform of reinstating Chaudery. His rival, President Asif Ali Zardari, of the Pakistan People’s Party and widower of Benazir Bhutto, had delayed returning Chaudery to his old position, ostensibly fearing that the independent-minded judge would revive old corruption charges against him and his wife. In the face of threats by Sharif to attend a major rally on Sunday, police placed the PM under house-arrest. But faced with mounting pressure from the streets as well as Pakistan’s strongest ally, the US, Zardari reinstated the chief justice, and Sharif called off the demonstration. Pakistan’s internal turmoil provides a fitting backdrop to the larger issue of fundamentalist violence that earlier this month manifested in a brazen attack on Sri Lanka’s national cricket team in Lahore.

GUEST: Stephen Kinzer, award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries on five continents, author of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, and All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, currently writes for the New York Times and teaches journalism and political science at Northwestern University