More than once, president Zardari’s government has been acknowledged by the US as a reliable partner in their war on terror. And yet, polls seem to show that Mr. Zardari’s popularity among the Pakistani public has declined sharply. News sources have even started questioning whether the democratically president will be able to survive his term of 5 years (ending 2013). One is naturally drawn to ask why a democratically elected president with a vote of confidence from the US is failing to win public support. After all, he is doing his best in curbing terrorism – the nation’s most dreaded problem.

A ready answer appears to be that the assumption that terrorism is the country’s worst problem is faulty. The terrorist activities are not the nation’s leading cause of disturbance or discomfort. And for the masses in general, this does sound logical. Let’s ask ourselves the question whether daily power outages of 6 to 18 hours interfere with every Pakistan’s life or do bomb blasts plague their daily lives. Obviously, the latter has its geographical, temporal, and other limitations but the former has been every Pakistani’s headache – and that is something literally true.

Other main issues of concern also appear to have also gained intensity in the current government’s reign. Poverty and a rise in prices, for example, are unrelenting and corruption scandals are on a record high. On a political level too, the chasm between major political stakeholders has deepened, not to say of the judiciary whose struggle for judicial sovereignty has carved a new chapter in Pakistan’s history of 62 years.

The decline in the President’s popularity is thus an indicator of the public’s heightened sensitivity to issues that go beyond terrorism and, no matter how much the mainstream media highlight the issue of terrorism, the nation demands the President’s serious attention to other, more important, issues – issues like poverty, hunger, disease, social and political justice, and the freedom of expression. This is what democracy means in its popular adage – a government of, for, and by the people.