Pakistan's new leaders are doing the easy stuff first. Judges fired by President Pervez Musharraf, including Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, will likely get their jobs back soon. Media curbs are being lifted. A regulation preventing prime ministers serving more than two terms may be scrapped, which could benefit Nawaz Sharif, a leader of the ruling coalition. Earlier, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Asif Ali Zardari, to run for Parliament in a June by-election. That could put the Pakistan People's Party co-chairman in line for the premiership, although the current incumbent, Yusuf Raza Gilani, may have something to say about it.

All this honeymoon excitement is partly about getting back at Musharraf, whose influence dwindles almost daily following February's election defeat. For Sharif, ousted and exiled by the president in the 1999 coup, and for the humiliated Chaudhry, the vendetta is personal. Pakistani media say a series of planned constitutional amendments will officially curtail the president's powers and patronage, thereby completing his political emasculation. At that point, the final drive to force him out will begin. His friends say Musharraf would rather quit than face loaded impeachment or court battles he cannot win.

Yet amid this feel-good score settling, a possibly more significant development was Monday's decision by North West Frontier province to free a senior pro-Taleban mullah, Sufi Muhammad.

The move was a first, untasted fruit of Islamabad's new policy of wooing rather than fighting hard-line Islamists. The government says it believes dialogue and development is the best way to pacify tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, notably Waziristan, where top Al-Qaeda leaders including Osama bin Laden are believed to be based, sheltered by indigenous fundamentalists.

David Miliband, making a get-to-know-you visit on Monday, gave the new policy a cautious welcome. Deals that created safe spaces and freedom of operation for terrorist groups, such as that struck by Musharraf in Waziristan last year, would not work, he suggested. Deals that involved militants renouncing violence, as Sufi Muhammad reportedly has done, might be more attractive. Not unusually, Britain is saying quietly and in a roundabout way what the Americans, or at least influential portions of the Bush administration, would prefer to state far more forcefully.

In developing its new softly-softly counterterrorism policy, Islamabad is simultaneously de-emphasizing military "solutions" and calling on US forces to show much more restraint, particularly in their use of Predator drone attacks in western Pakistan. It wants what it calls a "strategic pause". In this it is supported by influential figures in Congress and the US State Department who fear that, with Musharraf sidelined, renewed invasive operations could fatally undermine Pakistan's fragile democracy.

But ranged against them are Pentagon, CIA and White House officials who say the growing threat emanating from Pakistani territory, especially from Al-Qaeda, is so imminently serious that immediate, forceful action is required. Michael Hayden, the CIA director, made his view ominously plain last month. The security situation along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, he said, "presents clear and present danger to Afghanistan, to Pakistan and to the West in general, and to the US in particular". That is the verbal equivalent of pressing the button marked "Detonate".

Media reports from Washington this week say US commanders in Afghanistan, anticipating a Taleban spring offensive, are pushing for greater freedom to wage war inside Pakistan. Unidentified US intelligence officials told the New York Times that Pakistani networks had taken on an increasingly important role as allies of Al-Qaeda in plotting attacks in Afghanistan and helping foreign operatives plan attacks on targets in Western countries such as Britain. The American military's plans reportedly include limited cross-border artillery bombardments, aerial missile attacks, and/or ground incursions by CIA paramilitary squads or US Army Special Operations Forces. Only fears about the resulting anti-American and anti-Western backlash in Pakistan, and its impact on its fragile coalition government, appear to be staying Washington's hand.

They may not hold off much longer, as the Afghan war escalates, Al-Qaeda regenerates, and a legacy-minded George Bush retreats toward the exit, still trophy-hunting Bin Laden, with all guns blazing. "It's certainly something we want to get to, but not yet," one Bush official is quoted as saying.

That remark should send a chill down the backs of Pakistan's new leaders. "Not yet" probably means quite soon. For the busy-busy grudge-settlers and political point-scorers of Islamabad, the hard stuff is about to start.