It is never a good sign when the main players in Pakistan’s politics decamp to another country for crisis talks. Often it has been London but yesterday it was Dubai as Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widower, and the head of her Pakistan People’s Party, was holed up in Dubai with Nawaz Sharif, leader of the second main party in the governing coalition. Their subject – how judges sacked by President Musharraf should be reinstated – was always controversial. The question is whether it is going to be lethal: to the coalition, to the judiciary and to Pakistan’s Constitution. Unfortunately, it could be, with the only winner Musharraf.

The two main parties in the month-old Government, which they spent two months trying to form, are agreed on one point, an admirable one. They agreed to reinstate by the end of April the Supreme Court judges sacked by Musharraf last autumn. That promise was valuable for its clarity, and its support for the Constitution. Musharraf’s swipe at the judiciary followed a six-month battle in which the judges directly challenged the legality of his military rule and his “re-election” as president in September by a largely quiescent Parliament.

But the two sides depart on how to do it, and neither is entirely right. Sharif, head of the conservative Pakistan Muslim League, who was deposed by Musharraf in the 1999 coup and has sworn to return the favour, is right in principle to push for the reinstatement of all the judges at once. But he ignores (and it is in his interest to do so) the particular problems that could follow the return of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, whose personal dedication to prising Musharraf from office rivals Sharif’s.

In late December and January the Chief Justice – under house arrest – and the President engaged in a volley of multi-page letters addressed to other heads of state or international officials, accusing each other of everything from the grandest constitutional abuse to the smallest details of personal vanity. But Chaudhry’s, infinitely the more disciplined, made the better constitutional points.

Yet for all the soundness of his arguments there is no question that the judiciary has become politicised at this feverish time. Chaudhry is uncompromising about a point, which many of those who also defend Pakistan’s Constitution regard as arguable either way: whether Musharraf’s claim to a further term on the basis of the September vote is legitimate. Bhutto herself was prepared to overlook the point when she struck a pact with Musharraf at that time.

To bring back Chaudhry is to demand Musharraf’s immediate exit, which is why Sharif is doing it. It is not clear that the resurrection of what inescapably looks like a personal battle will help Pakistan escape its overpersonalised politics.

On the other hand, to call for clear curbs on the judiciary’s “right to interfere with politics”, as Zardari is doing, is blithely to wave away the Constitution, which gives the judges clear powers to say what is lawful. Bhutto was too fond of those ambiguities; so, it seems, is her husband. It would open the door to a new pact with Musharraf, shutting out Sharif; this is not the route to stability.

Of the two sides Sharif is more in the right, as closer to the Constitution. But the winner from this deadlock, improbably and undeservedly, is Musharraf.

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