March 14 (Bloomberg) -- Police arrested demonstrating lawyers and opposition activists in several Pakistani cities and shut highways to block the protesters from rallying in the capital March 16.

The government of President Asif Ali Zardari asked the army to post troops around sensitive areas to keep order, Dawn News television reported today, citing the army spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas. Some local news channels accused the government of blocking their broadcasts of the protests, which are aimed at forcing the restoration of dismissed judges and are supported by opposition leader Nawaz Sharif.

Zardari’s use of force to quell protest and signs of dissent in his Pakistan Peoples Party are “deepening his credibility deficit and leaving his government weaker,” said Syed Khwaja Alqama, a political-science professor in the Punjab province city of Multan, the site of one of today’s biggest demonstrations.

The protests sharpened a nearly three-week-old confrontation that began Feb. 25, when the Supreme Court barred Sharif, Zardari’s chief rival and a former prime minister, from public office. It also barred Sharif’s brother, Shahbaz, deposing him as the elected leader of Punjab, the country’s most populous province.

Zardari denied accusations by the Sharifs that he encouraged the ruling. His spokesman, Farhatullah Babar, said in a statement this evening that the government will ask the court to revise its verdict.

Clinton Calls

The U.S. has urged Zardari and Sharif to calm the conflict, saying it distracts the government from fighting Islamic militant guerrillas who control areas near the border with Afghanistan. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Zardari today to discuss the issue, a statement from his office said.

The lawyers and Sharif say they will not halt their protest until they win the restoration of 60 judges to the Supreme Court and other high courts who were dismissed in 2007 by the army-led government of President Pervez Musharraf. Babar’s statement signaled no retreat by Zardari on that issue.

Amid Zardari’s crackdown, Peoples Party aides of his assassinated ex-wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, appeared to be backing away from him, raising expectations that Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani might step forward to broker a deal, Alqama said. Naheed Khan, Bhutto’s long-time secretary, said yesterday she supports the judges and urged their reinstatement.

Cable Restrictions

Sherry Rehman, Bhutto’s former spokeswoman, quit as information minister after GEO television and other channels said government regulators were restricting cable distribution of their programs in several cities, Pakistani media reported. A day after those reports surfaced, Rehman remained silent, giving no response to repeated messages left on her phone for clarification.

In a press conference, Interior Minister Rehman Malik, a close aide to Zardari, declined to comment on the minister’s reported resignation and denied that the government was behind the channels’ disappearance from TV screens.

Any resolution of the crisis will need the support of the army, which has ruled Pakistan for 32 of its 61 years, Alqama, a professor at Zakriya Bahauddin University, said in a telephone interview. The army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, met Zardari and Gilani separately yesterday, a government statement said.

Gilani is ready to implement a deal backed by the U.S. and U.K. to end the confrontation, an English-language daily, the News, reported yesterday, without naming its sources.

Shipping Containers

News channels showed hundreds of men shouting anti-Zardari slogans in Karachi, the main port and financial center, Multan and Peshawar. Outside those cities and Islamabad, police piled shipping containers to form high steel walls, barricading some of the nation’s most important highways and forcing drivers to creep down side roads to seek alternate routes.

While leaders of the lawyers’ movement and opposition politicians led by Sharif vowed to mass their supporters in Islamabad in two days’ time for a sit-in outside parliament, it was unclear whether they can circumvent the roadblocks.

Authorities blocked several leaders of the lawyers from taking flights to join the protest, said Ali Ahmed Kurd, president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, who told reporters he was turned back at the airport in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province.

Lawyers condemned the government’s extension yesterday of a ban on public gatherings of more than four people, which now is in force in three of Pakistan’s four provinces.

‘Serious Threat’

Less than a year after a civilian government took office following 11 years of army-backed rule, it “is now being seen as a perpetrator of repression,” said Ishtiaq Ahmed, associate professor of international relations at Islamabad’s Quaid-i-Azam University. “It is a serious threat to a populist party, which may start unraveling soon because it has allowed concentration of power in one man.”

The crisis also risks slowing government efforts to revive a slumping economy that forced it to borrow $7.6 billion from the International Monetary Fund last year and to announce last month it will seek $4.5 billion more. The government predicts that economic growth in the year ending June 30 will be 2.5 percent, down from 5.8 percent last year.

The situation in Pakistan “continues to deteriorate very, very slowly under a political leadership which is very challenged because of the totality of the crisis,” Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose broadcast this week.

To contact the reporters on this story: James Rupert in Lahore at jrupert3@bloomberg.net; Farhan Sharif in Karachi at fsharif2@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: March 14, 2009 13:08 EDT