KEY POINTS:
The country most likely to trouble the world in 2008 may not be Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan or even Israel - it could be Pakistan. The quality of Pakistan's leadership was most recently evident in the fact that it took President Pervez Musharraf a week to make
any comment on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Then this week he proved he would have been wiser to keep silent.
Acknowledging she had been shot rather than fatally injured by falling inside her vehicle, as his regime initially asserted, Mr Musharraf said it was her own fault. "For standing up outside the car, I think it was she to blame alone. Nobody else. Responsibility is hers."
Tuesday was the date set for parliamentary elections, which after the assassination were put off for six weeks. Were it not for pressure from Washington, the former Army chief would not have called the election in the first place. Now, with the death of the country's sole symbol of hope, they seem not worth the dissension they will rekindle.
Even Mrs Bhutto, it needs to be said, did not spell much hope. She had been Prime Minister twice before her exile and neither term of office had seen much in the way of an attempt to improve the country's wretched poverty or the tribal divisions and privilege that have long ruled its politics. The Bhutto dynasty has enjoyed and maintained the privilege as much as anyone in its class, and profited from her period of power.
Nearly two weeks after her death, Pakistanis are no closer to knowing who or what element of the country's tensions were responsible. Her husband accuses the Musharraf government of engineering the outrage, the President blames a tribal militant leader suspected of al-Qaeda connections. Her husband has called for a United Nations investigation of the crime. Mr Musharraf has elicited the help of Scotland Yard.
Until Pakistan knows who to blame for the outrage, the wave of violence and destruction it started is likely to continue and provincial and tribal tensions can only deepen. Meanwhile, the world watches with incomprehension. One observer, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, has even called on the Pakistan Army to urge its former leader to quit the presidency. If another coup is the best hope for an eventual return to democracy, the hopeful are desperate indeed.
It must be wondered, too, whether Pakistani democracy would make the world safer. Mr Musharraf's support for the US against Islamic militants has not made him popular, nor has it enabled him to subdue the mountain regions where Osama bin Laden and the remains of his organisation almost certainly have found refuge. Or is it, as some suspect, that it suits Pakistan's rulers to let the militants live, ensuring the US continues to need it as an ally in the "war on terror"? More important to Pakistan, the US relationship ensures not too many questions are asked about the nuclear arsenal that it maintains for insurance in its endless antagonism with India.
Those weapons are said to be secured, with the warheads and detonation components in different places, making it hard for them to be stolen. But the country that owns them does not inspire confidence. It is Pakistan that has supplied crucial elements of North Korea's nuclear programme.
Pakistan is too unruly for the world's comfort but not weak enough to invite an intervention. Its people are proud, fiercely resentful of slights and quick to take offence. The best the West can do is tread cautiously, bet nothing on Pakistani democracy and deal with whatever its heated political culture throws up.
