I feel obliged to say something about what’s been happening in Pakistan, which irritates me because (a) I don’t like the precedent this sets and (b) there’s enough ill-informed self-styled experts out there making up diagnoses as they go along without me sticking in my two penneth. That said, what else is there to do on nights of insomnia?

No matter what you think of Benazir Bhutto (and I think I’ve made my contempt for this neoliberal collaborator clear enough already), this has the potential to become a major tragedy not just for the families of her two dozen co-victims but for all of Pakistan. Will Musharraf’s regime – whom many suspect of being behind the assassination – use it as a pretext for further repression? A clampdown is already beginning, though we don’t yet know how far it will go; even in the event of restraint from the ex-General (an entirely plausible scenarion, now that his main rival is out of the picture) this adds to the atmosphere of fear and intimidation in the country, and that’s never good.

That atmosphere is the atmosphere of terror, and especially of the War On Terror. Pakistan has always had its problems, but a certain consensus existed; a compromise between the military, clerical or land-owning elite, yes, but one which most of the people were prepared to tolerate provided it stayed behind certain lines. Those lines have been crossed with the war on Afghanistan, a war effort which is dependent on supply lines across Pakistan. The border between the two states being largely meaningless, now more than ever, the war soon spread to Pakistan’s border province – that is, Taliban guerrilla rule, and American (and even Pakistani Air Force) bombs on villages.

This war quickly turned unpopular, and to enforce it required new levels of political repression, including an unprecedented wave of state kidnappings. The independent judiciary, led by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, busied itself representing the victims of these unlawful reprisals, until Musharraf had Chaudhry removed. The protests that followed will probably be remembered as the beginning of the end of Musharraf’s regime, and I hope that we will see more of the former Chief Justice in the months to come.

More protests came at the other end of the social spectrum from the lawyers risking life and limb for the rule of law, with the Red Mosque Islamists. In the British press, distinguishing between Islam and Islamism is generally seen as unnecessary hairsplitting (why bother with understanding, when you can settle for racism?) but here we must distinguish between different types of Islamism; far from the genocidal nihilists of the al-Qaedalikes who probably killed Benazir, the followers of the Lal Masjid were demanding less war and more social justice.

Their demands – until they were machine-gunned down by the army – were not far from the demands of the British Left and that they invoked Islam and religious identity rather than socialism and class identity is, I think, testament to the real threat posed by Islamism. Yes yes, we know the routine, Hamas will spend Iranian money on nuking us all unless Israel starves more kids in Gaza, or something, but the real danger is of an ideology that distracts those who reject capitalist politics from seeing the underlying class struggle, and thus thwarts the emergence of genuinely progressive politics. This is something of which the players of the Great Game are well aware. But I digress.

In any case, by the end of the summer, much of Pakistan was close to open revolt, and even before the desperate Emergency, it was plain to see that Musharraf was losing it. Hence the return, under American patronage so clear that you could even see the strings, of a woman who played the Western media like a fiddle, who’d spent two terms leading governments from a party that once stood for a popular civil rights movement, imposing the interests of international capital on her electorate and getting down with the corruption quicker than you could say “pretty straight guys”. I think she reminds me of someone.

She had the support of the West and, for all her flaws, it seems clear that a lot of people in Pakistan had invested their hopes for democracy in her too. Her imminent election victory had seemed a shoe-in, and she looked set to lead Pakistan through a shaky truce to an unhappy compromise. Her absence leaves a gaping hole in the political landscape (it’s been suggested that the West shift its support to the other former PM who’s recently returned from exile, but he doesn’t have anywhere near Bhutto’s stature; if she’s Blair then he’s John Major), and it remains to see what fills it.

It could be that the Pakistan People’s Party goes on to win the elections with a substantial sympathy vote; it could be that they find a slightly better replacement candidate, like (and it’s long shots like these that probably reveal just how much of an expert I am not) Benazir’s neice the poet Fatima Bhutto. It could equally be that the elections are once more postponed. In any case, the West will struggle to fill Benazir’s shoes as a consensus candidate, but such attempts are surely preferable to the alternative: Pakistan’s reliability as a client state guaranteed not by quasi- or pseudo-democracy but by violent totalitarianism in the cities, while more and more of the countryside falls to the anarchy of Afghanistan.

The third option – the one where Pakistan is not ruled in War On Terror interests at all, but in the interests of its people – is clearly the only just one, and it’s also clearly one which the West cannot even consider. However, the Great Game is tearing Pakistan apart, and the only just option is also the only stable option (as Malcolm X would have recognised); it’s not out of dogma or contrarianism that I say that we must hope for the emergence of a serious Pakistani political movement against the dictatorship and against American Imperialism. The best we’ve seen in electoral politics so far is the unpopular populist Imran Khan, but perhaps Benazir’s absence will make room for a truly democratic, truly dissident candidate who will represent those who marched for Chaudry, those who cheered for the Lal Masjid, those who want to decide their own destiny, against those who would enforce the whims and delusions of policy makers in Washington.