THE very last thing the world needs right now is for Pakistan - a nuclear state with an itchy army and lawless lands occupied by al Qaida and the Taliban - to descend into civil war.

The very last thing British soldiers in neighbouring Afghanistan need is for the region to be over-run by Taliban fighters who can hide out with impunity in northern Pakistan.

Yet it is hard to see how January 8's elections in that country can go ahead when the leading party has been so brutally shorn of its charismatic leader. And if there are no elections, there is a frightening vacuum.

In her death, there is a temptation to turn Benazir Bhutto into a martyr. She was not the panacea for Pakistan - she would have been divisive as a ruler and brutal in her own way, and she would always have had corrosive questions about her family's wealth lingering in the background.

She did, though, offer hope. She had a vision of a democratic moderate Muslim secular state where women had rights and children had a proper education. She also supported the "war against terror" - perhaps partly due to political expediency (she needed US support to return home) - but hopefully also because she realised that the extreme way of life espoused by groups like the Taliban does not offer hope for ordinary people.

Now those extremists have killed her.

They have shown that their arguments are so weak they cannot win them with words alone. They have shown that they are so frightened by ideas and freedoms that they have to destroy them with violence.

But they have shown once more that terror can bring a country to its knees.

The world was already waiting for 2008 with some trepidation, not knowing whether its economy will rise or fall or whether its climate can hold together.

With Pakistan teetering on the brink, that trepidation grows enormously.