Barely a week after the resignation of Pervez Musharraf as president of Pakistan, the coalition that forced him out has collapsed, confirming that all that united them was opposition to the general, and that this was really a three-sided power struggle. But more is at stake than this jostle for power in Islamabad.

Pakistan, which has already lost control of its western frontiers, risks seeing its federation disintegrate. At the same time, an indigenous Taliban – part provoked by hostility to Pakistan’s alliance with the US, part nurtured by the Pakistani army’s and intelligence services’ licensing of jihadi proxies – threatens to spread the war in Afghanistan across Pakistan.