‘Even now that the full sorrow of this terrible event is inescapable, it is still too soon to weigh up the consequences or foresee the future." Harold Macmillan’s tribute to his friend John F Kennedy hours after his assassination on November 22, 1963, has fresh resonance this weekend as the world reels once again from the murder of a glamorous political dynast.
One of JFK’s favourite poems was Alan Seeger’s I Have a Rendezvous with Death. On Thursday, Benazir Bhutto kept a rendezvous that was both long predicted and deeply shocking.
No longer prime minister when he wrote his tribute, Macmillan was able to express his bewilderment and disorientation more candidly than would have been possible if he had still been in Downing Street.
His reaction was therefore psychologically authentic, capturing the frisson of empathy and fear that courses down the spine of any world leader when they hear such news.
To head a government – or to seek to regain high office, in Ms Bhutto’s case – is to join a very exclusive global club of human targets: those who risk extinction simply by turning up to work in the morning. On Thursday, each of them thought: there but for the grace of God.
At such moments, all politicians claim that ordinary politics has been suspended by grief, that the world needs time to mourn and heal before normal service is resumed. Scratch the surface, however, and politics is invariably fizzing away: odds are laid, positions tested and action prepared.
In this case, one did not have to scratch very far.
The lead was taken in the US, where Barack Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, said that his candidate had opposed the war in Iraq precisely because it would divert resources from the fight against al-Qa’eda and its affiliates.
"Senator Clinton made a different judgment, so let’s have that discussion," declared Mr Axelrod – as close as he could get to saying that Hillary pulled the trigger, without actually doing so.
In Westminster, with no election imminent, the politics is less explicit. But it is there all the same.
On Friday, Nirj Deva, a Tory MEP and spokesman on international development, broke cover on the website conservativehome.blogs.com in order to apportion blame.
"Through their collective failure to crack down on the extremism that is Pervez Musharraf’s dictatorship," he wrote, "Western governments have not just Benazir Bhutto’s blood on their hands… but that of scores of civilians who have died in terrorist attacks around the world."
The significance of Mr Deva’s outburst is that he said in public what many more senior Tories are saying in private. "We are heading towards an appeasement mentality," one shadow cabinet member told me. "I just don’t think Brown focuses on this in any sort of systematic way."
In the week before Ms Bhutto’s assassination, the Conservatives had been harrying the Prime Minister on the question of prospective negotiations with the Taliban.
Now, in the wake of fresh bloodshed, Gordon Brown faces a much more pressing series of questions about an Islamic nuclear power that may yet become a failed state.
Principally, he must decide how far and with what conditions to back George W Bush’s Pakistan policy – which has been, for six years, "Musharraf, right or wrong."
In particular, the PM must decide how intensively, and how publicly, the British Government should now deal with Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the opposition Pakistan Muslim League (N): a calculation which has been made more complex by Sharif’s pledge to boycott elections if they go ahead on January 8.
Mr Bush’s loyalty to Pakistan’s president is longstanding and deep, born in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. How Mr Brown handles the Musharraf Question may well be the first real test of the supposedly recalibrated special relationship.
The PM will be mindful that Tony Blair’s alliance with Bush over the Lebanese conflict was the proximate cause of the September coup against him in 2006.
While it is hardly likely that Labour backbenchers will rise up against Gordon if he makes the wrong call over Pakistan, the PM will not want to be seen to be supporting a failed presidency in Islamabad merely to placate a failed presidency in Washington.
What has this to do with domestic British politics? Everything. Mr Brown likes to say that "over there is now here" – a more demotic version of Mr Blair’s doctrine of global "interdependence". There could be no more vivid illustration of this principle than the fate of Pakistan in 2008.
What happens next there has huge implications for security and the fight against fundamentalism elsewhere, not least in Britain. The prospective disintegration of Pakistan dramatises the integration of the modern world.
Lest we forget: the aspiration to create a Pakistani democracy, founded on the rule of law and anchored by prosperity, is challenged by ancestral forces that have turned this most fragile of states into a breeding ground for jihad.
In April, the Operation Crevice trial ended with the jailing of five men who had plotted to bomb a shopping centre, nightclub and the gas network. Four of the defendants had trained at the same terrorist camp in Pakistan. Three of the four July 7 bombers visited Pakistan in the year before the London attacks.
Omar Bakri Muhammad, the banned Islamist preacher, has described this outsourced training of British jihadis as "National Service" and "part of a young Muslim’s religious obligations". These "obligations" include learning how to make bombs, handle rocket-propelled grenades and fire an AK-47.
Over the summer, a 46-minute video-tape was released depicting 250 graduates of one such training camp near the Afghan-Pakistani border, including speeches in English by recruits. "We are not only fighting in Afghanistan," said the Taliban leader Mullah Mansoor.
"We will commit suicidal attacks and we will destroy [the West’s] national assets."
Indeed, so direct is the "conveyor belt" between the two countries that one protagonist in the Crevice case forgot the crucial ratios required to mix the explosives and emailed a contact in Pakistan direct for assistance.
Pakistan is both finishing school for British terrorists, and provider of the helpline once operations are up and running.
During 2008, Mr Brown will try to persuade the Commons to extend the maximum pre-charge detention period for terror suspects from 28 to 42 days. He will seek to ratify an EU Treaty that will alter, yet again, the rules of the game governing migration.
As he struggles to restore control of our borders, he will be conscious that 60 per cent of non-EU immigrants are now Muslims: this underpins his concern that the battle for "hearts and minds" be fought at home as well as abroad.
All these, and other controversies, will be made more vivid by the assassination of Ms Bhutto. Hers will be the ghost in the Commons, admonishing MPs to remember what the Islamist enemy is willing to do; that, as much as we would like it to be otherwise, this is a conflict without rules and without limit, in which disengagement is only an option for the deluded.
And, for now at least, the frontline of this conflict is in Pakistan. Already the crucible of jihad, it is an adolescent nation, armed with nuclear weapons, on the verge of collapse.
Benazir Bhutto’s rendezvous with death was a reminder of history’s caprice: the geopolitical and the personal are often perilously intertwined.
Imagine, if you will, a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. Well, this is the very opposite. On the eve of 2008, Pakistan is quite simply the most important country in the world.
• Matthew d’Ancona is Editor of the Spectator.
