In a Britain inured to warfare and loss, the story didn't warrant the BBC lunchtime TV news. In France, where scepticism towards allotted martial roles persists, reactions are liable to be more visceral. Ten young men dead and 21 wounded, all in a single incident: this is grievous, profound and an answer to all the glib claims of success in Afghanistan.

It is also no coincidence. On the instant Pervez Musharraf yielded to reality and resigned as Pakistan's President on Monday, the neighbouring cockpit, the central ground of an incoherent "war on terror", exploded. Twenty-five dead - at the time of writing - in the bombing of a hospital in North West Frontier Province. Intense fighting in the Bajaur district, on the Afghan border. Six suicide bombers killed by the Americans during an assault - it appears to continue - on Camp Salerno in Afghanistan's Khost province.

Meanwhile, those who have claimed the scalp of Musharraf, the factions loyal to former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, or to the legacy of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto, squabble in Islamabad. In proclaimedly multicultural Britain, meanwhile, with a strange mixture of deep colonial knowledge and profound ignorance, we prefer happier news of all-important Olympic golds.

Understandable, perhaps, but ill-advised. We overlook, first, the fact that a war is going on within Islam that makes the subjugation of terrorists seem trivial. We - and I cannot repair the damage implicit in a little word - forget that many of our people, our fellow Scots, have a great deal invested, historically and personally, in the future of Pakistan.

Meanwhile, we do not begin to grasp that the misconceived efforts of the "International Security Assistance Force" will win nothing in Afghanistan if fighters continue, inexhaustibly, to cross the Pakistan border to die for ideas. The Vietnam parallels are pertinent. In the wars that cannot be won, no-one surrenders. Tell Sandhurst.

Musharraf was the west's latest nominated strong man. He honoured democracy most often in the breach rather than in the observance, but we let it pass. States of emergency brought the general to power and kept him there. Now he runs from the threat of impeachment and charges of corruption laid by parties that themselves seem able, strangely, to prosper amid poverty and a collapsing economy.

Such is the west's bulwark. White House rhetoric is one thing; inflation at 25% is another. The United States has coughed up billions in "aid" and yet, according to the Asian Development Bank, the poor of Pakistan have grown poorer, and more numerous. Musharraf has fought the west's war, more or less, despite the habits and instincts of his intelligence services, and been applauded. But was this a democrat, an honest man, a solution - or still another problem?

The Americans have cut Musharraf loose. The State Department has said, bizarrely, that the upheaval is an "internal matter", ignoring the fact that public opinion in Pakistan abhors the Afghan campaign. The Pakistani military, Musharraf's first sponsors, have also declined the opportunity to maintain their favourite general in power. No-one seems seriously to have asked, of Pakistan or Afghanistan, a simple question: what follows?

The coalition government that came to office in February is a ramshackle affair, at best. It counts, by most definitions, as a marriage of convenience between forces united only by a hatred of Musharraf. Whether the partners desire to take up the west's anti-terrorist burden is open to question. Thus far they have failed even to restore a functioning judiciary after the general's mass arrests. Choosing a President, selecting a workable political compromise and assembling a state suitable to the west's ends - and then only if the argument is confined to Afghanistan - is probably beyond them.

Charges of corruption are the stock in trade of Pakistan's politics. Today it is said that Musharraf looted US aid. But Mrs Bhutto's widower, Asif Zardari, has been accused of equivalent offences. Nawaz Sharif, the other player, was overthrown and imprisoned by the upright general in 1999 amid like charges. Clearly, Musharraf was despised. But Pakistan, in the White House lexicon, can be defined simultaneously as a failed state or a loyal ally. Which? Washington will need to make up its mind.

Britain, second home to the world's Pakistanis, seems incapable of thinking in such terms. We are a major donor of aid to the country but not, apparently, a major influence on its affairs. We are, meanwhile, fixated with Olympian ideals and the Russian bear. So has everyone forgotten the obvious? Pakistan is problematic and chaotic. It evinces a certain ambivalence towards selected western wars on its doorstep. But Pakistan is a nuclear power.

Have my prediction, gratis. Today, tomorrow, or by the week's end Vladimir Putin will recede from view. The hellish firefights in the Afghan theatre will come back into focus, no doubt because of a grief-stricken France. People of Pakistani origin in Britain will make themselves heard. And then someone, possibly within the government of India, will say this: the Pakistan People's Party and the Pakistan Muslim League have effective control, between them, over a nuclear arsenal. A policy, anyone? A dusty file that might cover such an eventuality? A plan that does not involve the latest trustworthy general? All of the hypotheticals involving Iran, or the Koreans, or the snow-dusted ursine Russians will matter less, I think, than the question of who might be in control in Islamabad next week. Actual nukes tend to have more potency than the potential kind.

General Ashfaq Kayani, current boss of the Pakistani military, fresh from having allowed Musharraf to twist in the breeze, has no doubt reassured the Pentagon on that score. I'm less sanguine. I remember how, for one thing, the mighty Shah of Iran came up short, once upon a time, in the allies-forever stakes. The Pakistan majority, the ordinary population, is in no sense "Islamist": who said they were? But anyone who clutches at "therefore"

and settles on "pro-western" is thinking wishfully.

Giving up Afghanistan as a very bad and stupid job might help. Deciding, in fact, that Pakistan matters more in the global culture wars than Kabul ever could might count as an important shift. A British government with half a wit might even marshal the Pakistani legacy in this country: just encourage folk to participate. The standing fact is, however, that a big, important and populous nation is in chaos. And armed with nukes.

I am guessing, but not by much, that the State Department crew down at Washington's Foggy Bottom have already picked their next favourite Pakistani. Mr Sharif, a known quantity, is probably favourite. It is baffling, nevertheless, to witness the hysteria over Putin while a real crisis for the west unfolds.

What if "the west" were to lose Pakistan? India and China would take a view. The 48,000 kids despatched to Afghanistan would become, like the country itself, irrelevant overnight. America would reset to paranoia-default. And the rest of us would be reminded, once more, that we had missed the point.

Why are the "Islamists" right? Because the future of the nation of Pakistan is not something for which the white world can propose, or dispose. And why do we care about someone else's country? Because we left ourselves with no choice. A mistake, perh