Yesterday’s car bomb outside the Danish Embassy in Islamabad should not be dismissed as just another attack, of a kind that still remains rare in Pakistan’s cities. It is a sign that Islamic militants have been encouraged by the Government’s turmoil and are turning it to their advantage.

This bomb is more important than many others. True, there have been recent attacks in Lahore and Karachi, although still astonishingly few, given how easy they are to launch (and in the tribal areas of the west, there are often several a week). Islamabad itself, for all its white villas, tree-lined avenues and orderly districts (“fifteen minutes from Pakistan” is the old joke about its incongruous calm) has not been immune, as shown by last summer’s siege of the Red Mosque, and other blasts at embassies.

This bomb is particularly destructive in its target and timing. Although Denmark has troops in Afghanistan, many in Pakistan thought yesterday that the 2005 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad were the real provocation for the attack. In that case, the bomb should be seen as a head-on attack on the West — a decision to take eternal offence from its values — not a narrow assault on the region’s main actors, as the regular threats against the US Embassy could be seen to be.

It also shows that Islamic militants now feel bolder, hoping that President Musharraf’s seven-year drive against them is failing. They may be right. The past week has been very bad for hopes of stability as the coalition Government has come to the brink of collapse. By far the worst point is that the hardliners of the Islamist Right, including former officers of the army and the ISI intelligence service, appear to think that they can appropriate Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League for their own causes.

This is the wing of the military that struck the 1990s alliances with the Taleban — and that Musharraf cut out of power when he backed the US. Now, these former officers seem to think that their time has come again. They have targeted the Sharif party as their vehicle, with his base in Punjab, larger and richer than the other provinces together. They want to reverse Musharraf’s Western-leaning reforms as well as his drive to make peace with India in Kashmir, perhaps his greatest single achievement.

It is noticeable that Islamist militants are now acting more freely in the tribal areas, and the US has got nowhere in its call for the capture of Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taleban, accused by Pakistan of ordering the assassination of Benazir Bhutto (which he denies). The only bright spot is that the success of the Awami party in North West Frontier Province gives Peshawar, the capital, a secular, regional flavour at this crucial time.

That rubs home the problem: that Pakistan has strong regional government — too strong, with each party having a province as its base — but after the past week, almost no central government. The issues that have split the coalition were always explosive: stripping back the President’s powers and reinstating judges who challenged him. Pakistan has to solve them if it is not to return to military rule or to violent fracture. Its best hope is that the danger forces the coalition together. The risk is that the parties will believe that they can seize power from turmoil and that they bring the Government down.

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