Today Pakistan will publish its annual budget, the single most useful indicator about whether the country will manage to keep stable. Leaks contained alarming warnings about the huge cost of food and fuel costs. The text makes explicit calls for help to other countries, which the Britain and the US should answer.

But it is also a hopeful document. The best of President Musharraf’s eight-year tenure is that the economy grew well, and despite the slowdown, that transformation remains. The budget hopes that Pakistan will achieve growth of 5.5 per cent in the coming year. Not as good as the 7 per cent of the recent past, but with manufacturing still expected to do well.

It would be hard to describe as useful the Pentagon-funded study this week from the Rand Corporation, the US think-tank. It makes the indisputable point that winning the war in Afghanistan is harder if the Taleban has sancturies in Pakistan. It adds the old accusation that elements within Pakistan’s Government and intelligence services are helping the Taleban. But it dodges the only question that is not banal, or well covered already: how to persuade any Pakistani Government to crack down on Western militants, when Musharraf paid so high a price in support for doing just that.

That brings us to the third of this week’s developments: the “long march” mounted by Pakistan’s showy and passionate lawyers. They want the reinstatement of the Supreme Court justices sacked by Musharraf – and, much more difficult, an affirmation of the powers and independence of the judiciary.

That is another area where other countries may, tactfully, be able to help Pakistan, by creating the conditions for talks to resolve this question left blank by the Constitution and decades of military rule. The country cannot run until it is resolved. But no military leader will do it, and the coalition Government, elected early this year in a rebuff to Musharraf, has failed to do so. Musharraf, in denouncing plans to “turn me into a useless vegetable” by taking away many of the powers of the President and giving them to Parliament, is justified in one point. He is right to argue that the powers of the presidency, in its relation to Parliament, to the Government and the judiciary, need to be defined almost from scratch (although he is wrong in his unsurprising view that they should stay almost exactly as they were in the years of military dictatorship).

This is, in essence, the point the lawyers are making. But what should we make of these lawyers, who have become almost a political movement in their own right? When they first started taking to the streets, just over a year ago, the world was captivated by the sight of these people, in immaculate dark suits and white shirts, taking on the military dictatorship with arguments and demonstrations (and some literal stone-throwing).

Yet while possessing the qualities of trial lawyers round the world – overarticulate, independent to a fault, not much interested in leadership or consensus – they have taken on the profile almost of a political body. Aitzaz Ahsan, the best-known, a senior Supreme Court barrister with an on-off relationship with Benazir Bhutto’s left-wing Pakistan People’s Party, yesterday dismissed worries that terrorists might attack the lawyers’ rally with the defiant assertion that “if there are any terrorists, they are opponents of Musharraf”. This is naive bravado. It is also untrue. Pakistan has plenty of all kinds of terrorist.

This week has brought drama in each of Pakistan’s three worst challenges: the economy, terrorism, and its Constitution. The West is in danger of concentrating on the second, and ignoring the need to help with the other two.

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