'Pakistan to split into warlord-run fiefdoms'

[K.I. Bajwa]

Does India think the Pakistani Public is asleep?


These Sand Model Tacticians have not seen a single real battle, yet they have the audacity to comment.


K.I. Bajwa

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The Times of India

April 19, 2009


'Pakistan to split into warlord-run fiefdoms'


WASHINGTON: A growing number of US intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials have concluded that there's little hope of preventing


nuclear-armed Pakistan from disintegrating into fiefdoms controlled by Islamist warlords and terrorists, posing the a greater threat to US than Afghanistan's terrorist haven did before 9/11.


"It's a disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution," said a US intelligence official who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.


Pakistan's fragmentation into warlord-run fiefdoms that host al-Qaida and other terrorist groups would have grave implications for the security of its nuclear arsenal; for the US-led effort to pacify Afghanistan ; and for the security of India , the nearby oil-rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia , US and its allies.


"Pakistan has 173 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al-Qaida sitting in two-thirds of the country which the government does not control," said David Kilcullen , a retired Australian army officer, a former State Department adviser and a counterinsurgency consultant to the Obama administration.


"Pakistan isn't Afghanistan, a backward, isolated, landlocked place that outsiders get interested in about once a century," said US intelligence official. "It's a developed state . . . (with) a major Indian Ocean port and ties to the outside world, especially the Gulf, that Afghanistan and the Taliban never had."