'Pakistan to split into warlord-run fiefdoms'

I stumbled upon this piece of comforting news today. Pakistan is the biggest threat to global stability. Think about what would happen to financial markets in Asia and elsewhere if this comes to pass.-Lou

'Pakistan to split into warlord-run fiefdoms'

Times Of India

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."