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| India-Pakistan |
| Rand Corp: PakistanŽs nuclear weapons Žat riskŽ |
| 2009-04-25 |
| [ADN Kronos] Pakistan's nuclear weapons would be at risk if militants took control of the government, a leading international terrorism expert has told Adnkronos. However, Brian Michael Jenkins, an advisor to the American Rand Corporation and international security expert, said Pakistan was a "failing state" but was not in danger of imminent collapse. Jenkins was visiting the Italian capital Rome at the request of the Italian government as part of the country's rotating presidency of the Group of Eight of the world's top economies plus Russia ahead of their forthcoming July summit. He took part in a conference of Italian and foreign officials at Italy's foreign ministry, on "Transnational threats and destabilising factors" before visiting the Rome headquarters of the GMC-Adnkronos media group where he met president, Giuseppe Marra. "There is concern that if there is a radical takeover of Pakistan itself, the armed forces will behave like the Iranian forces and simply say 'This is the new government, we are part of the new government' and therefore the nuclear arsenal could become part of a more radical government," said Jenkins in an exclusive interview with Adnkronos. Jenkins said while claims of the government's imminent collapse was an "overstatement", the long-term outlook is bleak. "I see this much more as a slow descent which can be arrested," he said. "I think some of these headlines that we have seen such as 'on the verge of collapse' are overstatements, nonetheless, the long term trends are not good. "This is not a failed state, this is not a state that is going to fail tomorrow, but this is a gradually failing state." Jenkins also said that there has been an escalation of violence in Pakistan which is moving from the tribal areas into the cities and the government does not know how to handle the threat. "What we see now is both a geographic escalation of the fighting in Pakistan. Before it was confined to the tribal areas, now we see the violence moving into the settled areas, into the major cities," he said. "Now we see the increasing use of large scale terrorist attacks, in many cases involving suicide bombers, this is new and extremely serious. In fact, the Pakistani authorities have not known quite how to deal with it." In addition, Jenkins said the Pakistani government's strategy of either confronting the Taliban militarily or making deals with the militants has failed and will require "decades" to overcome. "Neither strategy has worked well thus far and so there is a long-term challenge here that the Pakistan government with international help is going to be dealing with for many years, this is a task of decades," concluded Jenkins. A former US army Green Beret in Vietnam, Jenkins has advised the US government and many others around the world on terrorism and security issues. He is the author of numerous books, including 'Unconquerable Nation' and his latest 'Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?'. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 If...if...if... If Pakistan wasn't a Punjab majority state and if many Punjabis weren't inclined to squash ethnic upstarts, then there would be cause for worry. |
| Posted by: Jans Wittlesbach2039 2009-04-25 08:44 |