U.S. Power Vacuum Now Threatens To Destabilize Nuclear-Armed Pakistan
Radical Threat: Anti-government demonstrators could soon upend the one Islamic country that has nuclear weapons. Ironically, candidate Barack Obama feigned hawkishness in 2008 by threatening to intervene in Pakistan.
Violent protests in Islamabad involving tens of thousands are threatening Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s hold on power. With a comfortable parliamentary majority, Sharif responded by convening both chambers to buttress his support and strengthen opposition to what his government considers an anti-democratic, terrorist rebellion.
Last week, all of Pakistan’s political factions actually joined together and formally urged Sharif to resist the demonstrators’ demands to resign.
But representative government just doesn’t impress populations in the Islamic Mideast the way it impresses us in the West. That is why President Obama’s 2009 appearance in Cairo — in which he said “I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world” — ended up unleashing not democratic forces but their opposite.
The collapse of a nuclear-armed Islamic country’s government would be a chillingly unpredictable event, even though Pakistan’s military, which controls the nuclear weapons, is in many respects is pro-Western. Right now such a collapse looks unlikely, but the rise of a new jihadist state in parts of Iraq and Syria looked unlikely two years ago.
And before Obama, so did the toppling of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, where he was in power for three decades.
It is vital to U.S. interests for a nuclear-armed Pakistan not to be run by forces hostile to us. At the same time, Pakistani leaders seen to be too cozy with the U.S. become targets of repeated assassination attempts, as was the case with former President Pervez Musharraf, now under house arrest.
Imagine the disaster of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons landing in the wrong hands. A nonclassified U.S. government analysis, conceding the obvious, was quoted by NBC News in 2011. It described Pakistan as “the least stable of the nine nuclear weapons states and the one where there has been significant support for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, not only among the general population but also within the military and intelligence forces.”
Bin laden, after all, managed to live there undisturbed, near a key Pakistani military institution, for about nine years.
The Pakistan Security Research Center at Britain’s University of Bradford cited indigenous terrorist attacks on a nuclear missile storage facility at Sarghoda, Pakistan, in November 2007; on the nuclear air base at Kamra, Pakistan, by a suicide bomber the following month; and Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers blowing up several entrances at one of the country’s primary nuclear-weapon assembly centers the following year.
Read More At Investor’s Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/090214-715648-a-destabilized-pakistan-could-mean-nuclear-armed-terrorists.htm#ixzz3CDsGSpZu
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Radical Threat: Anti-government demonstrators could soon upend the one Islamic country that has nuclear weapons. Ironically, candidate Barack Obama feigned hawkishness in 2008 by threatening to intervene in Pakistan.
Violent protests in Islamabad involving tens of thousands are threatening Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s hold on power. With a comfortable parliamentary majority, Sharif responded by convening both chambers to buttress his support and strengthen opposition to what his government considers an anti-democratic, terrorist rebellion.
Last week, all of Pakistan’s political factions actually joined together and formally urged Sharif to resist the demonstrators’ demands to resign.
But representative government just doesn’t impress populations in the Islamic Mideast the way it impresses us in the West. That is why President Obama’s 2009 appearance in Cairo — in which he said “I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world” — ended up unleashing not democratic forces but their opposite.
The collapse of a nuclear-armed Islamic country’s government would be a chillingly unpredictable event, even though Pakistan’s military, which controls the nuclear weapons, is in many respects is pro-Western. Right now such a collapse looks unlikely, but the rise of a new jihadist state in parts of Iraq and Syria looked unlikely two years ago.
And before Obama, so did the toppling of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, where he was in power for three decades.
It is vital to U.S. interests for a nuclear-armed Pakistan not to be run by forces hostile to us. At the same time, Pakistani leaders seen to be too cozy with the U.S. become targets of repeated assassination attempts, as was the case with former President Pervez Musharraf, now under house arrest.
Imagine the disaster of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons landing in the wrong hands. A nonclassified U.S. government analysis, conceding the obvious, was quoted by NBC News in 2011. It described Pakistan as “the least stable of the nine nuclear weapons states and the one where there has been significant support for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, not only among the general population but also within the military and intelligence forces.”
Bin laden, after all, managed to live there undisturbed, near a key Pakistani military institution, for about nine years.
The Pakistan Security Research Center at Britain’s University of Bradford cited indigenous terrorist attacks on a nuclear missile storage facility at Sarghoda, Pakistan, in November 2007; on the nuclear air base at Kamra, Pakistan, by a suicide bomber the following month; and Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers blowing up several entrances at one of the country’s primary nuclear-weapon assembly centers the following year.
Read More At Investor’s Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/090214-715648-a-destabilized-pakistan-could-mean-nuclear-armed-terrorists.htm#ixzz3CDsGSpZu
Follow us: @IBDinvestors on Twitter | InvestorsBusinessDaily on Facebook
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