Pakistan: a withering state?

Will the community of nations enter the next millennium without Pakistan as a member? With authenticated facts and thorough-going analysis, this book fore tells that it is a distinct probability.

Some notable features of the quick sands called Pakistan are: inability, even after half a century of its existence, to come to a clear conclusion about its own identity; open contempt for insti tutions of governance by the armed forces; intimidation of the judiciary; economic collapse; survival of the state on drug money; export of terrorism across the borders; grim ethnic divide; public disdain for state authority; lack of leadership, vision and strategy.

Evidence is emerging of the close links of the ruling elite of Pakistan, including its Prime Minister, with the drug runners. Pakistanis in the know themselves assert that the country's nuclear programme is financed with the drug money. As the country goes under, overwhelmed by its economic, sectarian, ethnic and moral crisis, the resort to drug money will increase still further.

When US cruise missiles overflew more than 1,000 kilometres of Pakistan airspace to attack terrorist camps in Afghanistan, Pakistan had to accept it with just a whimper of protest. Most explosive, perhaps, is the detailed expo sure of Pakistan's terrorist activity in the Jammu and Kashmir state of the Indian Union, identifying locations, Pakistani officials involved, and the nature of their subversive enterprise.