There is almost no way this ends without losing one or more American cities. Only question is how soon and how many.
To completely secure the entire country (seven times the size of Iraq and more densely urban), you’d have to come up with 2-3 million troops to pacify it. And even if you got your hands on every single weapon, the raw materials, technology and scientists will scatter like candy out of a pinata.
Al Qaeda is on its way to birthing the nuclear caliphate.
http://www.ptinews.com/pti%5Cptisite.nsf/0/A1C7E3608771FFB2652575A0005E2FCF?OpenDocument
Mullen worried about Pak nukes if descent into chaos continues
Washington, Apr 22 (PTI) The US today expressed its concern over the safety of the nuclear weapons in Pakistan if the current “descent into chaos” continues there.
“In Pakistan, it’s a country that has nuclear weapons. My long-term worry is that descent, you know, should it continue, gives us the worst possible outcome there,” Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the NBC news in an interview.
He was asked: “Both Afghanistan and Pakistan are showing signs of descending into chaos. What is the real threat to the United States if this is not stopped?” However, Mullen who is currently in Afghanistan where the interview was recorded, said he is comfortable for now with the measures taken by Pakistan for safety of its nukes.
“Does the US have a plan to safeguard Pakistan’s nuclear weapons?” he was asked. “I wouldn’t go into any kind of detailed planning. I’m comfortable right now that the measures that the Pakistanis have taken in recent years provide adequate security,” Mullen said.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the al- Qaeda and the Taliban have now “merged” and are posing a very serious threat to the United States and its allies.
“The Taliban and al-Qaeda have, in ways, merged. So what was, a few years ago, sort of a separate fight is now merging,” he said adding, the threat from them is “very real”.
“I see intelligence routinely that indicates that al- Qaeda is plotting against the United States, against western interests,” he said. PTI
http://www.nationalpost.com/story-printer.html?id=1513235
Pakistan falling to pieces
(snipped)
“. . .it raises a terrifying possibility: that in this absurdly corrupt and mismanaged country, an otherwise unpopular Talibanstyle theocracy will manage to propel itself into power by piggybacking upon the rich litany of entirely secular grievances harboured by the nation’s downtrodden peasant class.
It’s a trick that would hardly be unprecedented: From the Bolsheviks in Russia, to the Taliban in Afghanistan, to Hamas in Gaza and the Khomeinists in Iran, history shows that the combination of an intensely radicalized vanguard (to borrow a favourite communist term) with an uneducated but umbraged political base can produce sudden, cataclysmic political change.
The Western world, including India, must be ready for this. Pakistan’s enormous internal problems — corruption on an epic scale, massive income inequality, an incompetent and obsolete military establishment still obsessed with the Indian threat, an intelligence service riven with Islamist sympathizers — are beyond our ability to change through our standard tools of democracy-building and foreign aid. But perhaps we can do something about the piece of the puzzle that affects the rest of the world most directly: Pakistan’s few dozen nukes. If the nation does indeed crumble into the hands of Medieval theocrats, we must be prepared to do what is militarily necessary to ensure those weapons are destroyed or disabled.
No one can be sure when or how the bumbling government of Asif Ali Zardari will fall. But whoever does replace him may make Mahmoud Ahmadinejad look reasonable by comparison. Let’s make sure the regime doesn’t have the tools to export death to the rest of the world on a scale not seen since the summer of 1945.”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/254/story/66368.html
Posted on Thu, Apr. 16, 2009
U.S. experts: Pakistan on course to become Islamist state
(snipped)
. . . “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,” agreed the U.S. intelligence official. “It’s a developed state . . . (with) a major Indian Ocean port and ties to the outside world, especially the (Persian) Gulf, that Afghanistan and the Taliban never had.”
“The implications of this are disastrous for the U.S.,” he added. “The supply lines (from Karachi to U.S. bases) in Kandahar and Kabul from the south and east will be cut, or at least they’ll be less secure, and probably sooner rather than later, and that will jeopardize the mission in Afghanistan, especially now that it’s getting bigger.”
The experts McClatchy interviewed said their views aren’t a worst case scenario but a realistic expectation based on the militants’ gains and the failure of Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership to respond. . .
I agree. It’s which cities? And when?
You’ll want to see Gerald Posner’s read on this as well:
The Taliban’s Nuclear Threat [on verge of seizing Pakistan’s nukes]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2235591/posts
SNIPPET from your post no. 12:
““I see intelligence routinely that indicates that al- Qaeda is plotting against the United States, against western interests,” he said.”
Thanks for the pings.
Very vervous bump.