Pakistan, affected by civil war, Talibanisation and a struggle for control of its nuclear weapons, will be a 'failed' state by 2015, premier US intelligence agencies have said in an assessment report.
Forecasting a 'Yugoslavia-like fate', the US National Intelligence Council and Central Intelligence Agency, in a jointly prepared Global Futures Assessment Report, have said Pakistan would be ripe with civil war, bloodshed, and inter-provincial rivalries.
"Pakistan will not recover easily from decades of political and economic mismanagement, divisive policies, lawlessness, corruption and ethnic friction," the report said.
The former Pakistan high commissioner to United Kingdom, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, quoted the report in an article titled Will the Pakistan army invade Balochistan as per the NIC-CIA Plan? in the South Asia Tribune.
Hasan said, "The military operation that has been put in motion in Balochistan would further distance the Baloch people from rest of the country."
"Nascent democratic reforms will produce little change in the face of opposition from an entrenched political elite and radical Islamic parties. In a climate of continuing domestic turmoil, the Central government's control will be reduced to the Punjabi heartland and the economic hub of Karachi," the former diplomat of Pakistan quoted the report as saying.
Hasan wondered, "Are our military rulers working on a similar agenda or on something that has been laid out for them in the various assessment reports over the years by the National Intelligence Council in joint collaboration with CIA?"
His article comes in the backdrop of growing violence between the Balochis and the Pakistani security forces stationed in the gas-rich province.
The recent moves by the security forces to evict all residents within a 15-km radius of Pakistan's biggest gas plant, Sui, and the decision to create a cantonment near it has given a fillip to the anti-Islamabad insurgent activities of Balochi groups like the Balochistan Liberation Army, media reports said.
They said Pakistan was taking the 'most drastic step yet' in its bid to crush a deadly tribal rebellion by forcibly evicting all residents from around 500 dwellings.