'Pakistan 10th most failed state of the world'

Just three places below Afghanistan, Pakistan has been ranked the 10th most failed state in the 2010 Failed State Index released by the prestigious Foreign Policy magazine on Monday.

The list is topped by Somalia, followed by Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Chad.

India is ranked 87 in a list of 177 countries.

In India's immediate neighbourhood, Burma has been placed at 13, Sri Lanka (22) and Nepal 25. China is ranked at 57th place. Norway is ranked at the bottom of the list.

"Shattered Somalia has been the No.1 failed state for three years running, and none of the current top 10 has shown much improvement, if any, since FOREIGN POLICY and the Fund for Peace began publishing the index in 2005," it said.

"Altogether, the top 10 slots have rotated among just 15 unhappy countries in the index's six years. State failure, it seems, is a chronic condition," the magazine said.

The magazine said Somalia saw yet another year plagued by lawlessness and chaos, with pirates plying the coast while radical Islamist militias tightened their grip on the streets of Mogadishu.

"Across the Gulf of Aden, long-ignored Yemen leapt into the news when a would-be suicide bomber who had trained there tried to blow up a commercial flight bound for Detroit," it said.

Afghanistan and Iraq traded places on the index as both states contemplated the exit of US combat troops, while already isolated Sudan saw its dictator, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, defy an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court and the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo once again proved itself a country in little more than name, the magazine said.