Could Pakistan and/or Afghanistan Become Failed States? Then What?

Pakistan, like Afghanistan has a weak central government, with rogue elements. Pieces of Pakistan, like Afghanistan have fallen to extremists. How long can Pakistan and Afghanistan stand?

Recent developments in Pakistan are more than troubling:

India has directly accused the ISI of involvement in the Mumbai attacks last fall.

Afghanistan is now saying that the attack on Kabul was not a typical Taliban attack, but similar to what happened in Mumbai, and they are looking to Pakistan.

In Pakistan, the Swat valley has been lost to the Taliban. Over 150 schools have been burned.

A Polish engineer was beheaded in Pakistan.

The Taliban have warned Obama on sending more troops to Afghanistan.

A provincial minister was assassinated in NW Pakistan.

What happens if Pakistan falls, or if larger pieces of it are lost? Afghanistan is essentially out of control, except the capital which was brazenly attacked last week. Holbrooke, Clinton and Obama are faced with bad and worse options.

If Pakistan goes down we are in big trouble. Not just us, but the whole world.

Religious extremists, who think nothing of dying for their cause and believe anyone not under their control deserves to die, can never be allowed to have a finger on the proverbial button.

It's just a question of how much further down they will go.

That Afghanistan has been a failed state for decades. It's cause a lot of death and destruction, but at least the region hasn't collapsed in toto.

The bad news is that Pakistan, as you point out, is verging on being a failed state. IMO, it will fall apart pretty soon. And who will end up with the nukes?

It's going to be world-historical awful. Pakistan's collapse is going to be *the* story for the first half of the 21st Century.

Unfortunately, it's a story that will be told by visiting anthropologists from Planet Zarg, as they survey the burned-out husk that used to be a green and fertile home to the human race.

Our presence is doing nothing to help the problem, and is in fact exacerbating it. We need to get out of the area and let Afghanistan and Pakistan, along with their neighbors, work out the problem on their own.

Oh, wait, our corporate overlords don't want us to abandon that gas pipeline and all those poppy fields. Great, we're going to be there for fucking ever.

Our only objective should be to keep and eye on the nukes.

However I don't know that invading Pakistan, or even staying in Afghanistan is a good way of going about securing them. Contrariwise, I think our actions and our presence makes them that much more likely to be used.

This is not akin to leaving sleeping dogs lie. All sorts of weird and violent ideologies can breed in such a place, usually based on some crackpot religious sects. That's how you end up with fanatics who are ready to die for their irrational beliefs. Life their is so shitty that some promise of a heavenly afterlife sounds like the way to go.

Now if they had clean water and indoor plumbing and schools and could grow enough food to eat, then they would be a much more civilized place. There are plenty of desperately poor places that are not ripped apart by violence, and in all of those places, it is possible to look around and see a way up. I think that Obama's plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan will be worth it in the long run.