Pakistan Could Collapse in Six Months, says CENTCOM adviser

The Pakistani state could collapse within six months if immediate steps are not taken to remedy the situation, warned a top adviser to the US Central Command, The News reported. David Kilcullen, who advises CENTCOM commander General David H. Petraeus on the war on terror, urged US policymakers to focus their attention on Pakistan as a failure there could have devastating consequences for the entire international community. In an interview with The Washington Post (Sunday Edition), Kilcullen warned that if Pakistan went out of control, it would ‘dwarf’ all the crises in the world today. “Pakistan hands down. No doubt,” he said when asked to name the central front in the war against terror. Asked to explain why he thought Pakistan was so important, Kilcullen said: “Pakistan has 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the US Army, and al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the two-thirds of the country that the government doesn’t control.”
He claimed that the Pakistani military and Police and intelligence service did not follow the civilian Government they were essentially a rogue state within a state. “Were now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state, also because of the global financial crisis, which just exacerbates all these problems,” he said. “The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover — that would dwarf everything we’ve seen in the war on terror today.”