Pakistan on brink of collapse: Expert

The prediction from Dr David Kilcullen, a former Australian Army officer and specialist adviser to the Bush administration, said yesterday, "We have to face the fact that if Pakistan collapses it will dwarf anything we have seen so far in whatever we are calling the war on terror now.

"You just can't say you're not going to worry about al-Qaeda taking control of Pakistan and its nukes." He warned, "The safety of people around the world is at stake".

Kilcullen said time was running out for international efforts to pull both Pakistan and Afghanistan "back from the brink".

In Danger: Taliban has turned Pakistan's picturesque Swat valley into a hell hole. File pic

"Pakistan has 173 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army, which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al-Qaeda sitting in two-thirds of the country, which the government does not control," the counter-insurgency expert told a Sydney newspaper yesterday.

Kilcullen sounded a note of caution against an excessive focus by Western governments on Afghanistan at the expense of Pakistan saying the Kabul tail was wagging the dog...

"Afghanistan doesn't worry me. Pakistan does," he said.

"We can muddle through in Afghanistan. It is problematic and difficult and we know what to do. What we don't know is if we have the time or if we could afford the cost of what needs to be done."

Dr Kilcullen said a "fault line had developed in the grasp of circumstances on either side of the Durand line", the disputed border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"In Afghanistan, it's easy to understand, difficult to execute.

"But in Pakistan, it is very difficult to understand and it's extremely difficult for us to generate any kind of leverage because Pakistan does not want our help."

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