Toronto, April 22 (Inditop) The western world and India must militarily destroy Pakistan’s nuclear weapons if the Taliban seizes control of the country, says a Canadian daily.
In an opinion piece, the National Post said Monday that the West and India must be ready to deal with the consequences as Pakistan falls to pieces under the Taliban onslaught.
Calling it “a terrifying possibility”, the newspaper said that “in this absurdly corrupt and mismanaged country, an otherwise unpopular Taliban-style theocracy will manage to propel itself into power by piggybacking upon the rich litany of entirely secular grievances harboured by the nation’s downtrodden peasant class.”
The daily warned that the western world, including India, must be ready for this possibility.
“Pakistan’s enormous internal problems – corruption on an epic scale, massive income inequality, an incompetent and obsolete military establishment still obsessed with the Indian threat, an intelligence service riven with Islamist sympathisers – are beyond our ability to change through our standard tools of democracy-building and foreign aid.
“But perhaps we can do something about the piece of the puzzle that affects the rest of the world most directly: Pakistan’s few dozen nukes. If the nation does indeed crumble into the hands of Medieval theocrats, we must be prepared to do what is militarily necessary to ensure those weapons are destroyed or disabled,” the National Post said.
“Let’s make sure the (Pakistani) regime doesn’t have the tools to export death to the rest of the world on a scale not seen since the summer of 1945.”
The paper said: “Its descent into Muslim fundamentalism – with all its attendant political and military pathologies – would be an upheaval that dwarfs even Iran’s 1979 revolution, an event that the civilised world is still dealing with 30 years later.”
The newspaper said until recently radical Islam was considered to be restricted to “Pakistan’s outlying, semi-autonomous tribal areas”. But this has changed as the Taliban has cashed in on the economic frustrations of landless people against their feudal landlords.
The paper said since Pakistan has not “modernised or democratised its land-holding system”, the Taliban could use landless people “to seize control in the Punjab and other populous areas of Pakistan.”