Pakistan At 70 Is A Failed State

PAKISTAN IS IMPLODING. THE TERRORISTS IT BRED TO BLEED INDIA BY A THOUSAND CUTS ARE BLEEDING PAKISTAN INSTEAD.

- Minhaz Merchant

PAKISTAN IS PRE-programmed to fail.” With those words, my father, an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, left a thin, gangling fellow-student, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in a bad mood.

It was 1950. Bhutto went on to Oxford University to study law before returning to Pakistan. My father, management degree in hand, returned to India to join the family’s manufacturing enterprise.

During his years at Berkeley, Bhutto tried hard to convince other Indian students what a great future his newly formed country Pakistan had. My father told him why he was wrong: a country founded on theocracy would eventually implode.

Sixty-seven years after that conversation on a northern California campus, those words appear prophetic.

On the 70th anniversary of its founding, Pakistan is in fact imploding. The terrorists it bred to bleed India by a thousand cuts are bleeding Pakistan instead.

Balochistan is in ferment. It is a matter of time before it breaks away from Pakistan. Balochistan was an independent state named Kalat in the British Empire. It was not part of the instruments of accession at Indian Independence and Partition in 1947. In May 1948, the Pakistan army invaded and annexed it.

The Pakistani daily The Nation published a detailed account on 5 December 2015 of how Pakistan illegally occupied Balochistan, now the centrepiece of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC): “Balochistan accounts for nearly half the land mass of Pakistan and only 3.6 per cent of its total population. The province is immensely rich in natural resources, including oil, gas, copper and gold. Despite these huge deposits of mineral wealth, the area is one of the poorest regions of Pakistan. A vast majority of its population lives in deplorable housing conditions where they don’t have access to electricity or clean drinking water.