WASHINGTON: What if Pakistan breaks up? It's a question a friend asked recently. He is a former diplomat, a man of wide international experience who holds reasoned opinions. "Why should we Indians be worked up? If it breaks up, let it go," he said.
We had a cracking debate about it that evening. I wondered whether strategy shops in India, in government and out, had drawn up alternative scenarios of the consequences of such a calamity. "There's no need," he said. "It won't be any different from what we have to face today. If anything, it will be a little easier."
The conversation came back to me when an Islamabad-datelined news item in this newspaper last week said that several Pakistanis had left or were planning to leave their homeland, so dangerous and exasperating life had become there. That doesn't mean that Pakistan will soon be drained of people. It just means some of those who can, mostly from the middle and upper classes will leave; some, alas, will be the ones with the best minds. The super rich already have a foot in other countries, with villas and estates to care for. Everyone else - the vast majority - will have no option but to stay back. Or, and this is the scary part, will want to run for their lives, helter-skelter, if Pakistan indeed begins to unravel. But where will they go for refuge?
The problem is that if its people start to desert Pakistan, they won't necessarily go in any predictable, orderly manner. There won't be a last person to leave who will turn the lights out and Pakistan will become a dark spot on the map. 'Break-up' is a convenient term in a speculative chat. No one knows exactly how it might happen.
What might a disintegrated Pakistan look like? My friend thinks Balochistan is the province most likely to break away; the north-west frontier area is formally inside Pakistan's borders but is more or less autonomous. The tribes and terrorists there don't care for national borders anyway. So, Pakistan will become Punjab and Sindh, which it has in fact been all these years. How would that make a difference to India?
http://newageislam.com/many-what-ifs-in-pakistan/islam-and-politics/d/2356
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9:42 PM
Moderate Islamist here
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