Pakistan - Anarchy, State Power

Pakistan’s Passing Grade
By Anatol Lieven - The National Interest

.... Karachi demonstrates as well as anywhere else the fact that while Pakistan is a troubled state, it is as yet very far from being a failed one. Only in its northwestern fringe has state power collapsed—and state power there wasn’t always very real anyway. Calling Pakistan a failed state is a bit like saying that Russia has failed as a state because it has lost control of parts of the northern Caucasus. Anyone who, like me, has lived and worked in truly failed states will know the difference immediately.

Pakistan on the Brink
By Ahmed Rashid - NYRB

.... Pakistan is close to the brink, perhaps not to a meltdown of the government, but to a permanent state of anarchy, as the Islamist revolutionaries led by the Taliban and their many allies take more territory, and state power shrinks. There will be no mass revolutionary uprising like in Iran in 1979 or storming of the citadels of power as in Vietnam and Cambodia; rather we can expect a slow, insidious, long-burning fuse of fear, terror, and paralysis that the Taliban have lit and that the state is unable, and partly unwilling, to douse.

Why the Taliban won't take over Pakistan
For reasons of geography, ethnicity, military inferiority, and ancient rivalries, they represent neither the immediate threat that is often portrayed nor the inevitable victors that the West fears.
By Ben Arnoldy - CSM

.... The worldview of the Taliban comes from West of the Indus. For them, the plains represent exposure. "The Taliban have been able to operate in certain [mountainous areas] because of the terrain and the sympathy factor," says Rifaat Hussain, a military expert at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. "But the moment they begin to move out of the hideouts, they are exposed. If you have 100 truckloads of Taliban on the Peshawar Highway, all you need is two helicopter gunships" to wipe them out.

Coming down from the hills also would expose the Taliban to a more secular, urban world that views their way of life as something on the cover of National Geographic. Or, as a colleague of Professor Hussain puts it: "They are a bunch of mountain barbarians."