ZONES OF ANARCHY

Under Nuclear Threats and War on Iraq

Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Washington Post Company, January 5, 2003

Pakistan balances on a knife's edge between simmering unease and total upheaval. It's the country to watch in 2003. Anti-American sentiment is surging. Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is already having difficulty justifying his country's cooperation with the U.S. war against terrorism.

That task could become impossible if the United States attacks Iraq:
Such an attack will be portrayed by Pakistan's Islamic radicals as a war against Islam. Anger over Musharraf's pro-U.S. policies could lead to his assassination. Already, entire cities and regions in Pakistan are largely beyond government control, including much of the North-West Frontier Province along the Afghan border and the port city of Karachi in the south, both places where Osama bin Laden might be hiding. The emergence of these "zones of anarchy" could foreshadow a broader unraveling of central authority in the country.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's relationship with India has seemed to stabilize lately, but that's just an illusion. It would take very little provocation -- perhaps another attack by Kashmiri radicals on a major Indian target -- to touch off a war. Such a war certainly would involve threats by both sides to use nuclear weapons.

The worst-case scenario following any kind of internal upheaval in Pakistan would be the loss of control over the country's large stores of enriched uranium. It's relatively easy to make a crude nuclear bomb with this material, and it would be a potent terrorist weapon -- the stuff of nightmares.

How can we ensure that these uranium stockpiles will remain secure? How secure are they now?

-- Thomas Homer-Dixon is the director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program of the University of Toronto and author of "The Ingenuity Gap" (Knopf). (c) 2003 The Washington Post Company