Pakistan is Ground Zero: Civil War and Nuclear Weapons

Let’s see: Pakistan is believed to have nuclear weapons. Elements of the intelligence service (ISI) support the Taliban. Large portions of the countryside are ungovernable. Where will it all lead? Ex-CIA analyst Bruce Riedel believes that the country is already in a civil war and that a military coup is a very real possibility. An excerpt from his interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel:

“Pakistan today is already in the midst of a small scale civil war. Last year 25,000 Pakistanis were killed or wounded in terrorism-related violence, and that’s just civilians. That’s three times the number of civilians killed or wounded in Afghanistan in the same year. It is a very fragile, very volatile and very combustible country right now. In many ways it is the strategic prize in this whole equation. What happens in Afghanistan will have huge ramifications for what happens in Pakistan. A jihadist victory in Afghanistan would have enormous reverberations and could even signal a take over by jihadist forces in Pakistan.”

Be sure to read the whole interview.