India poses no threat to Pakistan: US expert

A leading American expert has said that India poses no threat to Pakistan, and added that the real threat to Pakistans sovereignty, viability, security and prosperity comes from within.

Washington, Jan 22 : A leading American expert has said that India poses no threat to Pakistan, and added that the real threat to Pakistan's sovereignty, viability, security and prosperity comes from within.

"To the extent that disorder is fed from without, it is not coming from Delhi but from places like Afghanistan or from so-called "volunteers" from other places in the Muslim world," said Richard N Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in an interview.

He said that Pakistan is heading into a period of instability and drift with "constant political jockeying and skirmishing, lower economic growth, and probably a messy security situation."

Haass said Pakistan's problems in confronting the internal threat go beyond any lack of coordination with Afghanistan.

"What you have in Pakistan is a fundamental lack of state capacity. Pakistan, even though it is 60 years old, faces some of the same nation-building challenges that far younger, less mature countries do," he added.

This recent talk about the creation of a Frontier Corps is further proof that the Pakistan Army is not well-suited to this mission and much of US aid up until now has not contributed significantly to Pakistan's ability to deal with its real challenges, he claimed.

Musharraf deserves conditional support and the US ought to endorse the decision to hold elections by mid-February, he said.

Haass said the emergence of a new PPP leadership, which he said was not "terribly new", was in many ways a "disheartening reminder of how little democracy there is in Pakistan."

"This is an indication that Pakistani politics are more familial and feudal than they are representative," he added.

"The deployment of the army in the run-up to the elections shows that both Musharraf and the leadership of the army are worried about internal security," the Daily Times quoted Haass, as saying.

Haass, head of policy planning at the State Department under Clinton, said the future of Pakistan would be determined by Pakistani rather than by American policy.

ANI