As a Dawn report suggests, the US is considering pressuring Pakistan into halting its nuclear weapons production programme and it has won the support for this from the other four major nuclear powers, including China. The report, quoting American officials, goes on to reveal that there is also a contingency plan to take out Pakistan’s nukes should the country be destabilised any further to keep these weapons of mass destruction from falling into the ‘wrong’ hands.

All this tells us how big a problem Pakistan has become for world peace due to our own failings and the inability to govern ourselves effectively. Even as we speak there will be many who would say that the West and India had their eyes set on our nukes because they never wanted any Muslim nation to possess that technology in the first place, and that they are just looking for an excuse to take them out. Even if that is true, it is we who have worked hard all these years to offer them such an excuse and the opportunity on a platter as it were.

Forget for a minute the insurgency in Balochistan because it’s a question of just one wronged nationality struggling for its rights; what have we done with other parts of the country where extremist terrorists keep striking at the time and targets of their own choosing? Is Punjab any peaceful or safe in terms of law and order? Are Fata and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa not already destabilised, where girls dread going to school? And lastly, what about Karachi that has become a killing field, and no one seems to care?

The government has done little to improve internal security besides protecting the VVIPs, which becomes another nuisance in everyday urban life. One can also ask whether the armed forces are any stronger with their nuclear arsenal, which it now turns out, needs to be protected rather than the nukes becoming a guarantee of protecting us against foreign invasion, incursions or drone strikes. The fact is that we have let the forces of darkness so utterly free to do what they want that it is the external powers which have to clean up the mess now because we wouldn’t do it ourselves. Secretly, we still look at religious extremists as a national asset and as tools of foreign policy after the US leaves Afghanistan.

As for the Pakistani public, it bears the brunt of all the lopsided policies of the government and the armed forces, or a complete lack of any policy to tackle the growing internal and external threats. Forget rule of law, there’s not enough water, not enough power, no semblance of law and order, runaway inflation in double digits, rise in poverty, malnutrition, disease and a total breakdown of accountable governance. Are Pakistanis safe from the tyranny of keeping their own nukes which have consumed all their resources other than the billions being spent most unscrupulously on maintaining a royal lifestyle for the ruling elite: politicians, generals and bureaucrats alike? And now we have to protect those nukes with more resources because America may want to take them out. It’s all a bad joke.

National institutions have long become dysfunctional along with a squeeze on the industrial sector due to the acute and worsening energy crisis. Yet, no one has the will to even start addressing the issue. What kind of a sovereign state are we that can’t even manage our resources and keep vital institutions in working order? Do we deserve to have the dangerous nuclear technology whether it’s for waging war or maintaining peace, or for entirely peaceful purposes? There is precious little to show in the last mentioned department.

Let’s try to get it right: it is not the Islamic bomb that the West and India are panicking about. It is a bomb in the wrong place, with a record of nuclear proliferation confessed by a disgraced scientist on national TV who continues to be celebrated as a hero. It is a country where the military runs the foreign policy, where parliament and the executive remain rubber stamps in terms of exercising any real power besides that to plunder and pillage national assets and institutions as long as the generals want and get what they ask for. The problem is that no one from amongst them has the vision for the future, to think for the people and the country, and all are guardians of the status quo as long as it lasts and benefits them and their ilk.

In this laissez faire world of ours if our ineptitude is not contained within our own borders and it threatens to spill over to the rest of the world, the world does have a valid reason to worry. And this is precisely what it has been warning Pakistanis about, if only someone would listen and do something about fixing the rot.

The rot will not be fixed by administering more radical ideology, more denial and stubbornness and hollow protestations about breaches of our sovereignty as a nation; nor will it be fixed by crying that the external powers wish to see us go down the drain. It is the external powers that seem to worry about it and are trying to warn us of slipping over the precipice as we approach it.

It is pathetic.

—The writer is a member of the staff at Dawn Newspaper