NEW YORK, Nov 23: One of President-elect Obama’s top priority should be Pakistan, “a country with 170 million people and up to 60 nuclear weapons may be collapsing”, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Nicholas Kristoff said in an article published in the New York Times on Sunday.

He also suggested that the Obama administration “should push much harder for a peace deal in Kashmir — including far more pressure on India — because Kashmir grievances empower Pakistani militants.”

Kristoff said: “I’ve been coming to Pakistan for 26 years, ever since I hid on the tops of buses to sneak into tribal areas as a backpacking university student, and I’ve never found Pakistanis so gloomy. Some worry that militants, nurtured by illiteracy and a failed education system, will overrun the country or that the nation will break apart.”

He said that although he was not ‘quite that pessimistic’, “but it’s very likely that the next major terror attack in the West is being planned by extremists here in Pakistan”.

He observed that reporting in Pakistan was scarier than it had ever been. “The major city of Peshawar is now controlled in part by the Taliban, and this month alone in the area an American aid worker was shot dead, an Iranian diplomat kidnapped, a Japanese journalist shot and American humvees stolen from a Nato convoy to Afghanistan.”

Mr Kristoff, who angered the former president Pervez Musharraf when he wrote about the Mukhtar Mai rape case, is critical of President Asif Ali Zardari for his induction of two new ministers well known for their women rights abuses.

Mr Zardari, Kristoff said seemed overwhelmed by the challenges and locked in the past.

“Incredibly, he has just chosen for his new cabinet two men who would fit fine in a Taliban government.”

“While there are no easy solutions for the interlinked catastrophes unfolding in Pakistan and Afghanistan, there are several useful steps that we in the West can take to reduce the risk of the region turning into the next Somalia.”

He said the Obama administration should cut tariffs on Pakistani agricultural and manufactured products to boost the economy and provide jobs. “We should also support China on its planned export-processing zone to create manufacturing jobs in Pakistan.”

The new administration, he said, should also focus on education. One reason the country is such a mess today is that half of all Pakistanis are illiterate.

In another article in Sunday’s paper, the Times writer Jane Perlez said that one of the biggest fears of the Pakistani military planners is the collaboration between India and Afghanistan to destroy Pakistan.

Quoting a senior Pakistani government official, he said some people felt the United States was colluding in this.