The world, particularly the United States and NATO, owe Pakistan nothing.
The Pakistani elite have had seven decades to build a viable, productive, and honourable nation and they have squandered their opportunities at every turn.
Instead of building regional relationships and democratic institutions they opted for war against India, oppression against its citizens, and terrorism against Afghanistan.
Pakistan is headed for oblivion. Those who wish to maintain the facade that it can be saved are doing more harm than good.
A reinvention of South Asia would be for the best.
II.
Journalist Pepe Escobar wrote in 2007:
Khaled Ahmed of the Friday Times newspaper has been one among many to alert what may happen: Pakistan reduced to basically the Punjab. The NWFP would gladly recover a lot of hydroelectric power. Balochistan would gladly recover a lot of gas – and become a Turkmenistan-style gas republic. And Sindh would gladly profit from its industry and ports.
The partition of Pakistan as we know it is not such a far-fetched scenario because, according to a wealth of Pakistani civil society’s opinions, there seems to be no national consensus whatsoever regarding the current mega-crisis. This is above all a crisis of the Pakistani state – which simply cannot be in place any more just based on an idea of Islam.
An excerpt from, "Will Pakistan Break Up?" Carnegie Endowment For International Peace, June 10, 2009:
Harrison explained that Pakistan is an artificial political entity which consists of four ethnic groups—Punjabis, Pashtuns, Baluch, and Sindhis—that have historically never co-existed in the same body politic. Punjabis, with 45 percent of the population, dominate the Army and the state, and treat the minorities, collectively constituting 33 percent of the population, as pariahs, even though the minorities regard 72 percent of Pakistan territory as their ancestral homelands.
Harrison's reputation for giving "early warning" of foreign policy crises was well established during his career as a foreign correspondent. In his study of foreign reporting, Between Two Worlds, John Hohenberg, former secretary of the Pulitzer Prize Board, cited Harrison's prediction of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War 18 months before it happened. Hohenberg wrote: "What Harrison foresaw came to pass, and when it happened, American editors suddenly rose up in their wrath – as they always do at such times – and demanded, 'why weren't we told about all of this?' They had been told at great length, but because too many editors were bored with a place like India, they weren't listening." Terming Harrison "one of the few correspondents in all of Asia who was able to maintain a balanced point of view," Hohenberg called him a model of the "first-rate correspondent who knows the past of the area to which he is assigned, writes with clarity and meaning of the present and has an awareness of the future."
The United States should support Pashtun and Baluch political aspirations in Pakistan and focus on countering the Islamist threat in Punjab rather than the threat posed by the Taliban.
