Listen to the enemy.

In a book titled " Confronting the Bomb ", Pervez Hoodbhoy, Pakistani nuclear scientist with a PhD from MIT writes that the threat to nuclear weapons in Pakistan comes from within. TOI, 21 January.  He describes the Pakistani army as " a heavily Islamicised rank-and-file brimming with seditious thoughts ". " The fear of loose weapons comes from the fact that Pakistan's armed forces harbour a hidden enemy within their ranks. Those wearing the cloak of religion walk in and out of top security installations everyday," he writes and then," The fear of the insider is ubiquitous and well founded." This shows that neither the elected government nor the top brass in the army is in full control. This is all the more reason that India should stop fantasizing about a peace process with Pakistan because those we are talking to have no control on the bulk of the armed forces and possibly their nuclear weapons. Instead we should be pressurising the US to stop the flow of arms and money to Pakistan. In an article titled " Why Maulana Qadri and Cricketer Khan can't save Pakistan " Hoodbhoy mentions 3 actions that need to be taken. 1. " Address the population problem." In 1947 Pakistan's population was 28 million, today it is 180 million and will be 258 million by 2030. There will not be enough land or water to feed so many mouths. 2. Confront terrorism head-on. and 3. " The promise of the messiahs that they shall bring prosperity to everyone by somehow equalising the distribution of wealth is fake and dishonest, and un-implementable." You could take these arguments and apply them to India straightaway. Our population is already over 1.2 billion and we need to reduce numbers urgently or else the pressures on land, water and the environment will become intolerable. We must hit the terrorists very hard, perhaps even before they have time to mount an attack. We must also build a security wall to separate India from Pakistan so that not a single terrorist can get across and if there is no interaction with Pakistan they will not be able to claim that we are a threat to them. That will take away the fundamental reason for survival from the terrorists. This is not some delusion. The fence on the Demilitarized Zone in Korea has kept peace for over 60 years between the north and the south and the security wall that Israel has built on its borders has drastically cut down terrorist attacks by Palestinians. Finally talk of " inclusive growth " is a chimera. This is just to give an illusion of respectability to distribution of taxpayer money to the " vote bank " just to win elections. As such it is completely dishonest and amounts to grand larceny of public money. Pakistan is a failed state with nuclear weapons but with a collapsing economy and no control over armed gangs. We should listen to our enemies because we were born on the same day and could share their fate.