Pakistan ranks 13 in failed states index

WASHINGTON: Pakistan, a country which is run by a military obsessed with India and by a civilian elite that steals all it can and pay almost no taxes, has been ranked 13th in the latest ranking of failed states.

The unique ranking compiled by the prestigious Foreign Policy magazine is topped by African countries Somalia (114.9 points), Congo (111.2), Sudan (109.4), Chad (107.6) and Zimbabwe (106.3).

Afghanistan with 106 points is ranked at number 6, followed by Haiti, Yemen, Iraq and Central African Republic.

Pakistan with 101.6 points, the magazine said, is ranked 13, a slight improvement from the previous two years. In 2011 it was ranked 12th in the list of failed states, while in 2010 and 2009 it was ranked 10th.

"The country is run by a military obsessed with - and, for decades, invested in - the conflict with India, and by a civilian elite that steals all it can and pays almost no taxes," Robert D Kaplan, the chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor, wrote for the Foreign Policy.

But despite an overbearing military, tribes "defined by a near-universal male participation in organized violence," as the late European anthropologist Ernest Gellner put it, dominate massive swaths of territory. The absence of the state makes for 20-hour daily electricity blackouts and an almost nonexistent education system in many areas," he wrote.

Explaining the reasons for Pakistan being in the list of a failed state, Kaplan said the root cause of these manifold failures, in many minds, is the very artificiality of Pakistan itself: a cartographic puzzle piece sandwiched between India and Central Asia that splits apart what the British Empire ruled as one indivisible subcontinent.