Pakistan: In Position to be The World's First Failed Nuclear State?

(AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)

The Taliban and their cohorts have been busy this week:

A suspected suicide car bomb ripped through a police building in an army garrison of Pakistan's northwest city of Peshawar on Friday, killing up to 11 people, police said.

This would be the third or fourth brazen, high profile attack on a Pakistani police or military installation in 24 hours. But there's more:

• Oct. 15, 2009: Teams of gunmen attack three security facilities in the eastern city of Lahore, leaving at 27 people dead including several militants, while a suicide car bombing at a police station kills 11 people in northwestern Kohat district and another bomb kills a 6-year-old boy in Peshawar in the northwest.

• Oct. 12, 2009: A suicide car bomb explodes near an army vehicle in a market in the northwestern Shangla district, killing 41, including six security officers.

• Oct. 10, 2009: A 22-hour long raid and standoff at the army headquarters in Rawalpindi leaves nine militants and 14 others dead.

• Oct. 9, 2009: A suicide car bomb in the northwestern city of Peshawar kills 53 people.

• Oct. 5, 2009: A bomber dressed as a security official kills five staffers at the U.N. food agency's headquarters in the capital, Islamabad.

Granted it's a little early to panic, but one has to wonder exactly how secure Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is in the midst of all this chaos.

Keep in mind this is idle early-morning speculation on my part, but I also have to wonder what role Pakistan's Intersrvices Intelligence Directorate (ISI) plays in all of this [also keep in mind I'm relatively unfamiliar with the military and intelligence hierarchy in Pakistan]. However, it's an undisputed fact that the ISI was a very early benefactor of the Taliban, and it's likely they still have the means to ship heroin out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and weapons and fighters into the region....perhaps using the Taliban as a proxy against their own government if they feel this pipeline of drugs, money and fighters is endangered? Although the Pakistani government distanced themselves from the Taliban in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, it's doubtful the ISI ever bothered severing ties.