NEW YORK, Oct 21 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Offering militants a fertile breeding ground and sliding into political instability, Pakistan is arguably the most dangerous country of the world, a mass-circulation weekly reported on Sunday.

Today no other country on earth is more dangerous than Pakistan, according to Newsweeks cover story headlined Where the Jihad Lives Now. The bleak report says Islamic militants have spread beyond their tribal bases and have the run of an unstable, nuclear-armed nation.

The scary story reads political instability, a trusted network of radicals, an abundance of angry young anti-Western recruits and secluded training areas in Pakistan are what elusive al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden could dream of.

Unlike in Afghanistan or Iraq, the prestigious magazine points out, there are not many US troops hunting down would-be terrorists in the South Asian country. It goes on to refer to the risk of Pakistans nukes falling into the hands of al-Qaeda terrorists.

"If you were to look around the world for where Al Qaeda is going to find its bomb, it's right in their backyard," it quotes Bruce Riedel, the former senior director for South Asia on the National Security Council, as saying of the country's growing nuclear programme.

The country has been an unstable nuclear power, with its remote tribal areas stalked by terrorists, according to the report that adds what is more frightening is the extent to which Taliban and Qaeda elements have turned much of it into a base that gives jihadi forces more room to maneuver - both in Pakistan and beyond.

With the nose-diving unpopularity of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in recent months, Islamists have been encouraged, reports the weekly, which alleges the homegrown militants who have sheltered Al Qaeda leaders since the ouster of the Taliban regime in 2001 are operating freely in cities like Karachi.

Hammered by suicide bombers and Iraq-style IEDs and reluctant to make war on its countrymen, Pakistan's demoralised military seems incapable of stopping the jihadists even in the cities, the journal claims.

US and NATO efforts to defeat the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan have already been undermined by the safe haven insurgents have in Pakistan, the magazine continues. The result is that Taliban fighters now pretty much come and go as they please inside Pakistan.

Dozens of Taliban commanders have moved their wives and children to Pakistan, where they live in the suburbs of cities like Peshawar and Islamabad. This keeps them out of the reach of Afghan authorities, who have been known to arrest relatives in order to track down guerrilla fighters, the cover story says.

A member of Taliban's 30-member leadership council, Mullah Shabir Ahmad has moved his family to a neighbourhood in Quetta, capital of the Balochistan province. He reportedly showed a visiting Newsweek reporter a room chocked-full of new bolts of cloth, Ramadan gifts from Taliban backers.

Military dictators have found jihad to be an easy means of distracting Pakistani citizens and promoting their foreign-policy objectives, it asserts, recalling that Gen. Ziaul Haq converted the country into a base for the mujahideen fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan and won billions in American aid in the process.

In the 1990s, after the Soviet defeat, generals like Musharraf dispatched thousands of those fighters to wage a guerrilla campaign in Kashmir. Many trained across the border in Afghanistan, in the same camps that Al Qaeda had set up under the Taliban, the journal maintains.

smas/mud