Lahore, Nov 2 : Pakistan Army is not designed to fight insurgencies, and the ongoing political transition and the pending retirement of President Pervez Musharraf as Army Chief, has further complicated matters, according to a private US intelligence firm.

Kamran Bokhari, who is director of Middle East analysis at Strategic Forecasting Inc, said another major issue is that the Pakistani intelligence/security establishment is to a significant degree compromised (mostly in the junior ranks) to where the jihadis are always one step ahead of the authorities.

"Well placed sources have described the situation as agencies within agencies, which are dominated by people who bat for both sides. It will be sometime before the Pakistanis can successfully engage in a cleansing process and for that political stability is a pre-requisite," he said.

The Pakistan Army has developed a decent command and control infrastructure to protect its nuclear assets. A three-star general heads the Strategic Plans Division, which is the body responsible for managing the country's nuclear arsenal.

"Recently, Islamabad further institutionalised the issue by widening the circle of people with decision-making power regarding the nukes," Bokhari said.

He said it was wrong to group Pakistan with states such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, because the government's writ on its territory "has been quite solid", except in the tribal areas.

Bokhari said that there was a huge poverty of thought, not just in Pakistan but globally, on how to fight the scourge of jihadism.

"There is a dire need to bring together the real experts who understand the phenomenon we are dealing with and are familiar with the needs of policy-making. We are talking about a very small group of people from the epistemic community who at their individual level have some decent ideas," he said.

Bokhari said that the extremism and militancy in Pakistan was to a great degree the outcome of the unsettled debate over country's ideology, on whether it should be a secular state or an Islamic state.

He said that Benazir Bhutto is unlikely to be able to make any significant dent in the jihadis base, because she would need major political, capital and the full support of the military establishment to do so, neither of which was likely. (ANI)