The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Islamabad

Born from chaos and bloodshed, and still steeped in turmoil 60 years on, Pakistan has repeatedly defied predictions that the centre of the world's only nuclear-armed Islamic nation cannot hold.

While Benazir Bhutto's assassination has renewed fears Pakistan will become another failed state with a destiny determined by bombs instead of ballots, analysts say it has been down this road before -- and survived.

Pakistan is accustomed to seeing its political leaders meet a violent end, to be followed by claims civil war is at hand, and a kind of internal war has been part of the national fabric since its birth in 1947, they say.

Carved out of the rump of the British empire to give Muslims their own homeland with the partition of India, even the nation's founding was soaked in blood, with one million killed during the largest migration in human history.

"Pakistan was constructed as a contradiction, a homeland for Muslims that called itself a secular state. That is something Pakistanis have not come to terms with," said Marie Lall, an expert at British think-tank Chatham House. "But because there is a problem with the basis for the creation of Pakistan, that does not mean it is destined to be a failed state," she told AFP.

Often seen now as little more than a breeding ground for Islamic militancy, Pakistan is a complex mass of tribes and peoples where even the all-powerful military has come to believe that setbacks today do not mean failure tomorrow. The army, rulers of the country for more than half its existence, had to step in almost at the beginning, following a 1948 conflict with India over the Himalayan region of Kashmir that set off decades of strife.

Since then, Pakistan has lived through war and assassination, turmoil and the "war on terror" -- even the loss of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971, which is widely seen as the most traumatic moment in its history.