Pakistan, Aug. 2 -- Two unusually candid statements were made in Islamabad within the space of a few days. They came from different institutions, but diagnosed essentially the same national illness. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi declared that Pakistan's governance system had "collapsed". He argued that the existing administrative structure could no longer answer the country's political, economic and social problems and called for decentralisation, additional administrative units and a national consensus on structural reform.

Then the Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations, Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, said Pakistan was unfortunately not yet a "hard state". He immediately clarified that a hard state did not mean...