Observing that a "nuclear Pakistan as a base for international terrorism is a prospect that the world cannot afford," the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) asked the US government to redefine the territory of war in the region to include Fata.

This, it said, would help CENTCOM the US Central Command to cooperate with the Pakistan army in both military and economic development efforts as needed and agreed on by both the countries.

The observations were part of a report "Fata A Most Dangerous Place" authored by Shuja Nawaz, a Pakistani journalist, who has just been appointed as the first Director of the South Asia Centre at the Atlantic Council of the US.

"Fata remains a most dangerous place, with the failure of governance and the rise of militancy affecting Afghanistan and Pakistan not only individually and separately but also jointly," Nawaz said, concluding his observations.

"A nuclear Pakistan as a base for international terrorism is a prospect that the world cannot afford," he said.

Author of the book "Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army and the War Within" released last year, Nawaz was the first war correspondent of Pakistani Television in 1971, according to his bio put on his website.

In his foreword to the report, Arnaud De Borchgrave, director Transnational Threats, CSIS said: "Pakistan is the ground zero in the US-jihadist war."

Pakistan's Fata is at the heart of the immediate crisis, as it provides safe haven for the Taliban guerrillas and Al Qaeda terrorists, and have sown seeds of Islamic militancy and terror inside Pakistan proper, he said.

"The geopolitical nexus of Pakistan-Fata-Afghanistan- India must be seen as a regional crisis that requires a holistic politico-military approach," Borchgrave said.

Introducing the report, Nawaz argued that the most dangerous place on the map may be the source of another 9/11 type of attack on the western world or its surrogates in the region, in an apparent reference to the Mumbai terrorist attack.

Should such an attack occur, it likely will be spawned in the militancy that grips Fata and contiguous areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan today, he said.

Recommending that the US should forge a long-term relationship with Pakistan and its people, the report observes that failure to bring peace and to restore a modicum of stability to Fata will have widespread repercussions for the region and perhaps the world.