Center for a New American Security

A couple of stories from the weekend are worth flagging for further reading if you missed them, both of which revolve around Pakistan. The Times (of London not that Johnny-come-lately one in New York) has a report by Christina Lamb that alleges the British government has been covering up the fact that the SAS killed a Pakistani Army officer who was leading Taliban fighters in Helmand province last year.

British officials covered up evidence that a Taliban commander killed by special forces in Helmand last year was in fact a Pakistani military officer, according to highly placed Afghan officials.

The commander, targeted in a compound in the Sangin valley, was one of six killed in the past year by SAS and SBS forces. When the British soldiers entered the compound they discovered a Pakistani military ID on the body.

It was the first physical evidence of covert Pakistani military operations against British forces in Afghanistan even though Islamabad insists it is a close ally in the war against terror.

Britain’s refusal to make the incident public led to a row with the Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who has long accused London of viewing Afghanistan through the eyes of Pakistani military intelligence, which is widely believed to have been helping the Taliban.

This is hardly the first allegation of involvement by Pakistani forces with Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. In the early days of OEF there was the infamous Airlift of Evil which allowed hundreds of ISI and Frontier Corps “advisors” to escape from Kunduz ahead of the Northern Alliance. More recently, Seth Jones from Rand has repeatedly asserted that the ISI and FC are continuing to provide the Afghan Taliban with money and weapons.

The strange detail from this story is the fact that the SAS recovered a Pakistani Army ID. Troy is certainly not a special operator, but he presumes that if he were covertly advising insurgents in a third country, he wouldn’t bring his military identification with him. This suggests that the officer in question may have been freelancing, rather than on official duty, but we will have to wait for more details to emerge.

If this were true, it could explain the Brits decision calculus in covering up the story. Unnamed Afghan sources cited in Lamb’s article claim that it was done to avoid inflaming the Pakistani population in the UK, but Troy doesn’t find that convincing. However, publicizing evidence of a rogue army officer(s), vice evidence of an official covert operation, could cause a lot of public embarrassment that wouldn’t necessarily lead to any productive outcome. It would also explain why this story was leaked by Afghan sources who undoubtedly want an opportunity to "stick it" to Pakistan.

Clearly this is a sensitive point for Islamabad. As Lamb reports,

The Afghan claims of Pakistani involvement in Helmand were backed by a senior United Nations official who said he had been told by his superiors to keep quiet after Pakistan’s ambassador to the UN apparently threatened to stop contributing forces to peacekeeping missions. Pakistan is the UN’s biggest supplier of peacekeeping troops.

Turning to macro-political issues, Šumit Ganguly, the sharpest South Asia scholar in the U.S., has a commentary in the Washington Post on the structural basis for Pakistan’s endemic political chaos. It is a cogent analysis of an important topic, but not one that makes uplifting reading—particularly when the title of your article is “Danger Ahead for the Most Dangerous Place in the World.”

Here's an alarming thought: Pakistan is in even scarier shape than most of the so-called experts are willing to admit.

This nuclear-armed state of 168 million is no stranger to political upheaval, of course. But this time, things are different. Today's ongoing crisis -- marked by a rash of suicide bombings, the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto last December, inflation as high as 25 percent and a resurgent Taliban movement -- could spell doom for the Pakistani state itself.

It gets worse from there, particularly because Troy doubts the likelihood that his policy prescription would or could be implemented.