Report: Young Pakistani Army Officers May Be Turning to Taliban

by Infidelesto on May 12, 2009 · Comments

More grim news from the unstable nuclear state…

CQ Politics

A retired Pakistani general confided a deep worry to a friend in Washington last week: that some young officers in Pakistan’s regular army have become increasingly sympathetic over the past few years to the Taliban and their brand of radical Islam.

While he had no numbers or percentages of officers sympathetic to the Taliban, the possibility of any defections raises questions about the reliability of these officers during any sort of push against the Taliban by the Pakistani army.
Concern over the reliability of Pakistan’s officer corps has heretofore focused on the ISI, or Inter-Services Intelligence service, which was wedded to CIA-backed fundamentalist Afghan rebels fighting to oust the Soviet Red Army during the 1980s. A faction of ISI officers is said to remain loyal to the fundamentalists.The defection of regular army officers to fundamentalist rebels advancing through the Swat Valley toward Islamabad would add another wild card to various nightmare scenarios for Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation.

Arthur Keller, a CIA spy handler in Pakistan in 2006, told me that he had personally encountered treachery in the army.  “I know of at least two instances from my brief time in Pakistan where we found Pak officers sabotaging the CIA’s work in favor of the Taliban and/or al Qaeda,” Keller said by email Monday.And there were similar alarming incidents, said an intelligence source who demanded anonymity.In 2005 American eavesdroppers overheard a Pakistani officer tipping off the Haqqani network — the most dangerous, al Qaeda-linked Afghan rebel clan — of an impending raid against it.keep reading…

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  • JEWHAWK
    I heard Hillary Clinton saying that the world can't afford to let
    those nukes wind up in the "wrong hands",talking about the
    medieval-minded thugs called talibans.

    The problem is that those nukes ALREADY are in the wrong hands,
    the Pakistanis's.

    Muslims + Nukes will NEVER be a safe combo to the Civilized
    World.Period.
  • SirWilhelm
    Imagine that, deceit and treachery in an Muslim dominated country. Then there's all the complications of the ethnic differences. I learned recently that there are 60 languages spoken in Pakistan. The region has been like this for hundreds, if not thousands of years. No melting pot effect, I wonder why? The whole world could pay for it's lack in the very near future.
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